judicial or quasi-judicial function could be performed by Parliament whilst operating in the special Constituent field of law making. An omission to provide any quasi-judicial procedure in Article 368, which, apparently, furnishes a selfcontained code, means that no such power was meant to be included here at all. Proper exercise of judicial power is inseparable from appropriate procedure. 578. Learned counsel supporting the 39th Amendment tried to find the meaning of "constituent power" in theoretical speculations about the meaning of "the sovereignty of the people:, on the one hand, and the sovereignty of the medieval monarch on the other, instead of looking to the legislative history of the "constituent power". I have, therefore, also referred to some of these theories and practices from ancient times so as to be able to indicate the precise significance or relevance of various concepts and decisions placed before us. These theories and practices could have only an indirect bearing on the meaning of the term "constituent power" in Article 368. They are more germane to a statement of a correct theory of sovereignty which underlies what has been called the "basic structure" of our Constitution. 579. There are scattered dicta in the judgments of this Court speaking of the "sovereignty of the people" which, in my opinion, can only be related to the political sovereignty of the people recognised by the preamble to our Constitution where the people are described as the Constitution makers who gave the Constitution unto themselves. This, however, does not, in my opinion, mean that the people retained unto themselves any residue of legal sovereignty. They did not prescribe, apart from dividing the exercise of sovereign power roughly between the three organs of the Rupublic, each with its own modus operandi, any other or direct method, such as Initiative or Referendum, for exercising their politically sovereign power. The view I have tried to put forward in the foregoing pages is that the people entrusted to the three organs of the Sovereign Democratic Rupublic they constituted the exercise of three aspects of sovereign power on behalf of the people. This seems to me to be the only way or feconciling the idea of a sovereign people, in the political sense, and the sovereignty of the Republic, represented by a legally supreme constitution, so that the "sovereign" powers of each of the three organs of the Republic had to be exercised in conformity with the mandates, both positive and negative, express and implied, of the Constitution. I would prefer to describe this concept as one of the "supremacy of the constitution" instead of "sovereignty" of the Constitution because of the theoretical, specultive, and "emotive" clouds which have gathered around the term "sovereignty". 580. I have tried to point out that the term sovereignty in its origin is associated with the actual human ruler or authority wielding theoretically absolute or final powers. Political philosopheres are particularly concerned with the problem of determinig the location and manner of exercise of such powers if any. Jurists, however, have also occupied themselves with these problems partly because constitutional law, as Dicey once pointed out, has some overlapping territory with the political theory which underlies it. Some

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