1946–1950
Drafting the thing itself
Constituent Assembly, New Delhi · 26 November 1949
The man who had spent thirty years arguing that Indian society would not protect its minorities was asked to write the document that would have to.
He very nearly was not there at all. The Scheduled Castes Federation had done badly in the 1946 provincial elections and could not deliver him a seat in Bombay. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in July 1946 from Bengal instead, from a Khulna seat, after Jogendra Nath Mandal of the Federation made way for him; the votes that carried him came from the Muslim League. When Bengal was partitioned the following year his constituency fell inside East Pakistan and the seat vanished under him. Congress then arranged his return from Bombay, M.R. Jayakar resigning to make room, and he was re-elected in July 1947.
Both halves of that belong in the account and they are usually told one at a time, by people making opposite points. He entered the Assembly without Congress and against its preference. He could not have stayed in it without Congress. Neither fact cancels the other, and a version that carries only one of them is being used for something.
In August 1947 he became independent India's first Law Minister — Nehru offered him the portfolio, which is itself worth noticing, given what he had published about Congress two years earlier. On 29 August 1947 the Assembly appointed him chairman of the Drafting Committee, a body of seven.
The burden of drafting this constitution has fallen on Dr. Ambedkar and I have no doubt that we are grateful to him for having achieved this task in a manner which is undoubtedly commendable.
It is worth being concrete about the scale of the thing. The Assembly sat for two years, eleven months and eighteen days. The document that came out of it is one of the longest national constitutions in the world, and it had to do several jobs that no single document had been asked to do before: hold together a federation of provinces and several hundred princely states, define citizenship in a country that had just been partitioned along religious lines, and give enforceable rights to people whose disabilities were social rather than statutory.
Some of what the document did
- Article 17 abolished untouchability and made its practice in any form a punishable offence. It is one of the few articles that binds private persons rather than only the state.
- Equality before the law, and a prohibition on discrimination by religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.
- Reservation of seats in legislatures and of posts in public employment for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
- Universal adult suffrage from the first election, in a country where most adults could not read — a decision that was not obvious at the time, was argued against in the Assembly, and was without precedent at that scale anywhere.
- Constitutional remedies: the right to go directly to the Supreme Court to enforce a fundamental right. He called this the article without which the constitution would be a nullity, and said that if asked to name the most important article he would point to no other.
He did not get what he had asked for. In 1947 he had put a memorandum to the Assembly, later published as States and Minorities, proposing that key industries and insurance be state-owned and that agriculture be organised into collective farms with the state as landlord — economic rights entrenched in the constitution itself, on the argument that a political democracy resting on a landless and dependent population is a formality. Almost none of it survived into the text. Much of what did survive went into the Directive Principles, which by their own terms are not enforceable in any court. He accepted the outcome and defended the document that emerged, and it is not the document he would have written alone.
On 25 November 1949, the day before the Constitution was adopted, he made his closing speech to the Assembly. It is not a speech of celebration. Almost all of it is a list of the ways the thing they had just built could fail.
When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.
Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.
On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
He went on to say that if the contradiction were not removed, those denied equality would blow up the structure of political democracy the Assembly had so laboriously built. Then he made the point that undercuts the entire idea of a document as a guarantee — and it is the same point he had been making since Mahad, when a tank that two resolutions had opened stayed shut for ten years.
However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.
The Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950. In April 1948 he had married Dr. Sharada Kabir, a physician who had been treating him, and who took the name Savita; he was in poor health throughout the drafting, with diabetes and failing eyesight and neuropathy in his legs, and much of the work was done from a sickbed. His health did not improve afterwards.
Source note
Quotations and the closing speech are from the Constituent Assembly of India Debates, Volume XI, 25 November 1949. Committee appointments, the sitting days and the amendment counts are from the Assembly's own records. States and Minorities is in the Government of Maharashtra edition of his Writings and Speeches. The 1946 Bengal election and the 1947 Bombay return are documented in the Assembly's membership records and are the subject of a good deal of partisan retelling; only what those records support is given here.