Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's remarks in treaty rights of Princes in his Presidential Address at Ludhiana Session in 1939

Legal Document No 64

We are told now of the so called independence of the States and of their treaties with the Paramount Power which are sacrosanct and inviolable and apparently must go on for ever and ever. We have recently seen what happens to international treaties and the most sacred of covenants when they do not suit the purpose of Imperialism. We have seen these treaties torn up, friends and allies basely deserted and betrayed and the pledged word broken by England and France. Democracy and freedom were the sufferers and so it did not matter. But when reaction and autocracy and imperialism stand to lose, it does matter and treaties, however moth-eaten and harmful to the people they might be, have to be preserved. It is a monstrous imposition to be asked to put up with these treaties of a century and a quarter ago, in the making of which the people had no voice or say. It is fantastic to expect the people keep on their chains of slavery, imposed upon them by force an fraud, and to submit to a system which crushes the life-blood out of them. We recognise no such treaties and we shall in no event accept them. The only final authority and paramount power that we recognise is the will of the people, and the only thing that counts ultimately is the good of the people.