The drafting of our Constitution amid Partition and after a long period of colonisation has always been a moving and magnificent process. The drafters located within the body known as the Constituent Assembcolcolily functioned as a legislature by day and constitution makers in the afternoon. However, like many magnificent processes of transformations, some voices and persons are recognised, and others erased. This has been the defining feature of the contributions of the women members of the Constituent Assembly — their erasure. Hence, the importance of the scholarly and riveting work by Achyut Chetan, titled The Founding Mothers of the Republic, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
Explaining the aim of his work, Chetan writes, “more than their signatures on the adorned version, it is their presence on the Constitutional text — traces of their valuable interventions in the writings of the Constitution — that I seek to recover in this book.” When the Constitution was completed, there were 11 women members of the Constituent Assembly who signed onto it. These drafters were G Durgabai, Ammu Swaminathan, Amrit Kaur, Dakshayani Velayudhan, Hansa Mehta, Renuka Ray, Sucheta Kripalani, Purnima Banerjee, Begum Qudsiya Aizaz Rasul, Kamala Chaudhri and Annie Mascarene. This book not only documents their timely and consequential interventions in the Constituent Assembly, but also, as the author argues, the “politics of their erasure and then attempts a revisionary account of their significant contributions to the making of the Constitution.” The Constituent Assembly first met on December 11, 1946 and had 169 sessions before all its members signed the document on January 24, 1950.
How do we know what happened in the Constituent Assembly? A rich but by no means the only source is the 12 volumes of the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD), consisting of speeches made by members and the amendments to the draft articles. However, what the CAD does not have are the reports and notes of the various committees of the CA. For instance, much groundbreaking work was done in the Advisory Committee (chaired by Vallabhbhai Patel), which in turn had two sub-committees — the Fundamental Rights Sub Committee and the Minorities Sub-Committee.
Hansa Mehta and Amrit Kaur were on the Advisory Committee, with both being members of the Fundamental Rights Sub Committee and Kaur serving also on the Minorities Sub-Committee. G Durgabai occupied effective positions on two important committees on procedural affairs: The Steering Committee and the Rules Committee. Women members were present and highly active on almost all significant committees and subcommittees. As the author writes, “deliberations within the committees became the foundation of the entire discursive frame of the discussions on the floor”. The women members were comfortable in this more intimate setting as compared to the large and cavernous Constituent Assembly consisting of over 300 members, where prominent male members held sway speaking over microphones, while the women were relegated to the “back benches”.
Chetan writes that the women members often faced “disrespect and discrimination”. For instance, Renuka Ray opposed the clause on the Right to Property which put the compensation given within the purview of courts. Jawaharlal Nehru in Ray’s telling had initially committed to not allowing the courts’ purview over issues of compensation but then “almost overnight changed his mind”, after being convinced by lawyers of the Drafting Committee. When Ray told Nehru that such a clause disappointed the socialist members, he was “very angry with me and for some time we were not on speaking terms.” During the debates on the floor of the Assembly too, Ray says she was “constantly interrupted and heckled even by a man of the eminence of Shri KM Munshi who tried to deride my amendment.”
However, the women members made their opinions known and stood firm. In the settings of the committees they wrote notes of dissent. As the author illustrates, “Amrit Kaur and Hansa Mehta wrote notes of dissent against decisions that relegated the uniform civil code to the non-justiciable rights, allowed the state to impose conscription for compulsory military service, at each stage when the committees made their official recommendations to the higher bodies of the Assembly.” Amrit Kaur wrote “two long notes of dissent expressing her disagreement in principle with any kind of reservation for any community.” She also argued that regarding women “not only have custom and usage dealt harshly with us, but even the law has militated and still continues to militate against us.”
Dakshayani Velayudhan, the only woman member from the Scheduled Castes communities, argued against reservations. From the CAD, Chetan quotes her as saying on December 19, 1946, that she refused “to believe that 70 million Harijans are to be considered as a minority” and argued that “reservations would not be in the best interests of them”. She also argued that “the working of the Constitution will depend upon how the people will conduct themselves in the future, not on the actual execution of the law. When this Constitution is put into practice, what we want is not to punish the people for acting against the law, but for the state to take on the task of educating citizens for a transformation.”
Amongst the most fascinating parts of this book is the documentation of the differences in opinions between B R Ambedkar and Velayudhan as well as the fierce opposition that most of the women members expressed to reservations and separate electorates. The issue is not who or what we agree with, it is that in the conventional telling about the drafters, the Kaurs and Velayudhans are erased. As we approach 75 years of our Constitution, it’s time for scholars, teachers, students, lawyers, judges and all others who engage with our constitution-making efforts to look to sources that tell a more complete story of our drafters. The quiet women and the more visible men should both be recalled, for their roles and their contributions. That would be an accurate telling of how our founding document came to be.
The writer is a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India
