‘The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation’

 

‘The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation’

India celebrates 75th anniversary of the Republic on 26 January 2025. The constitution of India stood the test of time. Ernest Barker, a British political scientist, called the Preamble to the Constitution ‘a key note’. He was so moved by the Preamble that he printed it in his book Principals of Social and Political Theory, after the table of contents, “because”, as he said, “I am proud that the people of India should begin their independent life by subscribing to the principles of political tradition which we in the West call Western, but which is now something more than Western.”

 

According to Granville Austin, an American historian of the Indian Constitution, author of the book The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, originally published in 1966, the Indian Constitution is first and foremost a social document and its provisions are aimed at furthering the goals of social revolution by establishing the conditions necessary for its achievement. Though this book was recommended to us, when we were reading for a master’s in political science at the University of Bombay, we hardly bothered to read it. Now I realise the significance of Austin’s book. This piece is written, based on his book, to recapture the ideals enshrined in the Constitution.

 

The ideals are national unity and integrity and a democratic and equitable society. The new society is to be achieved through a social economic revolution pursued with a democratic spirit using constitutional, democratic institutions, with unity, social revolution, and democracy as the torch bearers.  The representative government with adult suffrage, a bill of rights providing for equality under the law and personal liberty, and an independent judiciary are to become the spiritual and institutional bases for a new society— one replacing the traditional hierarchy and its repressions. Democracy, personal liberty, equality before the law, are revolutionary for the society,social-economic equitableness.

 

The Constituent Assembly— Microcosm in Action

 

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said about the making of constitution: “This cannot be done by the wisest of lawyers sitting together in conclave; it cannot be done by small committees trying to balance interests and calling that constitution-making; it can never be done under the shadow of an external authority. It can only be done effectively when the political and psychological conditions are present, and the urge and sanctions come from the masses.” As Gandhiji said, Indians must shape their own destiny, that Swaraj would not be the gift of the British, but must spring from the wishes of the people of India as expressed through their freely chosen representatives. The members of the Constituent Assembly were national heroes and had almost unlimited power; yet decision-making in the Assembly was democratic.

 

The Assembly had six past or present Congress presidents, fourteen Provincial Congress Committee presidents, and fourteen out of eighteen members of the Congress Working Committee. Among these and other notables were the four, chiefs of the party - Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad, and Rajendra Prasad. One of the primary qualifications for a candidate to be elected to the Assembly was a record of active participation in the Independence Movement - a qualification that produced a group of eminent people of above average ability.  However, an exception was made to this general rule to accommodate persons of exceptional ability. Ambedkar was one such exception. He was originally elected to the Assembly as the member for the Scheduled Castes Federation, but he lost his seat due to the partition of Bengal. The Bombay Congress, at the request of the high command, re-elected him as the member of the Assembly so that he could retain his place in the Nehru’s Cabinet. In the words of K. Santhanam, “there was hardly any shade of public opinion not represented in the Assembly.” The members of Hindu Mahasabha were also present in the Assembly under other sponsorship: three former Mahasabha presidents were members. Two of them became so on the Congress tickets: M. R. Jayakar and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, who was a vice-president of the Mahasabha when he entered the Assembly after Nehru made him a member of his Cabinet.

 

That the same men were responsible for drafting the Constitution and for governing the country, gave the Assembly an immediate awareness of the issues involved in constitution making. The members experience with the major problems and day-to-day affairs of government profoundly affected the content of the Constitution and was one of the most unusual aspects of the Assembly. Constitutions in the past had often enough been drafted by representatives of mutually independent territories who desired to create a common, general government; Switzerland, Australia, and the United States were examples. Independent peoples, such as the Russians in 1936, the French in 1873, or the Germans at Weimar, had framed a constitution while sovereignty lay in their own hands.

 

According to Austin, “Nehru, Patel, Prasad and Azad constituted an oligarchy within the Assembly. Their honour was unquestioned, their wisdom hardly less so. In their god-like status in the Assembly, they may have been feared; certainly, they were loved…the government rested in the hands of those who were utterly incapable of doing any wrong to the people. The oligarchy’s influence was nearly irresistible, yet the Assembly decided issues democratically after genuine debate, for it was made up of strong-minded men and the leaders themselves were peculiarly responsive.”

 

The responsiveness of the Oligarchy could be seen either as coldblooded practicality or as showing high moral sense. It believed that a constitution adopted with the maximum of agreement would work better and provide a more stable foundation for the new India. The Oligarchy was responsive to the multi-fold currents of opinion in the Assembly. The Oligarchy used its irresistible influence to promote consensus. By replying to questions about, and opposition to, various provisions with full explanations, and by relying on persuasion rather than force, the members of the Oligarchy reinforced the effect of their power and prestige, usually winning over their opponents, even high-ranking ones. The Assembly adopted the Constitution by acclamation. It was presented to the nation as the realization of Nehru’s original aim: it had been drafted with the welfare of four hundred million Indians in mind.

The road to social revolution

To Pandit Nehru, freedom was not an end in itself; but ‘a means to an end’, and “that end being the raising of the people to higher levels and hence the general advancement of humanity.” The first task of the Assembly, he told the members, was to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity. “If we cannot solve this problem soon”, he warned the Assembly, “all our paper constitutions will become useless and purposeless. If India goes down, all will go down; if India thrives, all will thrive; and if India lives, all will live.” And this was a task far more complicated than the simple drafting of fundamental rights or the moral precepts of a preamble.

It was the Congress Experts Committee, formed on 8 July 1946, that set India on the road to her present constitution. This committee, with Nehru as its chairman, was set up by the Congress Working Committee to prepare materials for the Assembly. And on 9 December 1946, Pandit Nehru introduced the Objectives Resolution in the Assembly proclaiming that the new constitution would be dedicated to the goal of social revolution. B.N. Rau, the Constitutional Advisor, presented a draft constitution which was discussed and debated between October 1947 and February 1948. 

 

The Assembly’s belief in parliamentary government was strengthened in large measure by the intellectual or emotional commitment of many members to socialism. Although they ranged from Marxists through Gandhian socialists to conservative capitalists, each with his own definition of ‘socialism’, nearly everyone in the Assembly was Fabian and Laskiite enough to believe that ‘socialism is everyday politics for social regeneration’, and that ‘democratic constitutions are inseparably associated with the drive towards economic equality’. The difference between Nehru and the other three members of the Oligarchy was one of approach, not of basic belief. Nehru felt an emotional and intellectual obligation to attack India’s social problems. Patel, Prasad, and Azad, somewhat conservative, were committed only to effective government. Yet the attitudes of all four were rooted in a humanitarian outlook. If the good of the many demanded the sacrifice of the few— as in zamindari abolition— it would be done. The result was making of a democratic constitution with a socialist bias. Events before and during the life of the Assembly had indicated that India needed a centralized constitution to establish the stability and the unity necessary to the social revolution.

 

The Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy

 

The Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy are the conscience of the Constitution. They had their roots deep in the struggle for independence. They connect India’s future, present, and past, and giving strength to the pursuit of the social revolution. The Fundamental Rights are those rights of citizens, or rather negative obligations of the State not to encroach on individual liberty. These rights are:  the Right to Equality, the Right to Freedom, the Right Against Exploitation, the Right to Freedom of Religion, Cultural and Educational Rights, and the Right to Constitutional Remedies. The Right to Property originally provided in the Constitution was subsequently deleted from the list of fundamental rights by the 44^th Amendment 1978, converting it into a legal right under Article 300-A, as it was found obstructing the land reforms and the constitutional goal of realising social revolution.

 

The Fundamental Rights lay down that the state is to deny no one equality before the law. All citizens are to have the right to freedom of religion, assembly, association, and movement. Minorities are allowed to protect and conserve their language, script, and culture. The Rights are meant to foster the social revolution by creating an egalitarian society wherein all citizens are to be equally free from coercion or restriction by the state, or by society privately; liberty is no longer the privilege of the few. 

The essence of the Directive Principles lies in Article 38, which, echoing the Preamble aim to strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing a social order in which justice, social, economic, and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life. The Directive Principles exhort the state to ensure that citizens have an adequate means of livelihood, that the operation of the economic system and the ownership and control of the material resources of the country subserve the common good.

 

By 1947 it was a commonly accepted belief that the state bore a major responsibility for the welfare of its citizens.  Nehru, the Indian Socialists, and the very winds of social and political thought had brought to India the ideas of Marx, T. H. Green, Laski, and many others. The expression of such ideas had begun before the end of the nineteenth century with the views of Swami Vivekananda, and continued with those of R. C. Dutt, and M. Visvesvaraya, among others. Members of the Assembly had accepted without hesitation the views of other humanitarians and socialists that ‘political equality is never real unless it is accompanied by virtual economic equality’, and that ‘true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence’. It is quite evident that the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles are designed to be the chief instruments in bringing about the social revolution. The Fundamental Rights have created a new equality that had been absent in traditional Indian (largely Hindu) society and have helped to preserve individual liberty.

 

And with the adoption of the Constitution, through consensus in a spirit of accommodation of different points of view, India became the largest democracy in the world. A huge ancient land with the largest population in the world, socially and economically retarded, culturally diverse, and, for the first time in nearly 200 years responsible for its own future, is attempting to achieve administrative and political unity and an economic and social revolution under a democratic constitution. The framers of the constitution rejected the example of China and Russia, in which, no matter what the constitutional euphemisms, national unity and social renovation are enforced by coercive means.

 

Incidentally, the Election Commission of India also turns 75. It was in April 1950 that the Representation of People Act was passed raising the strength of the House of the People from 488, as originally prescribed, to 496, on the basis of one representative for 720,000 people.  As Prime Minister Nehru said, “every state, every group, and every minority should have a sense of fair play.  We have not only to consider the interests of various groups and minorities but also the States.”