The Constituent Assembly Opened on 9 December 1946 Without the Muslim League, Spent 114 Days Debating the Draft Constitution, and Had 15 Women Among Its Members

India’s Constituent Assembly was planned at 389 seats, 296 for the provinces and up to 93 for the princely states, and the plan chose none of them by a general vote of the public. Provincial legislators elected the 296 in July 1946. In Granville Austin’s figures, those legislators had themselves been chosen by the roughly 28 per cent of the provinces’ adults (people aged 20 and over) who were allowed to vote.

How 389 seats were filled without a general election

The scheme came from the Cabinet Mission, a British delegation of three members sent to India in March 1946. Their statement of 16 May 1946 said election on adult franchise was the best method but would cause “a wholly unacceptable delay”. The Mission used the provincial legislatures as the electors instead.

Each province got seats at roughly one for every million people. The seats were split among Muslims, Sikhs and everyone else (the plan’s “General” community), and each community’s legislators elected its share by the single transferable vote, a ranked-choice count that lets smaller groups win a seat. Austin’s table of allotments gives 292 seats for the provinces. Four more went to the small areas run directly from Delhi: Delhi itself, Ajmer-Merwara, Coorg and British Baluchistan. That makes the 296.

The princely states were to get no more than 93 seats, with the method of choosing them “determined by consultation”. Austin writes that the talks ended with at least half of the states’ representatives to be elected and the rulers free to nominate the rest.

In the July 1946 elections the Congress took 208 of the 296 provincial seats, Austin records, and the Muslim League won all but seven of the seats reserved for Muslims. The Cabinet Mission had guaranteed seats only to Muslims and Sikhs. It was the Congress high command, Austin writes, that brought Parsis, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians, Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and women in under the General category.

The first day, with the Muslim League’s seats empty

The Assembly met for the first time on Monday, 9 December 1946, in the Constitution Hall in New Delhi, now the Central Hall of Parliament. J. B. Kripalani proposed Sachchidananda Sinha for the temporary chair and called him “the oldest parliamentarian in India”, a member of the Imperial Legislative Council from 1910 to 1920. The Constitution of India archive counts 207 members who presented credentials and signed the register that day.

The Muslim League had accepted the Cabinet Mission plan on 6 June 1946. In July it withdrew that acceptance and told its representatives to boycott the Assembly, Austin writes, so the representatives of nearly 100 million Indian Muslims were absent. Jinnah’s side of those weeks is set out in our account of his record.

Whether such an Assembly could speak for India was argued from the start. Austin quotes Gandhi telling the writer Louis Fischer around 22 July 1946 that “it is no use declaring somebody else’s creation a sovereign body”. Rajendra Prasad took the opposite view. Speaking from the chair on 11 December, he called the Assembly “a sovereign body”.

That day Prasad was elected president without a ballot. Sinha held two valid nomination papers for him: one proposed by Kripalani and seconded by Vallabhbhai Patel, the other proposed by Harekrushna Mahtab and seconded by Nand Kishore Das. Two further papers were ruled out for lacking a seconder, and with no rival candidate Sinha declared Prasad elected.

The Objectives Resolution and a six-week pause

On 13 December, the fifth day, Jawaharlal Nehru moved the Objectives Resolution. It opened with the Assembly’s “firm and solemn resolve to proclaim India as an Independent Sovereign Republic”, promised all Indians justice, equality and freedom of belief, and provided “adequate safeguards” for minorities, backward and tribal areas, and depressed classes. Nehru asked members to read it as “a pledge and an undertaking” and not in a spirit of “narrow legal wording”.

The chair said he already held more than 40 amendments. One, from Dr. Jayakar, would have put the debate off until the Muslim League joined. The House did postpone the resolution, Nehru said later, to give others time to think it over. When he returned to it on 22 January 1947 he said six weeks had passed and that he had expected it to be disposed of in two or three days. The Assembly adopted it that day with all members standing. Prasad told the House on 26 November 1949 that it “constitutes now the Preamble to our Constitution”.

Fifteen women, and what the record shows

The Constitution of India archive lists 15 women among the Assembly’s members, and the Press Information Bureau gives the same number. They were Ammu Swaminathan, Annie Mascarene, Begum Aizaz Rasul, Dakshayani Velayudhan, G. Durgabai, Hansa Mehta, Kamla Chaudhri, Leela Roy, Malati Choudhury, Purnima Banerji, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Renuka Ray, Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The archive describes Begum Aizaz Rasul as the only Muslim woman member and Velayudhan as the only Dalit woman member.

Hansa Mehta and Amrit Kaur were the two women on the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee. On 30 March 1947 they, Minoo Masani and B. R. Ambedkar voted to make a uniform civil code an enforceable right, and lost five votes to four, Austin records. In late July 1947 Mehta, Kaur and Masani wrote to Patel asking the Advisory Committee to look at the clause again. It stayed among the Directive Principles, the part of the Constitution that guides government but cannot be enforced in court. On the night of 14 August 1947 Mehta presented the first flag to fly over the House “on behalf of the women of India”, in Sarojini Naidu’s absence.

Amrit Kaur also sat on the Minorities Sub-Committee. In the rights sub-committee she objected to protecting the free “practice” of religion without limits, because it could cover the devadasi system, purdah (the seclusion of women) and sati. A. K. Ayyar backed her, and the Advisory Committee reworded the clause, Austin writes.

Sarojini Naidu spoke on 22 July 1947, the day the Assembly adopted the national flag. She told the House that “we women stand for the unity of India”. Sucheta Kripalani sang the opening verse of Vande Mataram when the Assembly met on the night of 14 August 1947, and Purnima Banerji led the members in Jana Gana Mana at the last sitting on 24 January 1950.

Dakshayani Velayudhan spoke on 19 December 1946. She argued against Dr. Jayakar’s postponement, asked what British rule had done to remove the social disabilities of the Scheduled Castes (the official term for Dalit communities), and urged Scheduled Caste delegates not to press for separatism. G. Durgabai, who sat on the Steering Committee, argued on 14 September 1949 for Hindustani, which she described as Hindi plus Urdu, as the national language. She called the demand for Devanagari numerals, the digits used with Hindi, “language tyranny and intolerance”. Ammu Swaminathan told the House on 24 November 1949 that the Constitution had “given rights to women equal with every other citizen of the country”. She also said she had always pictured a constitution small enough to carry in a purse or pocket.

Committees wrote the first drafts

Most early drafting was done in committees. On 14 July 1947 Prasad told the House about three: one to draft a model constitution for the provinces, one to set the principles of the Union constitution and draft it roughly, and one to settle the Union’s powers. The Advisory Committee ran sub-committees on minorities, fundamental rights, and tribal and excluded areas. Austin’s appendix gives the chairs: Nehru for the Union Constitution and Union Powers committees, Patel for the Provincial Constitution Committee and the Advisory Committee, Kripalani for the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee and H. C. Mookerjee for the Minorities Sub-Committee.

The Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee first met on 27 February 1947 with draft lists of rights from B. N. Rau, K. T. Shah, K. M. Munshi, Ambedkar, Harnam Singh and the Congress Experts Committee on its table. It drafted in ten meetings in March and April 1947. Austin records that the Minorities Sub-Committee voted 26 to 3 against separate electorates, and that only three of 58 Advisory Committee members present opposed ending them on 28 July 1947.

Rau, the Assembly’s Constitutional Adviser, supplied working papers throughout, including a second memorandum on the Union constitution, dated 21 June 1947, that gathered the Union Constitution Committee’s decisions. After the Assembly took up the committee reports in July and August 1947, drafting passed to its Drafting Committee and Rau. Austin says Rau produced his draft in about a month. In Ambedkar’s count it ran to 243 articles and 13 schedules. Prasad later described the Drafting Committee as working on “the original draft prepared by Mr. B. N. Rau”. The Drafting Committee’s own work is covered in our piece on Ambedkar and the writing of the Constitution.

What the 3 June 1947 plan did to the membership

Partition changed the Assembly’s makeup. Prasad told the members on 14 July 1947 that the British statement of 3 June had led to the division of India and the partition of two provinces, that new elections had been held in the divided Bengal and Punjab, that many states which had kept aloof had sent representatives, and that “the members belonging to the Muslim League who had so far remained absent” were now attending. The border drawn afterwards is covered in our piece on the Radcliffe award.

Austin gives the League’s strength after Partition as 28 members and the Congress share of the Assembly as 82 per cent, up from 69 per cent. He also writes that “The Assembly was the Congress and the Congress was India” and, in the same chapter, that party policy kept diverse communities and views present. The archive’s count for December 1947 is 299 members: 229 from the provinces and 70 from the princely states.

A language compromise and a 77 to 77 tie

Early in September 1949 N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, K. M. Munshi and Ambedkar sponsored a compromise formula, filed as Amendment 65. It made Hindi in Devanagari script the Union’s official language, kept English for fifteen years and let Parliament extend that, and set a schedule of regional languages. Durgabai told Austin the schedule was there “for psychological reasons and to give these languages status”.

On 2 September the Congress members of the Assembly met to decide whether to adopt the formula as a party amendment. Austin, working from press reports of 3 September, records a tie of 77 to 77. Members from Bombay, Bengal, Assam, Madras and the south, plus Nehru and members of the Drafting Committee, were reported to favour adoption. Members from the United Provinces, Central Provinces, East Punjab, Bihar and Rajasthan opposed it. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, in the chair, declined to use his casting vote, the tie-breaking vote a chair may hold. There was to be no party whip, and the vote on the floor would be free.

Austin disputes a story that Hindi became the official language by a single vote. He cites reports in The Hindu and the Hindustan Times that party meetings named Hindi unanimously, and judges that the close votes were on numerals and on sponsoring the formula. He notes that Ambedkar, in Thoughts on Linguistic States, and Seth Govind Das, in his autobiography, each described a one-vote result, and he thinks both most likely confused the facts.

The debate opened on 12 September with Ayyangar moving the formula. On 14 September a motion to replace “Hindi” with “Hindustani” got 14 votes by show of hands and the rest were against. Durgabai told the House that she and others in the south had promoted Hindi at Gandhi’s call. The House then adopted the international form of Indian numerals for official use and voted Part XIV-A, the language chapter, into the draft, with its fifteen-year period for English.

The count, and the signing on 24 January 1950

On 25 November 1949 Ambedkar gave the Assembly its own tally. It had met for two years, eleven months and seventeen days since 9 December 1946, in eleven sessions that used 165 days. The first six sessions went to the Objectives Resolution and committee reports. The last five went to the Draft Constitution, which took 114 days. The draft had 315 articles when the Drafting Committee presented it, 386 at the end of the consideration stage and 395 in its final form. About 7,635 amendments were tabled and 2,473 moved.

Prasad added figures the next day. Expenses to 22 November were Rs 63,96,729, about Rs 64 lakh. At least 53,000 visitors had sat in the gallery. The Assembly passed the Constitution on 26 November 1949, and Prasad signed it to certify the text.

The signing came on 24 January 1950. Rajendra Prasad was elected President of India as the only candidate nominated, proposed by Nehru. Three copies of the Constitution lay on the table: one handwritten and illuminated in English, one printed in English and one handwritten in Hindi. Nehru signed first because he had public duty to attend to, and Prasad signed last. The Debates record the signing but give no headcount; the Press Information Bureau says 284 members signed.

Members then sang Jana Gana Mana and Vande Mataram. The Assembly adjourned without fixing a date to meet again, and the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950.