How India Wrote Its Constitution, 1946–1950: The Assembly, the Arguments and the Men Who Would Not Sign

It was a cold Monday morning in New Delhi. Under the great dome of the round Council House, in the chamber they now called Constitution Hall, men in achkans, Gandhi caps, turbans and Western suits found their seats. There were women too, among them Sarojini Naidu and Sucheta Kripalani. At eleven, the oldest man in the room, Sachchidananda Sinha of Bihar, took the chair as provisional chairman.

Two hundred and seven members answered the roll. Jawaharlal Nehru was there, and Vallabhbhai Patel, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and a sharp-tongued lawyer from Bombay who had spent his life fighting the caste system, B.R. Ambedkar.

Many seats were empty. The Muslim League, which had won almost every Muslim seat, stayed away. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was now demanding Pakistan, and the League would not take part.

So the men and women in that hall did not know, that morning, whether they were writing a constitution for one country or two. It took them two years, eleven months and eighteen days to finish. What they made still runs the lives of 1.4 billion people.

The Assembly was born of a British plan. In March 1946 three Cabinet ministers flew to Delhi. On 16 May the Cabinet Mission proposed a loose Indian union, with provinces grouped into sections, and a body to write its constitution.

That body was not chosen by the people directly. In July and August 1946 the elected members of the provincial assemblies, themselves voted in by only a minority of adults, picked 292 members by community: general, Muslim and Sikh. The princely states got 93 seats, to be filled later, and the chief commissioners’ provinces four: 389 in all. The Congress won 208 seats and the Muslim League 73.

Then the plan fell apart. On 29 July the League withdrew its acceptance and called for ‘Direct Action’ on 16 August; Calcutta burned for days. The League never took its seats in the Assembly that sat in Delhi.

The Sikh leaders did not like the plan either. Under its grouping, the Punjab would sit in a Muslim-majority section, and the Akalis feared being swallowed. In July 1946 Nehru said he saw nothing wrong in an area in the north where the Sikhs could ‘experience the glow of freedom’. Three years later, Hukam Singh told the Assembly that the Sikhs had come in trusting a Congress Working Committee resolution of 10 August 1946 that promised them all possible support. Hold on to that promise; it comes back.

On 11 December the Assembly elected Rajendra Prasad its president. Two days later Nehru rose with what he called a pledge: the Objectives Resolution. India would be an ‘independent sovereign republic’; all power would flow from the people; there would be justice, social, economic and political, equality of status and opportunity, freedom of thought and faith, and safeguards for minorities, backward and tribal areas and the depressed classes.

Not everyone wanted to rush. M.R. Jayakar moved that the vote wait until the League and the princes came in, so that nobody could say the majority had decided everything alone. The surprise was who backed him. Ambedkar, the Congress’s fiercest critic, told the House he had no doubt India would one day be united, but that this was the wrong way to begin. The speech won him applause from benches that had long distrusted him.

The League did not come. On 22 January 1947 the Objectives Resolution was adopted, and its words would later shape the Preamble.

On 3 June 1947 Lord Mountbatten announced Partition. Pakistan would get its own Constituent Assembly, which first met in Karachi in August. The members from the areas going to Pakistan left Delhi; the League members from the rest of India, 28 of them, now took their seats in India’s Assembly. Its strength settled at 299.

Partition changed the book that was being written. The Cabinet Mission had wanted a weak Centre to keep the Muslim provinces in; with them gone, the Union Powers Committee said in July 1947 that the country needed a strong Centre. Behind that decision lay the killing fields of the Punjab, told in our long read Partition of Punjab, 1947.

Ambedkar himself lost his seat. He had been elected in 1946 from Bengal, with the help of the Dalit leader Jogendra Nath Mandal, from districts that went to East Pakistan. The Congress, which had once kept him out, now brought him back from Bombay.

On 29 August 1947, two weeks after freedom, the Assembly set up a seven-member Drafting Committee and made Ambedkar its chairman. With him were Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, K.M. Munshi, Mohammad Saadulla, B.L. Mitter (soon replaced by N. Madhava Rau) and D.P. Khaitan (who died in 1948 and was replaced by T.T. Krishnamachari).

They did not start from a blank page. B.N. Rau, a Cambridge-educated judge serving as Constitutional Adviser, had studied constitutions around the world. In October 1947 he handed the committee a full draft of some 243 articles and 13 schedules. That winter he went to the United States, Canada, Ireland and Britain to talk to judges and scholars.

In Washington, the story goes, Justice Felix Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court warned him against a ‘due process’ clause, which American judges had used to strike down social laws. When the Drafting Committee’s draft came out in February 1948, the right to life and liberty was protected only against ‘procedure established by law’. Historians still argue over how much Frankfurter had to do with it; the legal historian Rohan Alva argues that Rau himself wanted to keep due process.

The committee’s draft was published for the country to read and argue over. On 4 November 1948 Ambedkar moved it in the Assembly. Next day T.T. Krishnamachari explained who had actually done the work: one member had died, another resigned, one was in America, one busy with state affairs, two far from Delhi or unwell. The burden, he said, had fallen on Ambedkar.

Here was the heart of it: fundamental rights that a citizen could take to court. Every adult, man or woman, rich or poor, literate or not, would vote. ‘Untouchability’ was abolished and its practice made an offence; it is Article 17. Speech, assembly, movement, trade and faith were all protected.

But each freedom came with a clause letting the state limit it. As early as April 1947, the Communist member Somnath Lahiri said the rights had been drafted ‘from the point of view of a police constable’. In September 1949 the Assembly went further and wrote preventive detention, jail without trial, into the rights chapter itself, with safeguards that critics thought thin.

Ambedkar did not pretend democracy would run itself. In his first big speech on the draft he warned that it needed habits, not just laws.

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.B.R. Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly, 4 November 1948

The old British system gave Muslims, Sikhs and others separate electorates: only Muslims voted for Muslim seats. Partition had been fought partly over them, and the Assembly would not have them back. The question was what to put in their place.

At first, Patel’s Advisory Committee kept reserved seats for religious minorities, voted on jointly. Then, on 11 May 1949, it reversed itself: no reserved seats for any religious minority, only for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and those for ten years. The Assembly accepted it on 25 and 26 May.

Some minority members welcomed it. In the debate Begum Aizaz Rasul, the only Muslim woman in the House, called reservation ‘a self-destructive weapon’ that kept minorities apart. Others felt the ground had been pulled from under them. The Sikh delegation agreed to give up its own reserved seats on one condition: that four Sikh Dalit castes, the Mazhabis, Ramdasias, Kabirpanthis and Sikligars, be counted as Scheduled Castes. The committee accepted it.

Fifteen women sat in the Assembly that finished the job. They were not decoration. Hansa Mehta, who had presided over the All India Women’s Conference, pressed for equal rights and for a common civil code. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Gandhi’s secretary and later India’s first Health Minister, sat on the committees on fundamental rights and minorities, and argued that adult franchise, not reserved seats for women, was the way to equality.

Dakshayani Velayudhan, the only Dalit woman member, stood with Ambedkar against untouchability. Durgabai of Madras, a Salt March veteran turned lawyer, spoke on judges’ independence and on the language question. Ammu Swaminathan fought for women’s rights in marriage and inheritance. Annie Mascarene of Travancore warned that too much power at the Centre, at the very start of democracy, would look autocratic.

When women in many Western countries had only recently won the vote, India gave it to every adult woman on day one, without a separate struggle. That was the Assembly’s doing.

No subject made the Assembly hotter. Hindi’s champions, led by Purushottam Das Tandon and Seth Govind Das, wanted Hindi in Devanagari to replace English, and soon. Members from the South and from Bengal feared that clerks who spoke Hindi from birth would rule the rest. Others, following Gandhi, wanted Hindustani in both Devanagari and Urdu scripts.

From 12 to 14 September 1949 they argued it out. Mohammad Ismail of Madras moved for Hindustani with both scripts; it failed. Seth Govind Das complained that English was being kept too long. In the end the House took a compromise worked out by K.M. Munshi and N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar.

The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script.Article 343, adopted 14 September 1949

English would carry on for fifteen years, after which Parliament could decide; numbers would be written in the international form, 1, 2, 3. Hindi was made the official language, not the ‘national language’. The day is still marked as Hindi Diwas, and when the fifteen years ran out in 1965, Madras State erupted in protest against Hindi.

Article 1 calls India a ‘Union of States’. Ambedkar explained why: the states had not come together by agreement, so none of them could walk out.

The Federation is a Union because it is indestructible.B.R. Ambedkar, 4 November 1948

In peace, power would be shared between the Centre and the states; in an emergency, the Centre could take almost all of it. In August 1949, H.V. Kamath and others warned that these powers could be turned into a dictatorship, and some pointed to how Germany’s Weimar constitution had gone. The provision that let the President take over a state government, today’s Article 356, drew the hardest fire.

Ambedkar agreed abuse was possible. On 4 August 1949 he said he hoped such articles would never be used and would ‘remain a dead letter’. They were used, more than a hundred times. In 1959 the Centre dismissed Kerala’s elected Communist government with them; in 1975 Indira Gandhi used the national emergency article to suspend rights for 21 months, the story of our long read The Emergency, 1975–77. The Supreme Court put limits on Article 356 only in 1994, in the S.R. Bommai case.

Hukam Singh’s complaint was the reverse side of the same coin: he said the provinces had been reduced almost to municipal boards. A generation later the Akali Dal’s Anandpur Sahib Resolution would ask for exactly what the Assembly had refused: a Centre limited to a few subjects.

Three more fights left marks that are still visible. The first was land. The Congress had promised to abolish the zamindari estates; the zamindars wanted full payment for them. In September 1949 a compromise said compensation would be fixed by law, and courts could not question the amount for the land-reform laws then on the way. Within eighteen months the courts still got in the way, and the First Amendment of 1951 shielded such laws in a new Ninth Schedule.

The second was the cow. On 24 November 1948 many Hindu members wanted a ban on cow slaughter as a fundamental right. Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava moved a compromise, framed in terms of agriculture and animal husbandry, and it went into the non-binding Directive Principles; it is Article 48. Two Muslim members, Z.H. Lari and Syed Muhammad Saadulla, argued that if the House wanted a ban it should say so clearly, rather than dress a religious demand in the language of economics. The lawyer Arvind Datar has written that the debates leave unclear whether a full ban was ever intended.

The third was Kashmir. The Maharaja had acceded in October 1947, with war under way. On 17 October 1949, N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar moved draft Article 306A, giving Jammu and Kashmir its own constitution and limiting the Centre’s powers there. Maulana Hasrat Mohani interrupted to ask why there should be such discrimination; the legal website The Leaflet argues his real point was why other states could not have the same freedom. It became Article 370, described as temporary. The Centre ended its special status in August 2019, and the Supreme Court upheld that in December 2023.

The loudest critics were not always in the hall. Jayaprakash Narayan’s socialists, who left the Congress in 1948, published their own draft; in its foreword he wrote that the Assembly’s Constitution would not bring full social democracy unless drastically amended. Inside, the economist K.T. Shah moved on 15 November 1948 to call India a ‘Secular, Federal, Socialist Union of States’. Ambedkar said the economic system should be left to the people to choose, and the House voted it down. Indira Gandhi put ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ into the Preamble during the Emergency, in 1976.

Gandhians had a different complaint: where was Gandhi’s India of village republics? Shriman Narayan Agarwal had published a ‘Gandhian Constitution for Free India’ in 1946, built on panchayats. Ambedkar was scathing about the village, which he called ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance’. Members such as Damodar Swarup Seth, Shibban Lal Saxena and H.V. Kamath were furious. K. Santhanam’s amendment put village panchayats into the Directive Principles as Article 40; they got real teeth only in 1992.

And there was the oldest charge: that it was the British Government of India Act of 1935 in new clothes. Much of the machinery, the lists of subjects, the governors, the emergency powers, did come from it. Ambedkar was unembarrassed.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in borrowing. It involves no plagiarism.B.R. Ambedkar, 4 November 1948

Monday, 21 November 1949. The third reading was under way when Bhupinder Singh Mann, an Akali member from East Punjab, rose. The Sikhs of East Punjab, he said, could not give the Constitution unstinted support. Promises of a fair share of government jobs and a special officer to watch over minority safeguards had been dropped late, without the minorities’ consent. Sikh Dalits, he said, deserved the same concessions as Hindu Dalits everywhere in India.

Later that day Hukam Singh spoke at length. He attacked the whole design: rights hedged with exceptions, an emergency that wiped out civil liberties, provinces turned into little more than municipal boards. Of the power given to legislatures over fundamental rights, he said:

The feared robber is made the judge.Hukam Singh, Constituent Assembly, 21 November 1949

Then he listed what the Sikhs had given up: separate electorates, and seats in proportion to their numbers. They had asked for a Punjabi-speaking province and been refused. He reminded the House of the Congress promise of August 1946. And he ended with the sentence Sikhs still quote.

My community cannot subscribe its assent to this historic document.Hukam Singh, Constituent Assembly, 21 November 1949

Neither man signed. One clause in particular rankled more over the years. Article 25 guarantees freedom of religion, and lets the state open Hindu temples and institutions to all castes. Its Explanation II says that, for this purpose, Hindus include Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. Its defenders say it was only about temple entry and reform laws. Many Sikhs read it as calling them Hindus. In the same Article, Explanation I says that wearing and carrying a kirpan is part of professing the Sikh religion, a protection the Sikh members had sought.

On 27 February 1984, Akali leaders including Parkash Singh Badal burned a copy of Article 25 in Delhi to demand a separate identity; Badal said in 2002 that he did it under pressure from Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, then Akali Dal president. In 2002 the national commission reviewing the Constitution, under former Chief Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah, recommended changing the wording. Parliament has not done so.

Friday, 25 November 1949. Ambedkar, now 58, rose to close the debate. The speech he gave is still read in law schools.

He gave the numbers: eleven sessions, 165 days of sittings, 7,635 amendments tabled and 2,473 actually moved. He gave the credit away: to B.N. Rau, who had made the rough draft; to S.N. Mukherjee, the chief draftsman, to whom he gave a much greater share; and to the discipline of the Congress Party, without which, he said, the Assembly would have been chaos.

Then he warned the country. Now that there was a constitution, there was no excuse for civil disobedience, non-cooperation or satyagraha to get one’s way.

These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy.B.R. Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly, 25 November 1949

He warned against worshipping leaders: in politics, he said, bhakti or hero-worship was a sure road to degradation and dictatorship. And he warned that one person, one vote would not mean much in a land of deep social and economic inequality.

We are going to enter into a life of contradictions.B.R. Ambedkar, on what 26 January 1950 would bring, 25 November 1949

If those contradictions were not removed soon, he said, the people who suffered from inequality would blow up the democracy the Assembly had built.

On Saturday, 26 November 1949, the Assembly passed the Constitution. It had 395 articles and 8 schedules, the longest written constitution of any country. Some parts, on citizenship and elections, took effect that day; the rest waited for 26 January 1950, the twentieth anniversary of the day in 1930 that the Congress had celebrated as Purna Swaraj Day.

The Constitution was written out by hand. The calligrapher Prem Behari Narain Raizada wrote the English text; artists from Santiniketan under Nandalal Bose decorated its pages with scenes from India’s past, from Mohenjo-daro and the Vedic gurukul to Guru Gobind Singh, Akbar and Gandhi’s Salt March.

On 24 January 1950 the members met for the last time. They elected Rajendra Prasad unopposed as President, adopted Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem, with Vande Mataram given equal honour, and filed up row by row to sign. Signatures went down in English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and other languages; 284 members signed. Hukam Singh and Bhupinder Singh Mann did not.

Thursday, 26 January 1950. In the Durbar Hall of Government House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan, the last Governor-General, C. Rajagopalachari, read out the proclamation that India was a sovereign democratic republic, and Rajendra Prasad took the oath as its first President. Guns boomed in salute.

That afternoon Prasad rode out in a horse-drawn carriage through cheering crowds to the Irwin Stadium, where the armed forces paraded before him. The Constituent Assembly became the provisional Parliament until the first general election, which began in October 1951.

Across the border, Pakistan’s Assembly was still arguing; Pakistan’s first constitution came only in 1956, and was torn up two years later. India’s has been amended more than a hundred times, but never replaced.

The Constitution was made by an Assembly that ordinary Indians did not elect, in a country tearing itself apart, by men and a handful of women who disagreed about almost everything. It borrowed shamelessly, as Ambedkar said, and it gave the Centre powers that later governments abused. It left Sikhs, Muslims, Gandhians, socialists and Hindu traditionalists each with real grievances.

And yet it gave every adult the vote on day one, outlawed untouchability, let a citizen take the state to court, and has outlasted every government since. Ambedkar’s warning is the part to remember: a constitution is only as good as the people who work it. The contradictions he named in 1949 have not all gone away.