Drafting the Indian Constitution

On 4 November 1948, B. R. Ambedkar rose in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi to introduce a draft constitution for a country that had been independent for less than fifteen months. What followed was nearly a year of argument, clause by clause, over how India should be governed: who could vote, what rights a citizen held against the state, how power would be split between Delhi and the provinces, and which language the republic would use (Constituent Assembly Debates, Parliament of India Digital Library^[3]). On 26 November 1949 the Assembly adopted the result. It came into force on 26 January 1950, the day India became a republic (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Constitution of India"^[2]).

An Assembly born before independence

The Constituent Assembly first met on 9 December 1946, under a scheme set out by the British Cabinet Mission earlier that year, and elected Rajendra Prasad as its President. It began with 389 seats: 292 filled by indirect election from the provincial legislatures of British India, 93 for the princely states, and 4 for the chief commissioners' provinces (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 15^[1]). The Muslim League refused to take part, and after Partition the members representing territory that became Pakistan left. The Assembly carried on with 299 members (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 16^[1]), 15 of them women.

Within days of its first sitting, Jawaharlal Nehru moved the Objectives Resolution, which the Assembly adopted in January 1947. It promised an independent, sovereign republic whose citizens would be guaranteed justice, equality and basic freedoms, with safeguards for minorities and for backward and tribal groups. Much of what the Assembly drafted afterwards was an attempt to turn that statement of principles into enforceable law.

For most of its life the Assembly also served as independent India's parliament. Until the first general election of 1951-52, the people writing the constitution were also passing the country's ordinary laws, while India was governed under an adapted version of the Government of India Act, 1935.

Building a draft from many sources

The Assembly's constitutional advisor, B. N. Rau, studied the constitutions of dozens of countries and produced an initial working draft in 1947. On 29 August 1947 the Assembly appointed a seven-member Drafting Committee, chaired by Ambedkar, to turn Rau's draft and the Assembly's earlier decisions into a finished text. Ambedkar had nearly been left out: the Bengal seat he first won fell in East Pakistan after Partition, and he returned to the Assembly from Bombay in July 1947.

The Committee published its draft in February 1948 and left it open to public comment for about eight months. Once Ambedkar introduced it that November, members tabled more than 7,000 amendments, and the clause-by-clause debate ran until 17 October 1949.

The framers borrowed openly. The federal structure, emergency powers and all-India services owed much to the 1935 Act (Granville Austin, "The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation"^[4]). The Fundamental Rights echoed the American Bill of Rights, the Directive Principles of State Policy were adapted from Ireland's constitution, and the parliamentary system followed the British model (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 22^[1]). The finished document had 395 Articles across 22 Parts and 8 Schedules (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Constitution of India"^[2]), and it remains the longest written constitution of any sovereign country.

The arguments that shaped it

Some of the Assembly's biggest decisions were also its boldest. Under the 1935 Act only a small, largely propertied share of adults could vote. The new constitution gave the vote to every adult citizen, regardless of literacy, property, caste or sex, in a country where most people could not read; NCERT notes it was the one provision passed with virtually no debate (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 17^[1]).

Caste was handled in the same spirit. Article 17 abolished "untouchability" and made its practice an offence. Separate electorates for religious minorities, which many members blamed for the politics that ended in Partition, were dropped, while seats in the legislatures were reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, initially for ten years.

Language was the hardest fight. After months of bitter debate, a compromise reached in September 1949 made Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union, with English continuing for official purposes for fifteen years. The question returned in the 1960s as that deadline approached.

Was Ambedkar satisfied with the constitution?

Ambedkar had spent decades campaigning against caste discrimination before independence. He served as India's law minister while chairing the Drafting Committee, and it fell to him to defend the draft and its many compromises on the floor. Much of the drafting also landed on him personally. In November 1948, Committee member T. T. Krishnamachari told the Assembly that, with colleagues who had died, resigned or were away, "the burden of drafting this Constitution fell on Dr. Ambedkar."

On 25 November 1949, the day before adoption, Ambedkar gave a closing speech that is still widely quoted. "On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions," he warned. "In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequalities." If India did not turn its political democracy into a social democracy as well, he argued, those left out would one day blow up the structure the Assembly had built (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 15^[1]).

His later remarks were harsher. He had pressed, often without success, for a stronger hand for the state in forcing social reform, and the final text was a negotiation among hundreds of members with competing regional, religious and princely interests. In a Rajya Sabha debate in September 1953, responding to being called the constitution's maker, he said: "My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do, I did much against my will." In the same debate he said he would be the first to burn it (Rajya Sabha Debates, 2 September 1953^[5]). Asked about that remark in 1955, he explained that a temple built for a god was of no use if demons took possession of it first.

Historians generally read these outbursts as frustration with how the constitution was being worked, and as a reminder that the drafting was collective and contested. Ambedkar's stewardship is still central to how the document is remembered, but he never claimed it as a full expression of his own views.

Adoption, signing, and the choice of 26 January

After adoption on 26 November 1949, now marked each year as Constitution Day (Samvidhan Divas), the constitution was written out by hand. Prem Behari Narain Raizada calligraphed the English text, and Nandalal Bose and artists from Santiniketan illustrated its pages. On 24 January 1950, 284 members signed it (NCERT, Indian Constitution at Work, ch. 1, p. 16^[1]). At the same sitting the Assembly elected Rajendra Prasad as India's first President, and Jana Gana Mana was adopted as the national anthem.

The constitution came into force two days later, and the date was chosen deliberately. On 26 January 1930, following its Lahore resolution of December 1929, the Indian National Congress had declared Purna Swaraj, or complete independence, as its goal, and the nationalist movement marked the day every year afterwards as an unofficial Independence Day. Fixing the republic's birth to that date tied the new constitution to two decades of political struggle.