Comment: Influence of Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar in the framing of the Indian Constitution. (1999, 20 Marks)
Jawaharlal Nehru set the Constitution’s purposes, B. R. Ambedkar turned them into justiciable law, and M. K. Gandhi, never a member and dead on 30 January 1948, weeks before the Draft appeared, shaped its moral vocabulary more than its structure.
Gandhi: influence without membership
- Indirect but pervasive. His movement gave the Assembly its legitimacy, and his 1931 hope for an India in which “the poorest shall feel that it is their country” anticipates the Preamble’s promise of justice.
- Textual imprints: abolition of untouchability (Article 17), village panchayats (Article 40), cottage industries (Article 43), the uplift of weaker sections (Article 46), prohibition (Article 47) and cow protection (Article 48).
- The rejected model. Shriman Narayan Agarwal’s Gandhian Constitution for Free India (1946) proposed a polity built upward from self-governing villages through indirect election. The Assembly chose the individual voter instead; Mahavir Tyagi complained there was “nothing Gandhian” in the result. Granville Austin reads this as a modernising, Western model defeating the Gandhian one, which was honoured in Part IV and passed over in the design.
Nehru: author of purposes and machinery
- The Objectives Resolution (13 December 1946) fixed the republic, popular sovereignty and justice (social, economic and political) as the Assembly’s ends. It became the Preamble.
- Committee leadership. Nehru chaired the Union Powers, Union Constitution and States Committees. After partition he moved the design towards a strong centre, residuary powers with the Union and parliamentary government on universal adult franchise.
- Social-democratic vision. Planning, a mixed economy, secularism and Part IV reflect his belief that political freedom must deliver economic change; Bhikhu Parekh counts socialism among the core components of Nehru’s national philosophy. He also brokered the 1949 property compromise (Article 31).
Ambedkar: draftsman, defender, dissenter
- Chair of the Drafting Committee from 29 August 1947, he piloted the Draft from 4 November 1948 and defended it clause by clause.
- Rights and remedies. He called Article 32 the “very soul” and “very heart” of the Constitution. Article 17, reserved seats and the service provisions carry his long argument for representation as a matter of justice.
- The individual as the unit. He dismissed the village as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”, directly against Gandhi.
- Where he lost. States and Minorities (1947) proposed constitutionally entrenched state socialism; the Assembly declined, and Article 40 entered only as a late, non-justiciable directive, an amendment he accepted without making the village the unit. His 25 November 1949 speech (the grammar of anarchy, the life of contradictions) warns about the gaps rather than claiming authorship.
| Mode of influence | Lasting imprint | |
|---|---|---|
| Gandhi | Moral, through the movement | Part IV, Article 17, later the 73rd Amendment |
| Nehru | Programmatic and political | Preamble, strong centre, socialist-secular ethos |
| Ambedkar | Legal and institutional | Part III, Article 32, reservations |
Weighing them
The Assembly held several competing ideological positions. The liberal-democratic strand (Ambedkar) and the social-democratic strand (Nehru) set the document’s contours, and the Gandhian strand stayed at the margin. The balance still holds. Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (November 2024) upheld the 42nd Amendment’s “socialist” and “secular”, which made Nehruvian commitments explicit; State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (August 2024) permitted sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, extending Ambedkar’s logic to the most excluded. The 73rd Amendment (1992) partly restored Gandhi’s village four decades after the Assembly left it non-justiciable.
Conclusion
The Constitution is best read as Nehru’s purposes carried out by Ambedkar’s methods, with Gandhi as the conscience both invoked and overruled. His ideas survive mostly as directives; theirs form the working structure. The gap Ambedkar named, between political equality and social inequality, remains open.