The Constitution of Jawaharlal Nehru: The

Framing of Objectives and the Negotiation of

Legitimacy 1

Benjamin Zachariah
Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies
Heidelberg University
Germany

Introduction
In a conversation with the Communist, ZA Ahmad, an old comrade from
Jawaharlal Nehru’s days in provincial politics in the United Provinces, Nehru
admitted that the Congress Party was, in 1945, more or less the upper-caste
Hindu communal party that it was depicted as in the propaganda of its
opponents. ‘There is a strong anti-Pakistan Hindu opinion inside the Congress
which would go over to the Hindu [Maha]Sabha’, Nehru said, if any concessions
were made at all to the Muslim League or to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. 2 Nehru
acknowledged the 'narrowness' of a 'purely nationalist' position, and its potential
aggressiveness and reactionary nature; but he accepted the need to take some
account of 'national sentiment' because it was 'a very powerful thing'. 3

Meanwhile, as sectarian violence broke out across the country, Nehru was
concerned to get a clear picture for himself. ‘What the Muslim League people
told us was wrong and exaggerated here and there’, Nehru wrote to
Vallabhbhai Patel from Bihar in November 1946, ‘but the real picture that I now
find is quite as bad and sometimes even worse than anything that they had
suggested ... there has been a definite attempt on the part of Hindu mobs to
exterminate the Muslims.’ Obviously there were instigators – ‘some educated
people of the Hindu Sabha variety’, or ‘some Marwaris in Monghyr [district]’, or
landlords who were partly attempting ‘to divert the attention of their tenantry
from agrarian problems’. But what disturbed Nehru most was that ordinary
people had to a very large extent responded to the instigators. 4 A few months
later, Nehru found himself replying to Rajendra Prasad, the ‘Gandhian’, in
response to Prasad’s request that Nehru ban cow-slaughter on the day of
Indian independence. ‘I find myself in total disagreement with this revivalist
feeling’, Nehru wrote, ‘and in view of this difference of opinion I am a poor

1
This article is an elaboration of an argument which first appeared in Benjamin Zachariah,
Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004). Due to the limitations of space in that book, the argument
was not properly developed. This is an attempt to remedy that omission.
2
ZA Ahmad’s notes from his talk with Jawaharlal Nehru, June 1945, ‘not to be shown to anyone
else without PC Joshi’s [General Secretary, Communist Party of India] permission’, 1945/9, CPI
documents, PC Joshi Archive, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
3
ZA Ahmad’s notes, pp. 9-10.
4
Jawaharlal Nehru to Vallabhbhai Patel, November 5, 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Nehru
Memorial Library, Vol. 81, ff. 93-4.
representative of many of our people today’. 5 As he had said to ZA Ahmad
during the Simla Conference in 1945, Nehru was influential in the Congress
partly due to his mass popularity and partly because he was ‘internationally
better known’ and had ‘better contacts than anyone else’; nevertheless he was
‘in a sense quite alone’. 6

From this position of balanced isolation, supported from within and without the
Indian National Congress by persons who saw him as progressive and by
persons who saw him as a necessary figurehead, Jawaharlal Nehru was
nonetheless, and paradoxically, an influential figure in the making of the Indian
Constitution. This essay, while making this argument (partly out of joint with the
received wisdom of Dr BR Ambedkar as the ‘father’ of the Constitution), does
not seek to confuse Jawaharlal Nehru the political actor with the retrospectively-
named ‘Nehruvian consensus’. The term ‘Nehruvian’ denoted an obligatory but
fragile language of legitimacy; and it was further framed in the debates in the
Constituent Assembly, which sat from 1946 to 1949 to draw up a Constitution
for India. The component parts of that vision all bore the imprint of Nehru’s
energetic interventions; but ‘Nehruvian’ is an adjective that attests to the
personalisation of a model that is a compromise to which personal authorship
cannot be attributed. In particular, the Congress’s cautious left rhetoric in the
‘Nehruvian period’ worked on the vaccination principle: a dilute strand of what
many in the Congress openly regarded as a disease, ‘socialism’, administered
to the body politic, helped to prevent the disease itself from taking root. 7

The framing of a new Constitution for India, in this context, acquired a great
importance. Unable to rely on the sentiment of the people, the governing
wisdom of political colleagues, or the existence of a robust set of institutional
precedents upon which to base a new form of government, the Constitution’s
framers were in the position of attempting to write and thereafter to use a
document that would be the safeguard against the instability, irrationality,
sectarianism or extremism of people and politicians alike. Nehru’s was a
minority voice among a very few others within the Assembly, who were in the
position of making their voices count not by democratic force of numbers, but
by virtue of their (perhaps less democratic) skills of debate and persuasion. ‘I
feel greatly how much out of touch I am with the present sentiments of the
Hindus’, Nehru wrote to Krishna Menon. ‘Over many matters we rub each other
the wrong way and I fear that the Constituent Assembly is not going to be an
easy companion.’ 8

Scholarship on the history of the Indian Constitution – as opposed to the legal

aspects of it – has been relatively meagre, given the centrality of the
Constitution to the definition and identity of the new state, and given its

5
Jawaharlal Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 7 August 1947, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
2nd Series (Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984-), Vol. 3, p 191.
6
ZA Ahmad’s notes, pp. 2-3.
7
For the wider arguments on which this paragraph is based, see Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru
(London: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 123-168, and Benjamin Zachariah, Playing the
Nation Game: the Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda, 2011), pp. 205-254.
8
Jawaharlal Nehru to Krishna Menon, 22 July 1947, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd
series, Vol. 3, p. 344.
importance in the history of state-building in India. 9 Granville Austin has been
the pioneer and most significant contributor to the history of the framing and
functioning of the Constitution; his Cornerstone has been cited several times in
Supreme Court judgements. 10 For the rest, much of the material is concerned
with retrospectively appropriating previous debates and reframing them in terms
of later theoretical and/or political concerns (such as ‘liberalism’, a word that
hardly appears in contemporary debates). 11 (Since the purpose of a
Constitution is in part to anticipate future problems, this is of course somewhat
understandable, but it does not make for sound history.) Questions of
‘secularism’, or of ‘minority rights’, 12 of the relationship of the centre to the
states, 13 and of the ‘essential features’ and consequently of possibilities of
constitutional amendments have attracted some attention. 14 A good deal of
literature on the Indian Constitution was of course generated by responses to
the Emergency of 1975-1977, which appeared to have pulled off the old colonial
trick of constitutionally abrogating constitutional rights, with another spurt of
writing following the panic that set in with the rise of what we now call ‘Hindutva’
or ‘Hindu nationalism’ from the 1980s onwards, leading to the demolition of the
Babri Masjid by a carefully coordinated ‘mob’ on December 6, 1992. It appears
that the presence of a Hindu right-wing tendency earlier on in the history of
South Asia can be analysed as the ‘pre-history’ of the rise of the Sangh Parivar,
but not centrally in the context of constitutional debates. For the most part, the
retrospective (and somewhat teleological) debates have not been adequately
concerned with the larger contexts of the contemporaneous debates of the
transition to Indian statehood from colonial rule. The overall politics of
9
For an early acknowledgement of this importance, see D. D. Wallace, ‘The Indian Constitution
of 1949’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May, 1951), pp. 269-275.
10
Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1966); Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999). Innumerable surveys, commentaries and annotated texts exist,
of course, for law students and legal practitioners. But Austin remains the pioneer and best
commentator on the Constitution and its working, including on a number of issues referred to
below, where other references in the following five footnotes must all implicitly include him as
first reference.
11
Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Minority Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).
12
See for instance, for a sample of the literature that deals with these questions in the specific
context of the framing of the Constitution, James Chiriyankandath, ‘Creating a Secular State in
a Religious Country: The Debate in the Indian Constituent Assembly’, Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics, Vol. 38 No. 2 (2000), pp. 1–24; Rochana Bajpai,‘Constituent Assembly
Debates and Minority Rights’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 21/22 (2000), pp.
1837-1845; Shefali Jha, ‘Secularism and the Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946–1950’,
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37 No. 30 (2002), pp. 3175-3180; Ian Copland, ‘What’s in a
Name? India’s Tryst with Secularism’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. 48 No. 2
(2010), pp. 123–47; Shabnum Tejani, ‘Defining Secularism in the Particular: Caste and
Citizenship in India, 1909–1950‘, Politics and Religion, Vol. 6 (2013), pp. 703–729; Shabnum
Tejani, ‘Between Inequality and Identity: The Indian Constituent Assembly and Religious
Difference, 1946-1950’, South Asia Research Vol. 33 No. 3 (2013), pp. 205–221. The larger
debates are too long and contorted to be summarized here; but see Benjamin Zachariah,
Playing the Nation Game: the Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011),
Chapter One, for my position on those debates.
13
S.A.H. Haqqi, ‘Position of the States Under the Indian Constitution’, Indian Journal of Political
Science, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (January-March, April-June 1961), pp. 43-52; V. M. Dandekar, ‘Unitary
Elements in a Federal Constitution’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 22, No. 44 (Oct. 31,
1987), pp. 1865-1870.
14
See David Gwynn Morgan, ‘The Indian "Essential Features" Case’, International and
Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 1981), pp. 307-337.
pessimism in which the question of framing a new constitution emerged seldom
gets a mention in the literature, especially as the rhetoric of achieving freedom
from imperialism and the dawning of a new era was understood by those who
participated in that moment to be the necessary message that had to be
delivered, even when they themselves were sceptical that this was indeed the
case.

This essay returns to a set of questions that nonetheless vexed

contemporaries: what were the conditions that were considered important for
the stability and viability of a new state? How did Nehru and a few (often only
implicit) allies imagine this was achievable through a constitutional route? And
what alliances did he, and they, select in order to get there? The focus on
Jawaharlal Nehru as coordinator of such concerns does not indicate that his
was an entirely lone voice; it does, however, rest on the fact that Nehru became
the focal point and voice of those who considered themselves ‘progressive’,
from the end of the 1920s onwards, and that even as he continued to bely the
expectations placed upon him, he remained, in the view even of his political
opponents, the lesser evil. 15

These are large questions, which a short essay such as this cannot claim to
answer satisfactorily; but it is possible to approach an answer, I think, through a
close reading of significant moments. This essay, therefore, focuses on the
debate on the ‘Objectives Resolution’, moved on 13th December 1946 and
passed on 22nd January 1947, as a crucial moment in a set of manoeuvres
which held the public life of a future Republic of India to certain standards that
could not be easily disavowed.

Principles, Compromises and the Constitution

A quick outline of the background to and experience of the framing of the
Constitution might be usefully provided here. The Constituent Assembly met
from 1946 to 1949 to frame a constitution for the new Indian state, which was to
become, after the formal transfer of power, temporarily a self-governing
Dominion under the British Crown. Jawaharlal Nehru, as head of the Interim
Government, had an overoptimistic time-frame in mind for the preparation of a
constitution: he thought Dominion status would only last a short time, until June
1948 at the latest – the projected date of British departure according to British
Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s initial announcement of the date of a British
transfer of power – by which time an Indian constitution would be written. The
last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, had on Nehru’s request agreed
to stay on as Governor-General of the new Dominion of India to ensure
continuity of administration and smoothness of transition (Mountbatten held this
post until June 1948, to be succeeded by C Rajagopalachari, a Congress
conservative).

The document produced by the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly

turned out to be the longest written constitution in the world, reflecting awkward
compromises and containing frankly irreconcilable principles that had to be
reconciled by hiding them in minor sections of the Constitution. The
composition of the Constituent Assembly, with its Congress majority, reflected
the Congress’ strength in the 1946 elections: elected not under universal adult
15
See Zachariah, Nehru, Introduction.
franchise but a limited property franchise, it did not represent the social forces
that might potentially have supported a consensus to the left, but instead an old
property-owning conservative elite, more on the lines of a Rajendra Prasad,
landowner and later saboteur of land reform legislation in his (somewhat
unconstitutional interpretation of his) role as first President of the Republic of
India. A number of Nehru’s natural allies in the cause of building a progressive
constitution, in particular among the Congress Socialists, had boycotted the
Constituent Assembly as it had been based on the old communal electorates
and property franchise of colonial India, which they believed was no basis for
framing a democratic and progressive constitution for the nation as a whole.
The Muslim League boycotted the Constituent Assembly’s proceedings, though
not the Assembly sessions that dealt with day-to-day legislation, because a
separate Constituent Assembly to frame a Constitution for an eventual Pakistan
could have been said to have been implicitly abandoned as a demand had they
joined the Constituent Assembly as it was then constituted. The Chairman of
the Constituent Assembly, elected after a temporary Chairman,
Sachchidananda Sinha, had guided the Assembly through its first few sessions,
was Rajendra Prasad. The Drafting Committee was chaired by Dr BR
Ambedkar, who had long been a voice of dissent from the Indian nationalist
mainstream, having been willing to use the interested assistance of the British
administration to safeguard the position of the backward castes; he was, from
August 1947, a member of Nehru’s first Cabinet. This Cabinet was itself a
balancing of divergent forces in what was effectively a national coalition.
Notably, Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad within the Congress, and
Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, also in the Cabinet though a member of the Hindu
Mahasabha, together represented right-wing upper-caste Hindu opinion; Patel
also remained a central pro-capitalist voice within the Congress. 16

The unresolved nature of the debates on what an independent India was to look
like was reflected in the debates of the Constituent Assembly. Minoo Masani,
former Congress Socialist and soon to be the main spokesman of Indian
capitalist interests, classified opinions in the Constituent Assembly along two
axes: ‘modernists’ and ‘traditionalists’, ‘socialists’ and non-socialists. 17 This has
to be recognised as a form of shorthand; it did not nearly reflect all the interests
and points of view to be reconciled. Moreover, the arrangement of political
opinion did not divide neatly along parallel axes: both ‘modernist’ and
‘traditionalist’ opinion divided along socialist and capitalist lines. Matters were
not made any simpler by many followers of Gandhi claiming, as Gandhi himself
was occasionally though not consistently wont to do, to be socialists
themselves – the boundaries of ‘socialism’ were fuzzy and there was no
agreed-upon adjudicator to decide who could claim to be within them. Gandhi,
regularly invoked in the debates of the Assembly now that he had been
anointed as ‘Father of the Nation’, was not a member of the Assembly or a
participant in its debates, although the occasional remark from him might
produce resonances therein. His assassination on 30th January 1948 added to
and amplified the tendency of debates to claim a Gandhian lineage as
legitimating principle.

The question of minority rights loomed large in the discussions, with minorities
16
Zachariah, Nehru, pp. 148-149.
17
Minoo Masani, Against the Tide (Bombay: Vikas, 1981).
being conceived as individuals bound together not by elective affinities,
intellectual, emotional or political bonds chosen as individuals, but by pre-
conceived ‘communities’ – a consequence of the long-standing logic of colonial
and anticolonial politics that refused to legitimate the individual, maintaining that
in India it was the community and the collective that was the relevant unit of
society. This was clear not only with regard to Muslims in the context of the
movement for Pakistan, but possibly more urgently in relation to other and
smaller minorities and the very large numbers of Muslims remaining in India
after partition. The transition from British rule to Indian self-rule had not
abolished the ‘interest-groups’ that had been carefully nurtured by the British or
had grown up in the interstices of colonial power and nationalist resistance; and
many of these had claims to special representation entrenched in the existing
colonial constitution. The so-called ‘modernists’, as Masani described them,
had an uncomfortable relationship with these special interest groups: their
attempt to deal with individuals as individuals seemed to be undermined by
collective bargaining by groups acting as groups. And yet, the question of
minorities and their genuine insecurities had to be dealt with. Nehru had often
said that a majority community had special responsibilities to assuage the
insecurities of minorities; therefore the principle of minority representation and
‘safeguards’ had to be acknowledged. This eventually involved special
representation for ‘backward castes’ and ‘tribes’, recognised (as they had been
under the 1935 Government of India Act) under specific Schedules of the Indian
Constitution (giving rise to the awkward Indian political expression ‘Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes’, or SC/ST for short). (Since 1932, when
Gandhi’s ‘fast unto death’ had blackmailed Ambedkar, representing the
‘Backward Classes’, into accepting that ‘untouchables’ were actually ‘Hindus’,
‘Hindus’ were structurally a majority ‘community’ in the Indian subcontinent, but
the ‘backward classes’ were clearly still minorities within a majority.) Such
provisions were intended to be temporary forms of social protection; economic
and educational advancement, as Nehru and his allies were wont to put it,
would quickly end the conditions in which they were necessary. 18

If this seemed dangerously akin to colonial enumeration policies, it also

illustrated that a category that became the basis of claims to resources, even if
it was a category that appeared to perpetuate rather than eradicate the stigma
of caste discrimination, was extremely difficult to abolish later. It might have
been different if power had been seized by a revolutionary nationalist force; but
in an orderly transfer of power designed to protect mutual interests and based
on mutual fear of the ‘masses’ among British and Indian elites, such continuities
were logical. These continuities enabled various interpreters to conclude that
the newly independent India was going to be British India with a few
adjustments. ‘As evidence of the enduring quality of the 1935 [Government of
India] Act’, Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten’s press attaché, noted in his
diary after a conversation with Ambedkar, ‘he [Ambedkar] said that some two
hundred and fifty of its clauses had been embodied as they stood into the new
constitution.’19

18
For an elaboration of my reading of the logic of this argument, of development as an ersatz
nationalism that would overcome backwardness and atavistic values, see Benjamin Zachariah,
Playing the Nation Game: the Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011),
Chapter Five.
19
Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), entry for
The Constituent Assembly met for the first time on December 9, 1946. On
December 13, Nehru’s speech on the Objectives Resolution invoked the
American Constitution, the Tennis Court Oath of the legislators of the French
Revolution’s National Assembly, and the experiences of the USSR. He insisted
that a future Indian political order would be based on the principles of
democracy and socialism, called for a republican form of government, and
rejected ‘an external monarchy’. He stressed the principle of popular
sovereignty: in the Princely States, the people, not their monarchs, would
decide on their future (a principle that Vallabhbhai Patel in effect ignored, in his
negotiations with the States’ rulers, in order to persuade them to surrender
sovereignty to the Indian Union). As always, Nehru offered the route of
compromise: the Constitution would be based on basic principles that were
‘fundamental’ and ‘not controversial’. 20 But he also hinted at the possibility of
revolution and of the impermanence of the Constitution, gently prompting more
conservative elements to accept gradual, top-down change as a better solution
than revolution from below.

The implicit tensions that were part of the constitution-making discussions were
enshrined in the written version. These tensions remained unresolved –
between the principles of equality before the law and various minority rights and
forms of positive discrimination; between the Fundamental Rights guaranteed
by the Constitution (equality, freedoms of various kinds ‘against exploitation’ of
various description) and various exceptions to the Fundamental Rights; and
between the Fundamental Rights and the ‘Directive Principles’ of state policy,
which were not a legally enforceable part of the Constitution but were said to be
desirable goals or aspirations that would justify future legislation. The central
principle of ‘secularism’ was negatively defined: everyone would have the
freedom to ‘practise and propagate’ their religion, but the State and its organs
would neither recognise nor support particular religions or religious
organisations. The ‘Directive Principles’ were the box placed in a corner of the
Constitution to which were banished principles that were undesirable to reject
altogether given the demands of political legitimacy, but were impossible or
undesirable to make a part of the actual legal framework of the state. These
included proposals to abolish poverty, commitments to redistribute wealth and
establish social equality, to establish a total ban on alcohol consumption
(among the so-called ‘Gandhian principles’), as well as the more sectarian
demand to ban cow-slaughter; but the possibility of opening that box to justify
diverse political agenda was always present. 21 As Granville Austin put it:

The Directive Principles of State Policy were to be 'fundamental in the governance

of the country'. They contain a mixture of social revolutionary – including classically
socialist – and Hindu and Gandhian provisions (such as banning cow slaughter
and instituting prohibition). Although not justiciable, unlike the [Fundamental]
Rights, they have become yardsticks for the measurement of governments'
22
successes and failures in social policy.
th
Wednesday, 28 April 1948.
20
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Volume One: September 1946-May 1949 (New Delhi, 2nd
edn., November 1958), p 10.
21
There is a standard commentary on the Indian Constitution that has gone to several editions,
and is in use in schools and in universities across India: DD Basu, Introduction to the
Constitution of India (Delhi: Prentiss Hall, 1982) [several editions].
22
Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, p. 8.
Given that the various yardsticks, of course, did not agree on what constituted a
yard, we are of course far away from agreement on what social policy ought to
look like. What standards, then, could public policy be held to?

The Debate on the ‘Objectives Resolution’

A great deal of the work in setting up such standards was provided by the so-
called ‘objectives resolution’. It is to the debate on this resolution that this essay
now turns; the use of long quotations is important in that without them, it is
difficult to convey the spirit of the debate. My contention here is that the
Objectives Resolution debate operated according to pattern upon which further
debate was also to operate: enunciate a set of principles that were impossible
to disavow, thereby channelling discussions in a direction where disagreements
would be about details of how to operationalize the principles. In this way, if
(and by the time) a challenge to the principles was attempted, they would
already be so well-established that the challenge itself would appear strange.

Jawaharlal Nehru moved the Objectives Resolution on December 13th, 1946:

I beg to move:
"(1) This Constituent Assembly declares its firm and solemn resolve to proclaim
India as an Independent Sovereign Republic and to draw up for her future
governance a Constitution;
(2) WHEREIN the territories that now comprise British India, the territories that now
form the Indian States, and such other parts of India as are outside British India
and the States as well as such other territories as are willing to be constituted into
the Independent Sovereign India, shall be a Union of them all; and
(3) WHEREIN the said territories, whether with their present boundaries or with
such others as may be determined by the Constituent Assembly and thereafter
according to the Law of the Constitution, shall possess and retain the status of
autonomous Units, together with residuary powers, and exercise all powers and
functions of government and administration, save and except such powers and
functions as are vested in or assigned to the Union, or as are inherent or implied in
the Union or resulting therefrom; and
(4) WHEREIN all power and authority of the Sovereign Independent India, its
constituent parts and organs of government, are derived from the people; and
(5) WHEREIN shall be guaranteed and secured to all the people of India justice,
social, economic and political; equality of status, of opportunity, and before the law;
freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith worship, vocation, association and
action, subject to law and public morality; and
(6) WHEREIN adequate safeguards shall be provided for minorities, backward and
tribal areas, and depressed and other backward classes; and
(7) WHEREBY shall be maintained the integrity of the territory of the Republic and
its sovereign rights on land, sea, and air according to Justice and the law of
civilised nations, and
(8) this ancient land attains its rightful and honoured place in the world and make
its full and willing contribution to the promotion of world peace and the welfare of
23
mankind."

Nehru deemed the motion to have been necessary as ‘some indication to

ourselves’ as well as to the outside world in India and outside it, of what the
Constituent Assembly wished to achieve. ‘It seeks very feebly to tell the world
what we have thought or dreamt of for so long, and what we now hope to

23 th
Constituent Assembly of India Debates (12 volumes) [hereafter CAD], 13 December 1946
Vol. 1 Part V; all volumes available at http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/debates.htm.
Last accessed 12.08.2014.
achieve in the near future’. 24 But it was not a legal document, and he therefore
expressed the hope that it be accepted in that spirit and not become the subject
of legalistic readings. 25

These were basic principles that no one could reasonably oppose; and Nehru
knew that when he presented them. The language is recognizable to us as the
language of the Preamble to the Constitution, which similarly plays the role of a
starting point of legitimate and legitimating principles. Clauses 5 and 6 were at
the core of the social engineering project of a new India, and a clear indication
of what is in retrospect seen as the ‘Nehruvian project’; and the ‘ancient land’
clause at the end conceded much to the emotional sphere of a nationalism that
Nehru had often stood against. 26 The rest were unobjectionable, if not obvious.

Notably, Nehru starting speaking in Hindustani (as it was still often being called
in the House), and switching to English when he read the motion. Language
was a subject that had come up as a matter of controversy very early on: and
ambushes to the proceedings akin to those we might predict today had already
occurred:

The Chairman (Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha): May I respectfully ask whether the
Hon'ble Member does not know English.
Shri R. V. Dhulekar: I know English, but I want to speak in Hindustani.
The Chairman (Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha): Many of the members such as Mr.
Rajagopalachari do not know Hindustani.
Shri R. V. Dhulekar: People who do not know Hindustani have no right to stay in
India. People who are present in this House to fashion out a constitution for India
and do not know Hindustani are not worthy to be members of this Assembly. They
had better leave.
The Chairman (Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha): Please say what you wish to say.
Shri R. V. Dhulekar: I desire to move that the Procedure Committee should frame
all rules in Hindustani which may be translated into English.
The Chairman (Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha): Order, order you are not permitted by
me to address the House on the question of bi-lingualism, and printing of papers in
27
two or more languages. You are completely out of order...

(The following day, Rajendra Prasad was elected Permanent Chairman of the
Constituent Assembly, taking over from Sachchidananda Sinha. His opening
address to the House was in Hindustani.)28

It was also clear that to accept these principles in the Constituent Assembly was
to a certain extent to bind its members to a more progressive future than the
mood of the House seemed to indicate. Although Nehru noted that a great
many members were absent apart from the ones boycotting the Assembly on
some point of principle (thereby implying that they were not taking their historic
role seriously enough), he was clear that

24
CAD, 13th December 1946, Vol. 1 Part V. Nehru’s original remarks in Hindustani, official
translation.
25 th
CAD, 13 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part V.
26
See Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Signet, 1946), p. 144, on ancient
practices and backwardness.
27 th
CAD, 10 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part II, translated in the proceedings from the original
Hindustani.
28 th
CAD, 11 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part III.
 In this Constituent Assembly we are functioning on a world stage and the eyes of
the world are upon us and the eyes of our entire past are upon us. Our past is
witness to what we are doing here and though the future is still unborn, the future
too somehow looks at us, I think, and so, I would beg of this House to consider this
Resolution in this mighty prospect of our past, of the turmoil of the present and of
29
the great and unborn future that is going to take place soon.

Purushottam Das Tandon, seconding the Resolution – in a carefully stage-

managed coordination of left and right in the Congress in the interests of ‘unity’
and ‘national interest’ – declared that ‘Congress has always tried to unite all the
sections of the population to fight for the freedom of their country. Our leaders
have never indulged in communal bickerings. Congress is the only body in
which Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, Jains and Buddhists can unite. In politics it
refuses to recognize any difference on account of religion.’ 30 This was of course
completely untrue, as Nehru had said elsewhere. But here again, the Congress
Right, and the House more generally, were being held to a principle they could
not disavow later.

As the debate on the motion proceeded, it was clear that amendments or

objections would have to be either on technical grounds, or, following the logic
of the Resolution itself, be based on the claim that the Resolution did not go far
enough. MR Jayakar’s objections took the technical route:
The point which I propose to raise is that in this preliminary meeting of the
Constituent Assembly at this stage no question like laying down the fundamentals
of the Constitution can be considered. That the Resolution is intended to lay down
the fundamentals of the Constitution, even Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru has admitted.
It is a very vital resolution and it lays down the essentials of the next Constitution. If
you examine it, a cursory glance will reveal to you that the several things which are
mentioned here are fundamentals of the Constitution. For instance, it speaks of a
Republic; of a Union; it talks of present boundaries, and the status of Provincial
Authorities; residuary powers, all powers being derived from the people, minorities
rights, fundamental rights – all these can be accurately described as fundamentals
31
of the Constitution.

At this stage, Jayakar went on to say, the consideration of details would be

premature, and also not entirely legal, going as it did beyond the remit of the
Cabinet Mission Plan that had been the basis for the appointment of the
Constituent Assembly: the House did not know what form a future Government
would take. Furthermore, without the Muslim League’s participation it would be
provocative to decide anything, and it would be better to wait and hope that they
would join. Otherwise decisions would be valid for only part of the country. The
Princely States were also not represented as yet.

Defending the Resolution, Shri Krishna Sinha did not disagree with Jayakar on
the significance of the Resolution when he declared it ‘unfortunate’ that ‘a
resolution of such a sacred nature should have been subjected to amendments’.
He identified three features of the Resolution: ‘That India of the future is to be a
democratic and decentralised republic, in which the ultimate sovereignty is to lie
with the people and in which fundamental rights are to be safeguarded to
minorities inhabiting this land.’ He saw nothing in the Resolution that prevented

29 th
CAD, 13 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part V.
30 th
CAD, 13 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part V.
31 th
CAD, 16 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VI.
the Muslim League from joining the Constituent Assembly at a later date, and
was scathing of the implication that the Constituent Assembly was to limit its
discussions to a remit provided by the departing imperial power: ‘I cannot refrain
from reminding this House that we are all assembled here in assertion of a right,
a cherished and valuable right which mankind has achieved for itself after
undergoing untold sufferings and sacrifices’: the principle of popular sovereignty
as opposed to the sovereignty of monarchs. Providing a brief history of the
principle from the French Enlightenment and Revolution to the present day, he
went on:
It was to achieve this constituent power that we in this country have been fighting
British Imperialism for the last several years ... So, Sir, we are not here in this
Assembly because the British Government in a fit of generosity have thought it
32
proper to ask us to take over power.

India also had a duty to provide a lead to the countries from which the ‘flood of
Western Imperialism’ was soon to recede, ‘by successfully constructing a state
which will be a democratic republic, and, at the same time decentralised so that
different cultural groups based on language, on religion, may be integrated in a
vast republic … it is very necessary that we should set an example by having a
state in India which will be a state for the whole of India and at the same time
provide safeguards for cultural minorities.’33

Many of those who might have been expected to be in opposition to Nehru

supported the motion. Minoo Masani’s statement stressed the importance of
avoiding totalitarianism, making an indirect reference to the Soviet Union. He
quoted Gandhi on giving power to the masses; but he did not oppose Nehru’s
resolution. 34 SP Mookerjee also opposed Jayakar’s amendment – how long
could one wait for the League leadership to make up their minds? And the
States could not participate in the Constituent Assembly as yet. The Resolution
was not necessarily inconsistent with the Cabinet Mission's Scheme, but
enumerated ‘certain fundamental things which are within the framework of the
Scheme itself’, even if some political views tended towards ‘a stronger Centre in
India's paramount interest.’ Nehru had also made it clear that ‘we are not now
framing a constitution for India; we are only passing a resolution at this stage, at
the preliminary stage, outlining generally the shape that the future constitution
of India should take. 35 Meanwhile, the Resolution had an importance of its own.
‘After all, we are sitting here not in our individual capacity, but we claim to
represent the People of this great land. Our sanction is not the British
Parliament; our sanction is not the British Government; our sanction is the
people of India.’36

BR Ambedkar backed Jayakar’s point on the necessity of leaving space for the
League to come back in: ’Let us even make a concession to the prejudices of
our opponents.’ Jayakar had made his case, however, ‘somewhat in a legalistic
manner. The basis of his argument was, have you the right to do so? … The

32 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
33 th
CAD, 16 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VI.
34 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
35 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
36 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
question I am asking is this. Is it prudent for you to do so? Is it wise for you to
do so?’ 37 He also said that the Resolution did not go far enough.
The part which is non-controversial is the part which comprises paragraphs (5) to
(7) of this Resolution. These paragraphs set out the objectives of the future
constitution of this country. I must confess that, coming as the Resolution does
from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who is reputed to be a Socialist, this Resolution,
although non-controversial, is to my mind very disappointing. I should have
expected him to go much further than he has done in that part of the Resolution.
As a student of history, I should have preferred this part of the Resolution not being
embodied in it at all. When one reads that part of the Resolution, it reminds one of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man which was pronounced by the French
Constituent Assembly … [which] have become not only the part and parcel of the
mental make-up of modern man in every civilised part of the world, but also in our
own country which is so orthodox, so archaic in its thought and its social structure,
hardly anyone can be found to deny its validity. To repeat it now as the Resolution
38
does is, to say the least, pure pedantry.

And in general, the Resolution spoke of rights, but not of remedies. ‘All of us are
aware of the fact that rights are nothing unless remedies are provided whereby
people can seek to obtain redress when rights are invaded. … I should have
expected some provision whereby it would have been possible for the State to
make economic, social and political justice a reality and I should have from that
point of view expected the Resolution to state in most explicit terms that in order
that there may be social and economic justice in the country, that there would
be nationalisation of industry and nationalisation of land, I do not understand
how it could be possible for any future Government which believes in doing
justice socially, economically and politically, unless its economy is a socialistic
economy. Therefore, personally, although I have no objection to the enunciation
of these propositions, the Resolution is, to my mind, somewhat disappointing.’ 39

Somnath Lahiri, for the Communist Party of India, was also of the opinion that
the Resolution did not go far enough: He congratulated Nehru for his assertion
that ‘no imposition from the British will be accepted by the Indian people’. It was
therefore important not to simply work with the Cabinet Mission Plan, but ‘to
declare independence here and now and call upon the Interim Government, call
upon the people of India to stop fratricidal warfare and look out against its
enemy, which still has the whip hand, the British Imperialism – and go together
to fight it and then resolve our claims afterwards when we will be free.’ He
addressed paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 of the Resolution: ‘here you have formulated
certain fundamental principles on which the equality and the rights of the people
of India would be based. …. It all depends on how you interpret those Principles,
in the light of the past and the future.’ Congress Ministries, however, had in the
past few years been flouting these principles with an alarming regularity, and
the formulations of the Resolution would not convince anyone without
containing more specifics. Who was to determine whether safeguards for the
Depressed Classes were adequate or not? On an electoral system, Lahiri
suggested proportional representation with adult suffrage and joint electorates:
‘thereby each party, whether it be a communal party or a political party, on the
basis of the total votes gained by it, will get its representation assured and then

37 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
38 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
39 th
CAD, 17 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part VII.
the parties, the communal parties like Muslim League and the Scheduled
Castes Federation, who would have been assured of their proper representation,
could not have any complaint. At the same time, it would give a fillip to the
political parties also to get their proper representation, so that we can gradually
cut across the religious separatism that has grown in our country, and healthy
politics on the basis of political division and political struggle would develop.’ 40

The debates thus developed in an extremely desirable direction: the principles

of the Resolution were considered self-evident, and any dissent that was
expressed was based on the question of whether they needed to be fleshed out
further at the current juncture, and how: This was very well expressed by Jaipal
Singh:
Mr. Chairman, Sir, I rise to speak on behalf of millions of unknown hordes – yet
very important – of unrecognized warriors of freedom, the original people of India
who have variously been known as backward tribes, primitive tribes, criminal tribes
and everything else, Sir, I am proud to be a Jungli, that is the name by which we
are known in my part of the country. Living as we do in the jungles, we know what it
means to support this Resolution. On behalf of more than 30 millions of the
Adibasis (cheers), I support it not merely because it may have been sponsored by
a leader of the Indian National Congress. I support it because it is a resolution
which gives expression to sentiments that throb in every heart in this country. I
have no quarrel with the wording of this Resolution at all. … You cannot teach
democracy to the tribal people; you have to learn democratic ways from them.
They are the most democratic people on earth. What my people require, Sir, is not
adequate safeguards as Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru has put it. They require
protection from Ministers, that is position today. … It is only a matter of political
widow-dressing that today we find six tribal members in this Constituent Assembly.
How is it? What has the Indian National Congress done for our fair representation?
Is there going to be any provision in the rules whereby it may be possible to bring
in more Adibasis and by Adibasis I mean, Sir, not only men but women also? There
are too many men in the Constituent Assembly. We want more women, more
women of the type of Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Pandit who has already won a victory in
America by destroying this racialism. My people have been suffering for 6,000
years because of your racialism, racialism of the Hindus and everybody else. … I
have heard of resolutions and speeches galore assuring Adibasis of a fair deal. If
history had to teach me anything at all, I should distrust this Resolution, but I do not.
Now we are on a new road. Now we have simply got to learn to trust each other.
And I ask friends who are not present with us today, that they should come in, they
should trust us and we, in turn must learn to trust them. 41

And perhaps even more importantly, he addressed the question of ‘Hindus’ as a

majority, and the fears of the minorities.
Sir, I do not consider my people a minority. We have already heard on the floor of
the House this morning that the Depressed Classes also consider themselves as
Adibasis, the original inhabitants of this country. If you go on adding people like the
exterior castes and others who are socially in no man's land, we are not a minority.
42
In any case we have prescriptive rights that no one dare deny.

40 th
CAD, 19 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part IX.
41 th
CAD, 19 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part IX.
42 th
CAD, 19 December 1946, Vol. 1 Part IX. That the claim to being ‘original inhabitants’ of India
made by Jaipal Singh hinged on the Adibasis being considered descendants of the people of
the Indus Valley Civilisation should also be noted, if only to indicate that the claim to the ‘nation’
rested on very instrumental readings of history.
NV Gadgil affirmed the importance of the Resolution in defending it before the
House: ‘this Resolution is absolutely necessary and though textually it may not
be a part of the Constitution, that may come ultimately to be framed, it is a sort
of a spiritual preamble which will pervade every section, every clause and every
schedule and as I said, Sir, it is necessary. It is a sort of a dynamic, a driving
power which will be available to those who will be charged with the framing of
the Constitution in detail. This is in fact the foundation.’43

Jayakar himself withdrew his amendment with the acknowledgement that 20th
January, the date until which he suggested the House wait for the Muslim
League to potentially join discussions, now having past, its central rationale had
collapsed; he was not allowed to speak further. 44 On the 22nd of January 1947,
other minor amendments also having been withdrawn, Nehru spoke, again
beginning in Hindustani and continuing in English, in reply to the debates: it had
taken six weeks to get to the point where they might pass a resolution he had
hoped would be passed in two or three days; nevertheless, he believed that the
long delay and deliberations had been right, and had occurred for the right
reasons. ‘You should bear in mind that this Assembly is not only to pass
Resolutions, I may point out, that the Constitution, which we frame, is not an
end by itself, but it would be only the basis for further work.’45 Cooperation with
other countries, essential in a new world that had to be marked by peace and
not war, was of course necessary: with the USA, the British Commonwealth, or
the Soviet Union, but on principles of freedom and equality. ‘I hope that this
Resolution will lead us to a constitution on the lines suggested by this
Resolution. I trust that the Constitution itself will lead us to the real freedom that
we have clamoured for and that real freedom in turn will bring food to our
starving peoples, clothing for them, housing for them and all manner of
opportunities of progress, that it will lead also to the freedom of the other
countries of Asia, because in a sense, however unworthy, we have become –
let us recognise it – the leaders of the freedom movement of Asia, and whatever
we do, we should think of ourselves in these larger terms.’ 46

Rajendra Prasad then read a ‘Hindi’ translation of the Resolution, and Mohan
Lal Saxena an ‘Urdu’ translation. The Resolution was passed. 47

Conclusion: The Banality of Principles; or,

How to Create a Framework that Binds its Opponents
The Objectives Resolution, that was now said to have been passed
‘unanimously’ by the House, was declared two days later to be ‘binding’ by
Govind Ballabh Pant when referring to the rights of minorities. 48 He referred
specifically to clauses 5 and 6, suggesting that this should give minorities the
‘confidence’ they required; but in a language that bore many of the markers of
Nehru’s acerbic style, warned:

I cannot however refrain from referring to a morbid tendency which has ripped this
country for the last many years. The individual citizen who is really the backbone of

43 th
CAD, 20 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part I, available on the Parliament of India websit.e
44 st
CAD, 21 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part II.
45 nd
CAD, 22 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part III (Nehru speaking in Hindustani).
46 nd
CAD, 22 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part III (Nehru speaking in English).
47 nd
CAD, 22 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part III.
48 th
CAD, 24 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part IV.
 the State, the pivot, the cardinal centre of all social activity, and whose happiness
and satisfaction should be the goal of every social mechanism, has been lost here
in that indiscriminate body known as the community. We have even forgotten that a
49
citizen exists as such.

Jaipal Singh, taking exception to the meagre representation of Tribals in the

Advisory Committee, also referred back to what he called Nehru’s ‘Independent
Sovereign Republic Resolution’ as touchstone of legitimacy, saying ‘This House
is on trial; let us see what happens.’50 The Objectives Resolution had already
begun functioning almost as a set of constitutional precedents to the
constitution. And of course, a reading of only the debates in the Constituent
Assembly might all too easily show very high-minded debates, conducted on
the basis of great principles, which we might actually confuse with what was
actually happening. Nevertheless, the autonomy of events, framing of
constitutional clauses, and indeed of politics itself, was crucially dependent on
the ability of protagonists to place their arguments within the parameters of
those great principles.

The Objectives outlined in what might too easily be seen as a minor debate in
the grander scale of Constitution-making, therefore, are far more important than
we might think. The reiteration of the principles upon which a new political order
ought to be founded provided a very different standard of legitimacy to what the
consensus among a Hindu majoritarian-inclined majority inside the Congress,
and the House, might have liked. Nehru, by making the first move, pre-
emptively established the basis of acceptable politics and standard of political
legitimacy in the new state. Deviations from such norms would need to be
disavowed or justified as exceptions. If this appears too meagre an
achievement in retrospect, it needs also to be remembered that these norms
constrained policy and law to remain within certain non-sectarian bounds.
Arguments would thereafter have to be based upon how the norms were to be
realised, not whether they were desirable norms. As the Reverend Jerome
D’Souza put it in the House, responding to Dr Ambedkar’s contention that the
principles of the Resolution were so universal and self-evident as to be
redundant, even that which went without saying bore repeating: ‘a profession of
our democratic belief is made in a solemn, public, and irrevocable manner’. 51

The picture that emerges from this is of an outmaneuvering of a potential right

wing in politics before the political game had properly begun: that the operative
and effective coalition in post-independence India was one that consisted of a
'left’ inside Congress and a 'left' outside it, including the Communists, who treat
Nehru as a sort of 'front organisation' on his own, with the right within the
Congress as well as outside it lacking access to the language of political
legitimacy. The progressive nature of the principles upon which the Constitution
was based, and the progressive future of India, were not up for debate. The
road back for the right was a long one; it is a road that has, perhaps, now been
travelled.

49 th
CAD, 24 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part IV.
50 th
CAD, 24 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part IV.
51 st
CAD, 21 January 1947, Vol. 2 Part II.