Unity and integrity of India was perhaps the single uppermost factor in the minds of the Constitution makers. Comment. (2019, 10 Marks)
Writing in the shadow of partition, the framers treated India’s survival as one state as the precondition of every other goal. Yet Granville Austin reads their purpose as a seamless web of three strands — unity and integrity, democracy and social revolution. Unity was the most urgent strand, not the only one.
Why unity pressed hardest
- Partition reversed the federal plan. The Objectives Resolution (1946) had left residuary powers with the units to keep the Muslim League inside. After the 3 June 1947 plan, the Union Powers Committee under Jawaharlal Nehru (second report, 5 July 1947) judged a weak centre “injurious to the interests of the country” now that partition was “a settled fact”.
- B. R. Ambedkar had wanted this even earlier, telling the Assembly on 17 December 1946 that he preferred a centre stronger than the 1935 Act’s.
- Riots, refugees, over 550 princely states and war in Kashmir made fragmentation real, and as late as 1960 Selig S. Harrison called the years ahead India’s most dangerous decades.
How it entered the text
- Article 1‘s “Union of States” was, Ambedkar explained, not the product of an agreement, so no state may secede; Article 3 lets Parliament redraw states.
- A dominant Union List, residuary power with the Union (Article 248), Union law prevailing in concurrent matters, emergency powers (Articles 352, 356, 360), appointed Governors, All India Services, one judiciary and Election Commission, and single citizenship — K. C. Wheare’s quasi-federal design.
Why “single” overstates it
- Democracy was not traded for order. Universal adult franchise from day one and a justiciable Part III are not the choices of framers who ranked unity above all.
- Social revolution was written in through Articles 15–17 and Part IV; the strong centre was also meant to plan for it.
- Ambedkar described a federation that could be unitary or federal as circumstances required — flexibility, not centralisation for its own sake.
- Dissent was real: K. Santhanam feared provinces would become “beggars at the door of the Centre”, and Article 356, meant to stay a “dead letter”, was abused until S. R. Bommai (1994).
The strand still in tension
In Re: Article 370 (11 December 2023) upheld abrogation on the logic of integration yet directed statehood restored “at the earliest” — still pending. In April 2026 the 131st Amendment Bill on delimitation fell short of the special majority: the federal balance, too, now needs consensus.
Conclusion
Unity was the framers’ uppermost anxiety, and after June 1947 it dictated the federal design. But Austin is right that they sought unity through democracy and social justice, not instead of them — and wherever later governments pursued it at the others’ expense, integrity itself suffered.