A Seven-Member Committee Sat 141 Days to Draft India's Constitution, and Its Chairman B. R. Ambedkar Told the Assembly the Credit Did Not Really Belong to Him

B. R. Ambedkar chaired the Drafting Committee of India’s Constituent Assembly, and on 25 November 1949, the day before the Assembly passed the Constitution, he told it that the credit given to him “does not really belong to me.” The Assembly’s own record shows why he said so. It contains a first draft by the constitutional adviser Benegal Narsing Rau, a seven-man committee whose membership and attendance shifted, and about 7,635 amendments tabled from the floor.

Seven names on 29 August 1947

The Assembly passed a resolution on 29 August 1947, moved by Satyanarayan Sinha, naming seven members: Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Ambedkar, K. M. Munshi, Saiyid Mohd. Saadulla, Sir B. L. Mitter and D. P. Khaitan. An amendment from B. G. Kher widened the brief. The committee was to scrutinise the text “prepared by the Constitutional Adviser” and submit a revised draft to the Assembly. The President, Rajendra Prasad, noted that Saadulla was unwell and took leave to fill any vacancy.

The committee met the next day, 30 August. In 1949 Ambedkar said he had entered the Assembly with “no greater aspiration than to safeguard the interests of the Scheduled Castes,” the official name for communities once treated as untouchable. Election to the committee surprised him, he said, and being chosen chairman surprised him more.

Bengal had elected him to the Assembly. Austin writes that Ambedkar lost that seat with Partition, which also cut the Muslim League’s representation in the Assembly to twenty-eight. The Debates of 4 November 1948 list him as a member for Bombay.

A first draft in a month, a second in 141 days

Rau was not a member of the Assembly. Austin says he produced his draft in a month, and the Constitution of India archive, which hosts the Debates online, dates it to 1 October 1947 and calls it mostly a compilation of committee reports the Assembly had already settled, with some provisions marked as pending. Ambedkar and Prasad both put its size at 243 articles and 13 schedules. By the archive’s count it ran to 240.

From October 1947 to mid-February 1948, according to Austin, the Drafting Committee worked on that text. A letter from Ambedkar dated 21 February 1948 set out where the committee had departed from the Assembly’s decisions or suggested alternatives. The draft ran to 315 articles and 8 schedules and was published on 26 February. Moving it in the Assembly on 4 November 1948, Ambedkar said it had been before the public for eight months and described the committee’s task as preparing a Constitution in line with the Assembly’s earlier decisions.

Ambedkar gave the rest in numbers. From 30 August 1947 the committee sat 141 days. Across eleven sessions the Assembly met for 165 days and spent 114 of them on the draft. About 7,635 amendments were tabled, 2,473 were moved, and the finished text had 395 articles and 8 schedules.

The committee as Krishnamachari described it

The day after Ambedkar introduced the draft, 5 November 1948, T. T. Krishnamachari told the Assembly what had become of the seven members “nominated by you.” One member had resigned from the House and been replaced, another had died and not been replaced, a third was away in America and his place was not filled, and a fourth was engaged in State affairs. “So it happened ultimately that the burden of drafting this constitution fell on Dr. Ambedkar,” he said, and he called the result “undoubtedly commendable.” In his view the Committee as a whole had not given the matter the attention it deserved.

Debi Prasad Khaitan’s death had been announced by the President the day before. Austin’s list of the committee’s seven members at its January 1948 meetings includes Madhava Rau and not Mitter. In a footnote Austin adds that Krishnamachari himself joined the committee about two months after that speech and that his criticisms then became “much less barbed.”

In the closing speech of 25 November 1949 Ambedkar gave his colleagues credit, thanking them for sitting 141 days and for their “capacity to tolerate and to accommodate different points of view.” Naziruddin Ahmad had called the body a “Drifting committee.” There is a difference, Ambedkar replied, “between drift without mastery and drift with mastery.”

Article 11 on 29 November 1948

The draft’s Article 11, today’s Article 17, abolishes untouchability, forbids its practice in any form and makes enforcing any disability arising from it an offence. Naziruddin Ahmad moved to reword it so that no one could be treated as an untouchable on account of religion or caste, arguing that the word had no legal meaning. K. T. Shah said the term was undefined and might catch the temporary untouchability observed for women at certain periods, after funerals, or in quarantine.

Ambedkar answered the amendment in one sentence: “I cannot accept the amendment of Mr. Naziruddin Ahmad.” Asked whether he would answer Shah, he said no. The amendment was negatived and the article adopted, and the Debates record the cheer “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai” for Gandhi. Earlier that day Ambedkar had told the House that the article itself made interference with an untouchable’s rights an offence, instead of leaving it to Parliament or the States.

Mono Mohan Das called 29 November 1948 a “great and memorable day for us the untouchables” and put their number at five crore (50 million). Gandhi and Ambedkar had clashed in 1932 over separate electorates for the “backward classes,” and the archive’s biography of Ambedkar says he had to give in under the Poona Pact after Gandhi’s fast.

The article he called the soul of the Constitution

Draft Article 25, now Article 32, guarantees the right to go to the Supreme Court to enforce the fundamental rights. Debating it on 9 December 1948, Ambedkar said that if he were asked to name one article “without which this Constitution would be a nullity,” he could name only this one. “It is the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it,” he said.

The reasoning was practical. Habeas corpus already appeared in the Criminal Procedure Code and mandamus in the law on specific relief, but those writs were “at the mercy of the legislature,” which could amend them away. Once they were written into the Constitution, no legislature could remove them. The British approach to rights suited him better, he told the House, because “It is the remedy that makes a right real.” The article as adopted lists habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari.

25 November 1949: three warnings and a contradiction

The last speech began with the Assembly’s age. It had first met on 9 December 1946, and by his count it was “two years, eleven months and seventeen days” old. From there he moved to what could go wrong.

The first warning was to “hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.” Where such methods were open, he said, civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha had no justification, and he called them “the Grammar of Anarchy.” The record of satyagraha before 1947 is covered in the article on whether non-violence alone ended British rule.

The second was against hero-worship. Quoting John Stuart Mill, he said citizens should not “lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man.” India needed the caution more than other countries, he said, because “in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

The third was that “we must make our political democracy a social democracy as well.” He warned that on 26 January 1950 “we are going to enter into a life of contradictions.” Politics would recognise “one man one vote and one vote one value,” while social and economic life would go on denying “one man one value.” If that continued, he said, it would be “putting our political democracy in peril.”

The next day, 26 November 1949, Prasad put the motion “That the Constitution as settled by the Assembly be passed,” and the Debates record it adopted amid prolonged cheers. In his closing speech Prasad gave the credit for the fundamentals of the Constitution to Nehru and Patel, who had chaired several of the Assembly’s committees, and said Rau had prepared the draft the Drafting Committee worked on. Ambedkar, he said, had “added luster to the work which he has done.” The Preamble dates the adoption to 26 November 1949. Under Article 394, a handful of provisions, among them Articles 5 to 9 on citizenship, took effect at once, and the rest on 26 January 1950.

1951: the Hindu Code Bill

A bill ended his time in the Cabinet. The Hindu Code Bill aimed to reform Hindu personal law on marriage, divorce, succession and adoption, according to the archive’s biography. Ambedkar’s resignation statement, dated 10 October 1951 in the text reproduced online, says it was introduced on 11 April 1947, referred to a Select Committee on 9 April 1948 and taken up clause by clause again on 17 September 1951. Prime Minister Nehru then proposed, in Ambedkar’s account, passing only the marriage and divorce part and, days later, dropping the whole bill. Ambedkar tendered his resignation on 27 September 1951, and Nehru accepted it the next day.

The bill, he said, “was killed and died unwept and unsung” after four clauses passed. To leave inequality “between class and class, between sex and sex” untouched while passing economic laws, he said, was “to build a palace on a dung heap.” The statement also listed other grievances, among them the treatment of the Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes, foreign policy, and his own exclusion from key Cabinet committees. Illness, he said, was not the reason.

Whose Constitution

The archive’s biography of Ambedkar says the drafting process is often seen as synonymous with him, and notes that as chairman he defended the draft and intervened in nearly every debate. Historians read the same record differently.

Austin’s 1966 study says “these four men controlled the affairs of the Assembly,” meaning Nehru, Patel, Prasad and Azad. Rau, he writes, “must be placed among those important in the framing of the Constitution,” and Ambedkar gave much of the credit for the careful wording to the draftsman S. N. Mukherjee. Austin also reconstructs one committee decision. In the draft article on personal liberty, which became Article 21, the committee dropped “due process” in favour of “procedure established by law” after 19 January 1948. Austin marks his account as partly inference. The inference is that A. K. Ayyar, whom Rau had convinced, changed sides, and Austin doubts that Ambedkar did.

Austin’s own thesis concerns what the document is for. The chapter on Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles opens with the sentence “The Indian Constitution is first and foremost a social document,” and calls those two Parts “the conscience of the Constitution.”

Upendra Baxi reviewed Austin within three years of the book’s publication. According to the abstract of the reprinted review, Baxi challenged Austin’s claim that the Constitution was made through consensus and accommodation, and argued that this claim rested on broad generalisations about Indian culture and society.

Arvind Elangovan’s 2019 study of Rau argues that Rau’s constitutional ideas have been largely forgotten, and the archive notes that Rau’s draft has received less attention than Ambedkar’s in accounts of the process. The historian Rohit De moves the question elsewhere. De’s 2018 book uses Supreme Court records to argue that ordinary people, including marginalised groups, used constitutional remedies to challenge state regulations, and that the Constitution changed daily life in lasting ways. The older view De sets out to answer held that a document drafted in English by elites had little effect on most Indians.

Ambedkar returned to the question himself. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha on 2 September 1953 on the Andhra State Bill, he said, “My answer is I was a hack,” and later in the same speech, “I shall be the first person to burn it out.” Anurag Bhaskar, in a book chapter excerpted by the Supreme Court Observer, argues that the second remark came in a plea for protection of minorities in the proposed Andhra State and was not a call to destroy the Constitution. Bhaskar notes that Ambedkar went on to ask the Home Minister, K. N. Katju, to consider his proposal on linguistic provinces.