Work : Committees and Consensus

When the Constituent Assembly first met on December 9, 1946, J.B. Kripalani, the then Congress president, proposed

the name of Dr Sachhidanand Sinha, the oldest member of the Assembly, for the post of the provisional president. Later, on December 11, Dr Rajendra Prasad was elected as the President of the Constituent Assembly.

The Constituent Assembly appointed several committees for framing the constitution.

These committees submitted their reports between April and August 1947 and on the basis of these reports, Dr

B.N. Rau, the Constitutional Adviser, submitted a draft of the Constitution by the end of October 1947. This draft contained 240 Clauses and 13 Schedules. In order to consider this Draft Constitution, a Drafting Committee under the chairmanship of Dr B.R. Ambedkar (the law minister at the time) was set up. (The other members were: Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer,

N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, K.M. Munshi, Saiyad Mohammad Saadulla, Sir B.L. Mitter and D.P. Khaitan. After the first meeting Sir B.L. Mitter resigned and in his place N. Madhava Rao was nominated, and T.T. Krishnamachari took the place of D.P. Khaitan on the latter’s death in 1948.)

The Drafting Committee prepared the first draft of the Constitution. This was then circulated for the comments of jurists, lawyers, judges and other publicmen. In the light of their comments and criticism, the Drafting Committee prepared a second draft which consisted of 315 Articles and

9 Schedules. This second draft was placed before the Constituent Assembly on February 21, 1948. The draft was then considered clause by clause by the Assembly. The third reading commenced on November 14 and was finished on November 26, 1949. The Preamble was adopted last. It had taken 2 years, 11 months and 18 days to complete the task. As many as 7000 odd amendments had been proposed and nearly 2500 were actually discussed before the draft constitution was accepted.

Dr Ambedkar then moved a motion that the Constitution as settled by the Constituent Assembly be passed. On November 26, 1949, the people of India in the Constituent Assembly adopted, enacted and gave to themselves the Constitution of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of India. Dr Rajendra Prasad as president of the assembly signed the document.

The members of the Constituent Assembly appended

View

[a]ny claim for the sharing of power by the minority...[is] called communalism while the monopolising of the whole power by the majority...[is] called Nationalism.

—B.R. Ambedkar

their signatures to it on January 24, 1950—the last day of the Assembly. In all, 284 members actually signed the Constitution.

The Constituent Assembly, besides drafting the Constitution of India, adopted the National Flag on July 22, 1947, and adopted the National Anthem and National Song on January 24, 1950—the last day of its session.

The Constituent Assembly elected Dr Rajendra Prasad as the first President of India on January 24, 1950.

Late in the evening of August 14, 1947, the Assembly met in the Constitution Hall and at the stroke of midnight, took over as the Legislative Assembly of an Independent India.

The Assembly continued as the provisional Parliament of India from January 26, 1950 till the new Parliament was installed after the first general elections.

It must, however, be noted that while the formal centres of the work of drafting the Constitution were, no doubt, the Constituent Assembly and the Drafting Committee, the Congress leaders held the important powers of decision- making. In a way, the Congress Working Committee was the real architect of the Constitution in that most of the important decisions were arrived at on the basis of what the Congress leaders suggested. Granville Austin points out that four men—Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Abul Kalam Azad—constituted a virtual oligarchy in the Assembly and dominated the proceedings by virtue of the prestige and power they enjoyed both in the Congress and in the government.

The manner in which the Constituent Assembly arrived at decisions was that of consensus, defined by Granville Austin as “the manner of making decisions by unanimity or near unanimity”. An effort was made to smoothen differences and arrive at compromises and agreement. The objective was to overcome the biases, and an element of overruling dissent, ingrained in decision by majority.

Chapter 36

The Evolution of Nationalist Foreign Policy

One of the factors that facilitated India’s ready interaction with the world outside, immediately on independence, was the already well-established diplomatic engagement even under colonial rule. At independence, India was a member of 51 international organisations and a signatory to 600 odd treaties. India had signed the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, largely as a result of having contributed more than a million soldiers to that war. In the 1920s, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, the International Labour Organisation, and the International Court of Justice. It participated in the Washington Conference on Naval Armaments in 1921-22. From 1920 there was an Indian high commissioner in London. Even before the First World War, Indian nationals were staffing a few diplomatic posts. It was no accident that Indians formed the largest and most influential non-Western contingent in the United Nations and allied agencies very soon after independence.

The basic framework of India’s foreign policy was

structured much before 1947.

A significant and inevitable fallout of the Western influence on the nationalist intelligentsia was a growing interest in and contact with the dominant international currents and events. Gradually, the nationalist thinkers came to realise that colonialism and imperialism had an international

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character and much wider implications. With the development and crystallisation of an anti-imperialist nationalist ideology, there emerged a nationalist foreign policy perspective. The evolution of this policy perspective can be traced under these broad phases.