Heavy demand for a bestselling draft Constitution

Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History revisits the making of the Indian Constitution. The book offers a different approach to scholarly accounts that focus largely on the Constituent Assembly, and the debates and texts it produced. It explores instead “the proactive engagement with the constitution among diverse publics and state institutions from mid-1946 onwards.” The second chapter examines how communities and individuals across the country interacted with the drafting of the constitution, and many citizen translations that circulated at the time. “This is not to give the impression that the making of the constitution dominated peoples’ lives,” the authors note. “The Indian public was coping at the time with food scarcity, the unfolding consequences of partition violence, and authoritarian measures adopted by the Indian and provincial governments that curbed Indians’ promised freedoms. Nevertheless, the sheer ubiquity of constitutional public debates made the issue routine.” The following excerpt from the chapter looks at the demand and distribution for copies of the draft constitution and the media coverage of it, including in radio and print.

BY LATE OCTOBER 1947, the Constitutional Adviser had produced the first draft of the constitution. A week later, one Paramananda Das from Pachoria (Pacharia) village in Assam asked “whether the public be allowed to express their opinion about the draft constitution before final enactment, and be supplied with copies of the draft whenever that is sought for”? He expressed his concern that “if the newspaper reports of the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly be relied upon there are some grave defects in the draft constitution upon which the future government is likely to founder.” He wanted to warn of these defects. The secretariat of the Constituent Assembly wrote back to Das and to other individuals and organisations who urged “the desirability of the publication of the Draft Constitution” that “at this stage no definite reply can be given” to his enquiry, but that “this question will receive due consideration at the appropriate time.”

Perhaps swayed by these letters, on 23 October 1947, the president of the Constituent Assembly wrote to BR Ambedkar, the chairman of the Drafting Committee, suggesting that the first draft constitution of 1947 be published before the next meeting of the Constituent Assembly. “The public,” he reasoned, “should be kept informed about the form which our constitution is likely to take.” After some discussion and negotiation, the Drafting Committee agreed to publish the next draft it would produce, since the draft of 1947 was likely to undergo several changes.

In February 1948, the Constituent Assembly published the draft constitution and invited comments from a wide range of bodies and from the public. It was given wide publicity. This had not been the original intent. The plan to share the draft document with the entirety of the Indian population came after the Constituent Assembly had already received hundreds of suggestions from the public, who demanded to take part in the making of the constitution. In a way, the public had already inserted itself into the process, making it a fact.