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Constituent Assembly of India | |
---|---|
Type | |
Type | |
History | |
Founded | 9 December 1946 |
Disbanded | 25 January 1950 |
Preceded by | Imperial Legislative Council |
Succeeded by | Parliament of India (1950) Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947) |
Leadership | |
Temporary Chairman | |
President | |
Vice President | |
Chairman of the Drafting Committee | |
Constitutional Advisor / Legal Advisor | |
Structure | |
Seats | 389 (December 1946 – June 1947) 299 (August 1947 – January 1950) |
Political groups | |
Elections | |
Single transferable vote | |
Meeting place | |
Council House, Raisina Hill, New Delhi |
The Constituent Assembly of India was elected to frame the Constitution of India. It was elected by the 'Provincial Assembly'. Following India's independence from the British rule in 1947, its members served as the nation's first Parliament as the 'Provisional Parliament of India'. It was conceived and created by V. K. Krishna Menon, who first outlined its necessity in 1933 and enshrined it as a Congress demand. [1]
The Indian National Congress held its session at Lucknow in April 1936 presided by Jawaharlal Nehru. The official demand for Constituent Assembly was raised and Government of India Act, 1935 was rejected as it imposed the Constitution which was against the will of the Indians. C. Rajagopalachari voiced the demand for a Constituent Assembly on 15 November 1939 based on adult franchise, and was accepted by the British in August 1940.
On 8 August 1940, a statement was made by Viceroy Lord Linlithgow about the expansion of the Governor-General's Executive Council and the establishment of a War Advisory Council. This offer, known as the August Offer, included giving full weight to minority opinions and allowing Indians to draft their own constitution. Under the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, elections were held for the first time for the Constituent Assembly. The Constitution of India was drafted by the Constituent Assembly, and it was implemented under the Cabinet Mission Plan on 16 May 1946. The members of the Constituent Assembly were elected by the provincial assemblies by a single, transferable-vote system of proportional representation. The total membership of the Constituent Assembly was 389 of which 292 were representatives of the provinces, 93 represented the princely states and four were from the chief commissioner provinces of Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara, Coorg and British Baluchistan.
The elections for the 296 seats assigned to the British Indian provinces were completed by August 1946. Congress won 208 seats, and the Muslim League 73. After this election, the Muslim League refused to cooperate with the Congress and the political situation deteriorated. Hindu-Muslim riots began, and the Muslim League demanded a separate constituent assembly for Muslims in India. On 3 June 1947 Lord Mountbatten, the last British Governor-General of India, announced his intention to scrap the Cabinet Mission Plan; this culminated in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and the separate nations of India and Pakistan. The Indian Independence Act was passed on 18 July 1947 and, although it was earlier declared that India would become independent in June 1948, this event led to independence on 15 August 1947. The Constituent Assembly met for the first time on 9 December 1946, reassembling on 14 August 1947 as a sovereign body and successor to the British parliament's authority in India.
As a result of the partition, under the Mountbatten plan, a separate Constituent Assembly of Pakistan was established on 3 June 1947. The representatives of the areas incorporated into Pakistan ceased to be members of the Constituent Assembly of India. New elections were held for the West Punjab and East Bengal (which became part of Pakistan, although East Bengal later seceded to become Bangladesh); the membership of the Constituent Assembly was 299 after the reorganization, and it met on 31 December 1947. The constitution was drafted by 299 delegates from different caste, region, religion, gender etc. These delegates sat over 114 days spread over 3 years (2 years 11 months and 18 days to be precise) and discussed what the constitution should contain and what laws should be included. The Drafting Committee of the Constitution was chaired by B. R. Ambedkar.
The Constituent Assembly of India, consisting of indirectly elected representatives, was established to draft a constitution for India (including the now-separate countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh). It existed for approx three years, the first parliament of India after independence in 1947. The Assembly was not elected based on universal adult suffrage, and Muslims and Sikhs received special representation as minorities. The Muslim League boycotted the Assembly after failing to prevent its creation. Although a large part of the Constituent Assembly was drawn from the Congress Party in a one-party environment, the Congress Party included a wide diversity of opinions—from conservative industrialists to radical Marxists, to Hindu revivalists.
The Assembly met for the first time in New Delhi on 9 December 1946, and its last session was held on 24 January 1950. [2] The hope of the Assembly was expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru:
The first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity. This is certainly a great task. Look at India today. We, are sitting here and there in despair in many places, and unrest in many cities. The atmosphere is surcharged with these quarrels and feuds which are called communal disturbances, and unfortunately we sometimes cannot avoid them. But at present the greatest and most important question in India is how to solve the problem of the poor and the starving. Wherever we turn, we are confronted with this problem. If we cannot solve this problem soon, all our paper constitutions will become useless and purposeless. Keeping this aspect in view, who could suggest to us to postpone and wait?
India was still under British rule when the Constituent Assembly was established, following negotiations between Indian leaders and members of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India from the United Kingdom. Provincial assembly elections were held in early 1946. Constituent Assembly members were elected indirectly by members of the newly elected provincial assemblies, and initially included representatives for those provinces that formed part of Pakistan (some of which are now in Bangladesh). The Constituent Assembly had 389 representatives, including fifteen women. [3]
The Interim Government of India was formed on 2 September 1946 from the newly elected Constituent Assembly. The Congress Party held a large majority in the Assembly (69 percent of the seats), and the Muslim League held nearly all the seats reserved in the Assembly for Muslims. There were also members of smaller parties, such as the Scheduled Caste Federation, the Communist Party of India and the Unionist Party.[ citation needed ]
In June 1947 delegations from Sindh, East Bengal, Baluchistan, West Punjab and the North West Frontier Province withdrew to form the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, meeting in Karachi. On 15 August 1947 the Dominion of India and Dominion of Pakistan became independent nations, and members of the Constituent Assembly who had not withdrawn to Karachi became India's Parliament. Twenty-eight members of the Muslim League joined the Indian Assembly, and 93 members were later nominated from the princely states.
At 11 AM on 9 December 1946, the Assembly began its first session, with 211 members attending. The Assembly approved the draft constitution on 26 November 1949. On 26 January 1950, the constitution took effect (commemorated as Republic Day), and the Constituent Assembly became the Provisional Parliament of India (continuing until after the first elections under the new constitution in 1952).
Rajendra Prasad was elected as the president and Harendra Coomar Mookerjee, a Christian from Bengal and former vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, was vice-president. Mookerjee, additionally to chairing the assembly's Minorities Committee, was appointed governor of West Bengal after India became a republic. Jurist B. N. Rau was appointed constitutional adviser to the assembly; Rau prepared the original draft of the constitution and was later appointed a judge in the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague.
The assembly's work had five stages:
The Constituent Assembly appointed a total of 22 committees to deal with different tasks of constitution-making. Out of these, Eight were major committees and the others were minor committees.
Major Committees
The constitution has been in more recent times criticised on the basis of the fact that the members of the Constituent Assembly were not truly chosen by universal suffrage, but rather were elected by provincial assemblies, which themselves had not been elected by universal suffrage. [ citation needed ] In his book The Constitution of India: Miracle, Surrender, Hope, Rajeev Dhavan has argued that the Indian people did not have much say in the making of the Constitution, which they had no choice but to accept. [7]
Jawaharlal Nehru was an Indian anti-colonial nationalist, statesman, secular humanist, social democrat, and author who was a central figure in India during the middle of the 20th century. Nehru was a principal leader of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Upon India's independence in 1947, he served as the country's first prime minister for 16 years. Nehru promoted parliamentary democracy, secularism, and science and technology during the 1950s, powerfully influencing India's arc as a modern nation. In international affairs, he steered India clear of the two blocs of the Cold War. A well-regarded author, his books written in prison, such as Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1929), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946), have been read around the world.
The Constitution of India is the supreme law of India. The document lays down the framework that demarcates fundamental political code, structure, procedures, powers, and duties of government institutions and sets out fundamental rights, directive principles, and the duties of citizens, based on the proposal suggested by M. N. Roy. It is the longest written national constitution in the world.
Events in the year 1953 in the Republic of India.
Rajendra Prasad was an Indian politician, lawyer, journalist and scholar who served as the first president of India from 1950 to 1962. He joined the Indian National Congress during the Indian independence movement and became a major leader from the region of Bihar and Maharashtra. A supporter of Mahatma Gandhi, Prasad was imprisoned by British authorities during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 and the Quit India movement of 1942. After the constituent assembly 1946 elections, Prasad served as 1st Minister of Food and Agriculture in the central government from 1947 to 1948. Upon independence in 1947, Prasad was elected as President of the Constituent Assembly of India, which prepared the Constitution of India and which served as its provisional Parliament.
Events in the year 1954 in the Republic of India.
Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru was an Indian freedom fighter, lawyer, and politician. He was a key figure in India's struggle for independence, helping draft the Indian Constitution. He was the leader of the Liberal party in British-ruled India.
Events in the year 1955 in the Republic of India.
Events in the year 1956
Events in the year 1951 in the Republic of India.
Events in the year 1952 in the Republic of India.
Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi, popularly known by his pen name Ghanshyam Vyas, was an Indian independence movement activist, politician, writer from Gujarat state. A lawyer by profession, he later turned to author and politician. He is a well-known name in Gujarati literature. He founded Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, an educational trust, in 1938.
The Dominion of India, officially the Union of India, was an independent dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations existing between 15 August 1947 and 26 January 1950. Until its independence, India had been ruled as an informal empire by the United Kingdom. The empire, also called the British Raj and sometimes the British Indian Empire, consisted of regions, collectively called British India, that were directly administered by the British government, and regions, called the princely states, that were ruled by Indian rulers under a system of paramountcy. The Dominion of India was formalised by the passage of the Indian Independence Act 1947, which also formalised an independent Dominion of Pakistan—comprising the regions of British India that are today Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Dominion of India remained "India" in common parlance but was geographically reduced. Under the Act, the British government relinquished all responsibility for administering its former territories. The government also revoked its treaty rights with the rulers of the princely states and advised them to join in a political union with India or Pakistan. Accordingly, the British monarch's regnal title, "Emperor of India," was abandoned.
The All India States Peoples' Conference (AISPC) was a conglomeration of political movements in the princely states of the British Raj, which were variously called Praja Mandals or Lok Parishads. The first session of the organisation was held in Bombay in December 1927. The Conference looked to the Indian National Congress for support, but Congress was reluctant to provide it until 1939, when Jawaharlal Nehru became its president, serving in this position till 1946. After the Indian Independence, however, the Congress distanced itself from the movement, allying itself with the princely rulers via its national government's accession relationships.
Harendra Coomar Mookherjee, also spelt as H.C. Mukherjee, was the Vice-President of the Constituent Assembly of India for drafting the Constitution of India before Partition of India, and the third Governor of West Bengal after India became a republic with partition into India and Pakistan.
Sir Benegal Narsing Rau was an Indian civil servant, jurist, diplomat and statesman known for his key role in drafting the Constitution of India, He was the Constitutional Advisor to Constituent Assembly. He was also India's representative to the United Nations Security Council from 1950 to 1952. His brothers were Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Benegal Rama Rau and journalist and politician B. Shiva Rao.
The Hindu code bills were several laws passed in the 1950s that aimed to codify and reform Hindu personal law in India, abolishing religious law in favor of a common law code. The Indian National Congress government led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru successfully implemented the reforms in 1950s. This process was started during the British rule of India.
The Interim Government of India, also known as the Provisional Government of India, formed on 2 September 1946 from the newly elected Constituent Assembly of India, had the task of assisting the transition of British India to independence. It remained in place until 15 August 1947, the date of the independence of British India, and the creation of the dominions of India and Pakistan.
After power transformation, on 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru assumed office as the first Prime Minister of India and chose fifteen ministers to form the First Nehru ministry.
Kshitish Chandra Neogy (1888–1970), also known as KC Neogy, was an Indian politician from West Bengal. He was a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, member of the first Cabinet of independent India and the chairman of the first Finance Commission of India.
Elections for the post of first president of India were to be held on 24 January 1950. There was only one nominee for the post, Rajendra Prasad and he was elected, unopposed, as the President.