The workings of the Constituent Assembly shed interesting light on the mind of the institution. A brief update.
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Constituent Assembly debates of India
- The story: The making of India’s Constitution was a carnival of democracy. Emerging from the shackles of foreign rule, the Constituent Assembly was scripting a collective vision of the future of the country. Between December 1946 and 1949, the Assembly met for 165 days and spoke about 3.6 million words overall. This would mean around 8,000 pages of written documents. These laid the foundation for our Constitution. It is no surprise then that these debates capture the minds of not just legal scholars, but anyone interested even remotely in policymaking.
- Constitution Day: The Constitution Day is celebrated each year on 26th of November, the day in 1949 when the Constituent Assembly accepted the Constitution's final draft presented to it. Time to take a look at the Assembly and its working, from an expert analysis perspective.
- Diversity and participation - The Assembly was diverse, with almost a quarter of the members coming from the princely states, a considerable proportion. In terms of gender, there were only 15 women, which perhaps by the standards of 1947 India (with about 8% literate women) was admirable. Around 90% were Hindu. Despite an overwhelming presence of Congress party members, there was great diversity in their ideological positions. Between the socialist K.T. Shah, Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee and liberal Minoo Masani, the party had kaleidoscopic diversity.
- Participation in debates - The mere presence of some members does not necessarily imply that diverse viewpoints were considered. A more useful measure of representativeness is members’ participation in the debates. When the number of words spoken by each member is plotted in graphical form, the graph exhibits an extremely unequal distribution. Less than 6% of members spoke 50% of all the words uttered in the Assembly. Women members spoke less than 2%. (Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Sucheta Kriplani, among others, didn’t say anything). The most voluble speakers were Rajendra Prasad and Ambedkar (7.5% and 7.2% respectively). Prominent national leaders like Nehru and Patel contributed to merely 2.18% and 1.47% of the debate by word-count. The Gini coefficient of the number of words spoken in the Constituent Assembly debates is 0.756, a very high figure, indicating high lopsidedness. This is worse than the Gini index of income in South Africa, the world’s most unequal country in terms of what people earn. But not participating in the debates does not mean non-participants did not contribute to the constitution-making. For instance, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was part of many sub-committees, like the one on fundamental rights.
- Constitutional ideas - The frequently occurring words were ‘elections’, ‘union’, ‘constitution’, ‘amendment’, ‘article’ and ‘state’, and some important concepts relevant even today were ‘rights’ (the most invoked word). Members spoke considerably about ideas involving ‘religion’, ‘caste’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, not surprisingly, although much less than ‘freedom’. More members uttered ‘education’ as compared to ‘health’, and that too, a lot more times. ‘Gandhi’ featured in the discussions more than ‘god’, and words like ‘secular’ were used a lot more than ‘dharma’ or ‘morality’. ‘Women’ was invoked more than ‘adivasis’. Interestingly, ‘liberty’ invocations far exceeded ‘equality’, which in turn was used considerably more than ‘socialism’. Prohibition of alcohol, for instance, was hotly debated in the Assembly by 51 members and the term was used 212 times. Gandhi’s views advocating prohibition resonated strongly in the Assembly. Mahavir Tyagi and H.V. Kamath, who invoked ‘Gandhi’ most frequently in their speeches, also spoke for prohibition. While Ambedkar never invoked ‘Gandhi’, he used the word ‘prohibition’ 11 times (and was non-committal on it). Opposition to prohibition actually came primarily from Dalit and Adivasi leaders like Jaipal Singh Munda, then president of the Adibasi (Tribals) Mahasabha and an Olympic hockey player.
- Summary: These estimates may not signal anything concrete, but they offer a window into what occupied the Assembly’s collective mind.
- EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the nature of work that the Constituent Assembly of India carried out, in drafting the Constitution of India. (2) The Constitution that was given to India in 1950 was a revolutionary work of change. Why is that so? Explain. (3) What are the various sources that the Indian constitution referred in its creation process? Explain.
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