Making of the Constitution: Committees, Readings and Borrowed Sources

Two real Prelims questions map to this chapter: 2024-gs1-q31, on who chaired the Constituent Assembly's first sitting before Rajendra Prasad's election, and 2023-gs1-q15, a statement pair on Constitution Day that trips people up by misdating when the Drafting Committee was actually set up. Both questions sit on ground this site's Preamble and Making of the Constitution note already covers in detail: the Assembly's composition (389 members, later 299), its first sitting on 9 December 1946, Rajendra Prasad as permanent President, and Ambedkar as Drafting Committee chairman. That note is the one to read for the Preamble's own text and legal status. This note deliberately does not repeat any of that. Its job is the machinery behind those headline facts: which committees actually wrote the Constitution's structure before the Drafting Committee ever saw it, who the Drafting Committee's members were and how that membership changed mid-course, how many amendments the Assembly actually argued over, precisely which country contributed which provision, the historical demand that produced the Assembly in the first place, and the criticisms historians and contemporaries levelled at the whole exercise.

This chapter's material overlaps with NCERT Class 11, Indian Constitution at Work, Chapter 1 (Constitution: Why and How?). This note goes further than that chapter's coverage.

The demand before the Assembly existed

The Constituent Assembly did not appear from nowhere in 1946. The demand for Indians to write their own constitution had a 12-year build-up. M.N. Roy, the radical democrat and former Comintern figure, is credited with first putting forward the idea of a Constituent Assembly for India in 1934. The Indian National Congress made it official party policy the following year, 1935, and reaffirmed it at its Faizpur session in December 1936, its first-ever session held in a village rather than a city, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's presidential address there tied the demand directly to the Government of India Act, 1935, then just weeks old: the Congress rejected the Act's federal scheme and instead pressed, in Nehru's own words at Faizpur, for "a positive demand for a Constituent Assembly elected under adult suffrage," which he called "the very cornerstone of Congress policy." Nehru repeated and sharpened this demand on the Congress's behalf again in 1938, insisting the constitution of a free India be framed without any outside interference, by Indians elected on adult franchise.

The British accepted the demand in principle for the first time in the August Offer of 1940, made as Britain needed Indian cooperation in the Second World War, though it stopped well short of committing to a firm timeline. In 1942, the Cripps Mission, led by Sir Stafford Cripps, brought an actual draft proposal for a Constituent Assembly to be convened after the war, but the offer was tied to a right of provinces to opt out of the Indian union altogether, and both the Congress and the Muslim League rejected it. It took the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 to finally translate the demand into an actual body: a Constituent Assembly indirectly elected by the provincial legislative assemblies, with princely states given nominated seats, first meeting that December. The Assembly this note is about, and the Constitution it wrote, are the direct product of that 12-year sequence, from a lone economist's proposal in 1934 to a sitting body in 1946.

Three committees before the Drafting Committee

Before Ambedkar's Drafting Committee ever picked up a pen, three other committees had already settled the Constitution's basic architecture. This is the part of the story coaching material tends to compress into a single line about the Drafting Committee, but the real division of labour matters for exam statement-matching questions that pair a committee with its chairman.

The Union Powers Committee, appointed on 25 January 1947 and chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru, decided what subjects the future Union government would control. Working from the Cabinet Mission Plan's own limited list of Union subjects (defence, foreign affairs and communications), the Committee grouped proposed Union powers into defence, foreign affairs, communications and a set of revenue-raising powers, and separately recommended a further list of subjects, including insurance, banking and planning, that units could bring under Union authority by mutual agreement. Its first report went to the Assembly on 17 April 1947, with a substantially revised second report following in August 1947 once Partition had already changed the political map the Committee was designing for.

The Union Constitution Committee, also chaired by Nehru, worked in parallel on the actual structure of the Union government, its executive, legislature and judiciary. Its report on the design of Parliament's second chamber, presented to the Assembly on 21 July 1947, is a useful illustration of how much detail these committees actually settled: the Council of States' proposed strength (250), how many seats each unit would get, and even where the idea of nominating members with expertise in fields such as literature and science came from (borrowed, at that stage, from the Irish Constitution of 1937, before the Drafting Committee later reworked the mechanism).

The Provincial Constitution Committee, chaired by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, did the equivalent work for the provinces: the structure of provincial legislatures and provincial executives, in a period when it was not yet settled how much autonomy provinces would retain from the Centre. Its recommendations, together with the Union Powers and Union Constitution Committees' work, gave the Constitutional Adviser, Sir B.N. Rau, the raw material to write an actual draft.

Rau produced that first working draft in September 1947, in barely a month: 240 articles across 25 parts, with 13 schedules, its margins annotated with the foreign provisions each clause borrowed from. This was still a personal working draft, not yet the Assembly's own text. It went to the newly formed Drafting Committee, which spent October 1947 to February 1948 scrutinising and revising it clause by clause, before submitting a Draft Constitution of India to the President of the Assembly on 21 February 1948. That February 1948 draft, not Rau's September 1947 working paper, is the one that was then circulated to Assembly members, provincial governments, the Federal Court and the public at large, inviting comments, which the Drafting Committee spent March and October 1948 sifting through before the final draft went to the floor of the Assembly for its first reading.

The Drafting Committee: seven members, and how that changed

The Drafting Committee itself was set up on 29 August 1947, with seven members besides its chairman, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, Dr. K.M. Munshi, Syed Mohammad Saadullah, N. Madhava Rau, T.T. Krishnamachari and, in place of the last two named above at the time of formation, B.L. Mitter and D.P. Khaitan. What most accounts flatten into a static list of seven names was actually a body whose membership shifted mid-course, and that shift is worth knowing on its own terms. B.L. Mitter resigned on grounds of ill health and was replaced by N. Madhava Rau. D.P. Khaitan, the Kolkata lawyer who founded Khaitan & Co, died in 1948 partway through the Committee's work and was replaced by T.T. Krishnamachari. Add to this that several other original members were frequently away from Delhi for other engagements, ill, or otherwise unavailable through much of the drafting period, and the Committee's real working strength at any given sitting was often far smaller than seven. T.T. Krishnamachari himself later told the Assembly bluntly that the burden of drafting had, for long stretches, fallen on Ambedkar alone, because so many of his colleagues were absent, in poor health, or engaged elsewhere, a point worth remembering against any simplified telling of "seven members wrote the Constitution."

Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar and N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar did most of the heavy legal drafting alongside Ambedkar; Ayyangar in particular is credited as the principal drafter of what became Article 370. Munshi contributed both legal expertise and, through his own political standing, helped steer the Committee through contentious sittings. Saadullah, the only Muslim League-origin member retained after Partition, brought a minority perspective to a Committee that was otherwise entirely Congress in composition, a fact directly relevant to the criticism of Congress dominance covered further below.

The three readings that turned the draft into law

Laxmikanth's account of the Assembly's floor procedure divides the passage of the Draft Constitution into three distinct readings, each with a different purpose, and exam statement questions frequently test which reading a given event belongs to.

The first reading ran from 4 to 9 November 1948. Ambedkar formally introduced the Draft Constitution to the Assembly on 4 November with a detailed speech explaining its structure and defending its extensive borrowing from other constitutions (covered in the next section), and this was followed by five days of general discussion on the draft as a whole, without moving into individual clauses.

The second reading was the long haul: 15 November 1948 to 17 October 1949, eleven months of clause-by-clause consideration of every article, schedule and amendment. This is where the bulk of the Assembly's actual drafting work happened, article by article, amendment by amendment.

The third reading ran from 14 to 26 November 1949. By this stage the Drafting Committee had already incorporated the changes decided during the second reading into a revised text, so this reading involved comparatively little substantive debate: most speeches were general remarks on the Constitution as a whole rather than fresh amendments to specific articles. The Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, now marked as Constitution Day, the exact fact the 2023 PYQ on this chapter tests by pairing it against a false claim about the Drafting Committee.

How many amendments were actually debated

A genuinely checkable, often-garbled number: while working through the Draft Constitution, the Assembly moved, discussed and disposed of 2,473 amendments out of a total of 7,635 tabled. That gap, roughly two-thirds of all tabled amendments never even reached the floor for discussion, is itself informative: it reflects both the scale of member interest in shaping individual clauses and the practical need to consolidate overlapping amendments before debate, rather than any reluctance to engage with detail. The 2,473 figure is the one worth memorising; the 7,635 figure is the context that explains why it is smaller than the raw volume of member interest would suggest.

Where the Constitution's provisions actually came from

Ambedkar anticipated the charge that the Draft Constitution was not original, and met it head-on in his 4 November 1948 speech: members had already told him "about half of it has been copied from the Government of India Act of 1935 and that the rest of it has been borrowed from the Constitutions of other countries." His defence was that a century of constitution-writing worldwide had settled most of the basic questions any constitution has to answer, so "all Constitutions in their main provisions must look similar," and that originality lay not in inventing untested mechanisms but in the "variations made to remove the faults and to accommodate it to the needs of the country."

The borrowing itself is real, extensive, and traceable to specific constitutions, which is exactly why coaching material tends to garble it under exam pressure. The table below is the version worth memorising exactly:

The single largest source, in raw volume of provisions rather than in constitutional principle, remains the Government of India Act, 1935 itself, as this site's Historical Background note covers: the federal scheme's skeleton, much of the administrative and emergency machinery, and the office of Governor all trace back to 1935 more directly than to any foreign constitution. The country-by-country table above captures what the 1935 Act did not supply: rights, review, federal balance and emergency doctrine drawn from working democracies rather than colonial administration.

The criticisms levelled at the Assembly

None of this borrowing, or the Assembly's own composition, escaped criticism, at the time and since, and these are worth knowing as real historical positions rather than settled facts.

Not directly representative. The Assembly was not elected by universal adult franchise. Members were chosen by the provincial legislative assemblies, which had themselves been elected on the limited, propertied franchise the Government of India Act, 1935 provided for, so the body that wrote India's Constitution was itself a product of a franchise far narrower than the one that Constitution would eventually establish.

Congress-dominated. With the Muslim League's members largely withdrawn after Partition, the Constituent Assembly was overwhelmingly a Congress body. The American constitutional historian Granville Austin's often-quoted description calls it "a one-party body in an essentially one-party country," a characterisation meant descriptively rather than as an accusation of malpractice, but a real point about how narrow the range of organised political opinion in the room actually was.

Dominated by lawyers. Critics, including the British constitutionalist Sir Ivor Jennings, pointed out that a large share of the Assembly's active members were lawyers and career politicians, which shaped both the style of the final text, famously long and legally precise rather than a short statement of principle, and its content, weighted toward justiciable rights and procedural detail over broader social or economic vision.

Took too long. Two years, eleven months and eighteen days from first sitting to adoption struck contemporary critics as excessive for a newly independent country that needed a functioning constitution urgently, though defenders point out that the same span covered Partition, the integration of over 500 princely states, and the drafting of easily the longest constitution of any sovereign nation, none of which were small distractions.

Too derivative. The country-by-country borrowing catalogued above is the same fact Jennings pointed to when he argued the Assembly had not always chosen its borrowings well, calling the result excessively long and, in places, needlessly complex, a criticism distinct from simply noting that borrowing occurred.

Quick revision points

• Demand's timeline: M.N. Roy first proposed a Constituent Assembly (1934); Congress made it official policy (1935), reaffirmed at Faizpur (December 1936); Nehru's 1938 declaration; August Offer (1940), British accept in principle; Cripps Mission (1942), rejected by Congress and the Muslim League; Cabinet Mission Plan (1946), actually creates the Assembly.
• Three committees before drafting: Union Powers Committee (Nehru) on Union subjects; Union Constitution Committee (Nehru) on Union structure; Provincial Constitution Committee (Patel) on provincial structure. B.N. Rau's working draft (September 1947, 240 articles) followed from their reports.
• Drafting Committee set up 29 August 1947: Ambedkar (chairman), Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, Munshi, Saadullah, plus B.L. Mitter (replaced by N. Madhava Rau) and D.P. Khaitan (died 1948, replaced by T.T. Krishnamachari). Draft Constitution submitted to the Assembly's President on 21 February 1948.
• Three readings: first, 4 to 9 November 1948, general discussion; second, 15 November 1948 to 17 October 1949, clause-by-clause; third, 14 to 26 November 1949, final passage. Constitution adopted 26 November 1949.
• 2,473 amendments were actually moved, discussed and disposed of, out of 7,635 tabled.
• Borrowed provisions: UK (parliamentary system, rule of law, single citizenship), US (Fundamental Rights, judicial review), Ireland (DPSP, President's election method), Canada (federation with a strong Centre), Australia (Concurrent List, freedom of trade), Weimar Germany (emergency provisions), South Africa (amendment procedure), Japan (procedure established by law).
• Criticisms: not directly elected, Congress-dominated (Austin's "one-party body"), lawyer-dominated, took too long, too derivative (Jennings).

The committee-to-Drafting-Committee sequence and the exact borrowing table are where UPSC statement questions on this chapter concentrate; get the chairman of each committee and the country-to-provision pairing solid before moving on.