As India gets ready to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution and founding of the Republic it is imperative to reflect upon the impulses that drove the seminal moments before and after August 15, 1947, i.e. Independence Day.
The first and foremost imperative was that Independence marked the culmination of the the freedom struggle that was an unique experiment in non-violence and passive resistance initiated by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi after his arrival in Bombay from Cape Town in South Africa on January 9, 1915, after an arduous sea voyage of five months and 20 days.
Fifty-eight years before that day a violent rebellion, namely the the First War of Independence in 1857, also called the Great Revolt in Anglophile history, had failed to liberate India from the avaricious clutches of the East India Company paving the way for the formal establishment of the British Crown Rule in India.
The second impulse was that while freedom did come at midnight it was bloodstained. Both Punjab and Bengal had to bear the brunt of being partitioned followed by an orgy of violence that consumed and snuffed out millions of lives and uprooted millions more from their homes and hearth. From the far-flung mountainous extremities of the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) to the plains of Delhi over two million people died and another 15 million were rendered refugees as a consequence of the Partition of Punjab. In Bengal the number of people who died range from five hundred thousand to two million.
The central dilemma that confronted the leaders of the liberation struggle was what kind of a nation they would like to create after such horrific violence on such a colossal scale that had convulsed the very soul of a yet to be fully conceived nation.
Though the Constituent Assembly had been formed on December 6, 1946, and met formally for the first time on the ninth of December it really started its work only after the Partition of India that cleaved the continent into two dominions India and Pakistan, respectively.
The doyens who had led the movement for Independence were very clear in their minds that the ideas, concepts, aspirations of a people did not need expansive and grandiose structures of masonry to articulate and announce the dawn of a new era. Instead, it needed a foundational idea a grund norm that clearly spelled out in a crisp and crystallised manner as to what exactly are the principles on which the modern Indian nation state would stand.
Hence, they decided to persevere with the Constituent Assembly despite the fact that out of the original 389 members elected by the provincial assemblies only 289 remained with the rest leaving to form the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan that started meeting in Karachi.
Thus, the written word, in the form of a book, cheap to publish and universally available would become the perfect instrument for the dissemination of the Constitution.
The founding fathers of modern India who had come of age in the fiery crucible of the struggle against the mightiest imperialist goliath of the 20th century did not first, in 1947, move to raze building and raise buildings to announce the dawn of a new freedom. Instead, they chose to sit down, 299 of the very best of them, for almost two-and-a-half long years, to debate and dissect and carve the most important book of contemporary India, it’s Constitution. A new covenant of equality and fraternity and justice for all Indians.
The constitution was a manifestation of the liberal impulses that were intrinsic to the very DNA of the men and women of the Constituent Assembly for it is democrats who create festivals of ideas, crusades of justice and equity, carnivals of creativity, in which all may participate, on some kind of equal footing.
In the preamble of the Constitution itself they delineated a vision that was lofty in its conception and grandiloquent in its intent. The framers of the Constitution made a giant leap of faith when they gave the right to vote to all Indians irrespective of religion, caste, creed, place of birth or descent at a point in time when the literacy rate in India in 1950 was a meagre 18.32 per cent. The unamended Article 326 of the Constitution of India that was subsequently amended in 1988 by the sixty-first Constitutional Amendment Act when the voting age was reduced to18 years.
On a separate note, as the national president of the NSUI then, I had driven the initiative to make this seminal transition to a lower voting age a reality.
The framers of the founding document of the republic by a constitutional fiat abolished untouchability a centuries-old abhorrent practice that differentiated among people based upon caste. Article 17 of the Constitution explicitly stated untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law. Similarly, Article 23 abolished the pernicious practice of beggar or forced labour. These are some of the very forward leaning and progressive features of the Constitution that tend to go unnoticed.
Another not often discussed facet of the Constitution is how did the pendulum swing from a federal structure of the Constitution to a more unitary construct. The Cabinet Mission Plan had primarily allocated defense, communication and foreign affairs to the Union. In pursuance of this mandate a Union Powers Committee was appointed on January 25, 1947, headed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The committee submitted its first report on April 17, 1947. It listed six subjects under the broad rubric of defence, 17 under foreign affairs and 12 under communications. However, in view of the uncertainty over the political status of the nation the report was but a mere formality.
A second report was submitted on the 5th of July, 1947. Commending the report for the consideration of the Constituent Assembly, Pandit Nehru wrote to the president of the Constituent Assembly outlining the kernal shift in the constitutional structure of the new nation, namely a strong centre and weaker states. He stated, “Now that Partition is a settled fact, we are unanimously of the view that it would be injurious to the interests of the country to provide for a weak central authority which would be incapable of ensuring peace, of coordinating vital matters of common concern and of speaking effectively for the whole country in the international sphere…”
There are many such ironical twists and turns in the making of the Constitution and the evolution of the republic. Many who today claim to be the protectors of the Constitution have unfortunately not even acquainted themselves with its fundamental tenets much less the story of its conceptualisation.
