The making of the Indian Constitution is described as an attempt towards ‘social revolution’. Comment. (2022, 15 Marks)
The description comes from Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966), for whom the document was “first and foremost a social document”: most of its provisions either pursue a social revolution or build the conditions for one. The claim holds for the framers’ intent; the revolution itself was left to the republic.
What Austin meant
- In the Assembly a national revolution (freedom and democracy denied by colonial rule) fused with a social revolution (release from hierarchies tradition imposed on low castes and women).
- Jawaharlal Nehru set the agenda on 22 January 1947: the Assembly’s first task was to free India through a constitution “to feed the starving people” and clothe the naked masses.
- B. R. Ambedkar supplied the logic on 25 November 1949: political democracy cannot last unless social democracy lies at its base.
How the text pursues it
- Parts III and IV, the “conscience of the Constitution” for Austin, carry the core.
- Part III strikes at status: Article 17 abolishes untouchability, 15(2) opens public places, 23–24 bar forced and child labour, 16(4) permits reservation in posts.
- Part IV sets the positive agenda — Articles 38, 39(b)–(c), 41, 45, 46 — “fundamental in the governance of the country” though non-justiciable.
- Universal adult franchise at once made political equality a lever against social hierarchy; reserved seats (Articles 330, 332) brought excluded groups into legislatures.
- A strong, planning state was the chosen agent, not the market or the village.
How it was carried forward
- The First Amendment (1951) added Article 15(4) and the Ninth Schedule for land reform; the 44th (1978) removed property from Part III.
- Minerva Mills (1980) made the Part III–Part IV balance basic structure; the 86th Amendment (2002) inserted Article 21A, the right to education, given effect by the Right to Education Act, 2009.
- Upendra Baxi named the courts’ widening of standing and Article 21 social action litigation — courts finishing Part IV’s work.
Critiques
- Marxist: a bourgeois–landlord compromise that shielded property and made redistribution optional; Somnath Lahiri found the rights drafted “from the point of view of a police constable”.
- Gandhian: Shriman Narayan Agarwal’s village-based plan (1946) was set aside; change came top-down, panchayats confined to Article 40.
- Ambedkarite: legal equality over a caste-bound society produced the “life of contradictions”; Ambedkar’s own state-socialist programme was declined.
- Madhav Khosla reads the founding as political pedagogy — citizens made through codified forms — while on another reading the revolution begins, rather than ends, with the constitution. Austin’s Working a Democratic Constitution (1999) traced how the strands collided, property against redistribution above all.
The revolution in progress
State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024; seven judges, 6:1) permitted sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, overruling E. V. Chinnaiah. Caste enumeration in Census 2027, the first since 1931, will measure how far the revolution has travelled.
Conclusion
“Attempt” is exactly right. The framers wrote a revolutionary mandate into a gradualist, constitutional method; its instruments have worked unevenly, but every Indian equality argument still starts from Parts III and IV — proof that the attempt defined the republic.