Critically examine the impact of the national movement on the making of the constitution of India. (2001)
Granville Austin saw the Constitution joining a national revolution (democracy and liberty against colonial rule) and a social revolution (equality against caste and custom). Both belonged to the national movement. The Assembly largely codified the movement’s promises, but only those of the version of the movement that won.
What the movement carried into the text
| Commitment | Antecedent | In the Constitution |
|---|---|---|
| Rights catalogue | 1895 Bill; Nehru Report (1928) | Part III |
| Rights plus economic justice | Karachi Resolution (1931) | Parts III and IV together |
| Universal adult franchise | Nehru Report | Article 326 |
| Secular state | Nehru Report; Karachi | Articles 25–28 |
| Constructive programme | M. K. Gandhi’s campaigns | Articles 17, 40, 43, 46, 47 |
- Rights. Austin calls the Nehru Report’s rights chapter a close precursor of Part III.
- The Assembly itself was a movement demand, raised by M. N. Roy (1934), adopted by the Congress (1935) and conceded by the Cabinet Mission (1946).
- Personnel and legitimacy. Members drew authority from years in prison and Congress work, not from the narrow franchise that chose them.
- Values. Bipan Chandra lists the movement’s legacy as democracy, civil liberties, secularism and a pro-poor economic stance. All four run through the Preamble and Part IV.
- Method. Fifty years of petitioning, legislating and litigating bred a preference for a justiciable constitution, which is why B. R. Ambedkar (25 November 1949) asked that satyagraha now give way to constitutional methods.
A critical view
- The Gandhian ideal was left out. The village republic, the movement’s most original idea, survived only in the non-justiciable Article 40. K. Hanumanthaiya lamented an English band where the veena and sitar were wanted.
- It was a Congress movement. Congress held about 82 per cent of the post-partition Assembly, chosen by legislatures for which only 28.5 per cent of provincial adults could vote; the Muslim League’s rival nationalism was absent, so partition removed the communal question rather than settling it.
- The Dalit critique. In What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), Ambedkar argued that the movement put swaraj ahead of social reform. On this view, Article 17 and reservation owe as much to his pressure and the Poona Pact as to Congress.
- Colonial continuity. The movement had fought the Rowlatt laws, yet the Constitution kept preventive detention (Article 22) and emergency powers, and borrowed much of its frame from the Government of India Act, 1935.
- Passive revolution. Partha Chatterjee treats Indian nationalism as a passive revolution: an elite took over the state without reordering property or caste. The Assembly’s caution on compensation (Article 31) fits.
Continuing relevance
In Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (25 November 2024) the Supreme Court upheld the 1976 insertion of “socialist” and “secular”, reading secularism as already embodied in the original rights chapter and socialism as a welfare-state commitment, values traceable to Karachi. Yet the planned caste enumeration in the next Census, the first since 1931, shows that the social revolution the movement postponed remains open.
Conclusion
The national movement gave the Constitution its content, personnel and legitimacy, making it a movement’s programme rather than an imported model, but the programme of its liberal-modernist Congress leadership. What that leadership overruled (Gandhian decentralisation, a separate Dalit political voice) and the colonial machinery it kept remain the Constitution’s main points of dispute.