Presidentship of Punjab council

ONE of the most important privileges of the legislature in a country under the parliamentary form of government is the right to elect its own president. This privilege was withheld from several legislatures in India, Central and provincial, for the first four years, on the ostensible ground that it was necessary in the initial stages of their development to provide them with presidents who knew better than any elected member how to conduct the proceedings of such bodies on parliamentary lines. We say “ostensible ground” advisedly, because, as matter of fact, with the exception of the Legislative Assembly and partially one single province, no attempt was made to provide any of the councils with a president with any parliamentary experience. In some cases, such as our own, for instance, the office, like all important offices in the government, was from the first treated as a sacred preserve of the heaven-born service. Not one of the presidents in these provinces had spent even a short period in the vicinity of any Parliament, and such experience of parliamentary procedure as they could claim on account of their association with one or other of the legislative councils in India under old conditions could be claimed in the same, if not in a greater, measure by some among the elected Indian members of those councils. There were other cases, it is true, in which the governor had the good sense to appoint as presidents men who might not improbably have been elected by the legislature itself if it had the power to elect its president. But such cases were of the nature of an exception that only proved the rule.