As Babasaheb Ambedkar rises ever higher as a symbol of the self-respect of India’s oppressed and as the hope of an egalitarian India, the Brahminical forces and the Sangh Parivar have intensified their claim that Ambedkar was not the one who wrote the Indian Constitution. According to them, the real credit must go to the legal and constitutional expert BN Rau.
How true is this claim? What was BN Rau’s role in the making of the Constitution?
BN Rau (1887–1953) was a Konkani Brahmin from Mangalore, trained extensively in law and constitutional studies in India and abroad. He served the British government as a legal expert, even receiving a knighthood. He had held high administrative roles—Prime Minister of the princely states of Assam and Kashmir, Judge of the Calcutta High Court, and member of the British committees on constitutional reforms.
He never participated in anti-colonial struggles or in the emancipatory movements of India’s oppressed classes. But he possessed scholarly mastery over constitutions and administrative frameworks of modern democratic nations.
In 1946, the Congress-led Constituent Assembly appointed him as Constitutional Adviser. He was asked to prepare a preliminary draft for the Indian Constitution. But he was not a member of the Constituent Assembly and therefore did not participate in its debates. He only advised in his capacity as an expert.
In February 1947, Rau submitted a preliminary draft. His task as adviser was essentially complete. Although the Constituent Assembly sought his advice on specific points later, after February 1947, the responsibility for drafting the Constitution rested fully with Ambedkar and the Constituent Assembly.
Hence, Rau’s role was to provide a reliable start to the process, which was acknowledged even by Ambedkar. In his concluding speech on November 25, 1949, in the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar explicitly stated that the credit for the Constitution did not belong to him alone. A part of that credit must also go to BN Rau for preparing the initial draft, to SN Mukherjee, who put it into legislative form, to the Drafting Committee, and to the Congress Party for maintaining parliamentary discipline that enabled meaningful debate.
But that was a technical and legalistic draft. If one compares that with the final Constitution and the debate that ensued in the Constituent Assembly, one can decipher the long and democratic journey of the Assembly led by Ambedkar that travelled from the Rau draft.
Since Ambedkar assumed the charge as the Chair of the Drafting Committee in August 1947 and was tasked with providing an amended draft by October 1947, including the recommendations made by several other committees, he had already made preliminary changes to Rau’s draft.
Between February 1947 and August 1947, the various committees of the Constituent Assembly submitted amendments to the Rau draft. Meanwhile, due to Partition, the constituency from which Ambedkar had been elected became part of East Pakistan, and he lost his Assembly membership.
But Ambedkar had already established himself as a great constitutional Scholar with deep insights about the undemocratic Indian society through his submissions, contentions and interventions in the 1919 Southborough Committee, the 1928 Simon Commission, the 1930–32 Round Table Conferences, and other constitutional bodies. He was recognised as someone with exceptional constitutional knowledge and deep insight into India’s social pathology. British administrators such as the last Viceroy Mountbatten and Prime Minister Attlee were also in favour of Ambedkar continuing in the Constituent Assembly.
The Congress – out of political strategy to include its opponents and to ensure that the oppressed masses could claim the new nation and its Constitution as their own – got Ambedkar re-elected from the Bombay Province and appointed him Chairman of the Drafting Committee.
As the scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde details in Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, there were both political and strategic reasons for the Congress in choosing Ambedkar. By August 1947, as Chairman of the Drafting Committee, Ambedkar had before him the task:
“To revise Rau’s draft in light of the committee recommendations and prepare a new constitutional draft.”
Ambedkar completed a thoroughly revised first draft by October 1947. From November 1947 to February 1948, the subcommittees debated it and produced a second draft. From February 1948, the public was invited to submit suggestions for eight months. Incorporating these, in November 1948, the Drafting Committee—though it had seven members—produced the final draft, essentially through Ambedkar’s own labour.
From November 1948 to 25 November 1949, the Assembly debated the final draft clause by clause, eventually adopting it. Thus, Rau provided a necessary technical draft. But the task of infusing it with a democratic soul – a flesh-and-blood Indian democracy – was performed by Ambedkar.
The difference becomes clearer when we compare Rau’s draft with the final Constitution.
1. Fundamental Rights: Rau’s draft contained no enforceable clauses of Fundamental Rights. Before that, Jawaharlal Nehru presented the Objectives Resolution on December 13, 1946, which provided the rights framework, but Ambedkar had raised the significant question of the absence of protection of those rights and remedies.
Ambedkar’s very first speech in the Constituent Assembly in December 1946 was a case for enforceable rights. Due to his persistent advocacy, Articles 32 and 226 guaranteeing judicial protection of rights were enshrined.
2. Social Justice: Rau’s draft placed little emphasis on social justice or equality. The Rau draft did not focus on social and educational backwardness and the Scheduled Castes communities, as mentioned in Article 46 of the final Constitution. Rau's fundamental rights clause had a passing remark on social justice. Rau's draft did not emphasise the inequality perpetuated by the social structure in its Directive Principles clauses.
In the final Constitution, Article 39 (b) and (c) make specific references to it.
Under Ambedkar’s leadership, provisions abolishing untouchability (Article 17), expanding equality clauses (Articles 15 and 16), and embedding human dignity were incorporated.
3. Directive Principles of State Policy: Rau’s draft clubbed Fundamental rights and Directive principles in a single heading with no emphasis on either. In the final Constitution, they were divided into two separate chapters with elaborate explanations. Ambedkar’s vision—though he wanted these to be fundamental rights—ensured they were added as Part IV to guide the State toward social and economic equality.
4. Democratic Ethic and the Preamble: Rau’s draft was a technical manual for government. Rau’s preamble only said: “We, the people of India, seeking to promote common good, do hereby through our chosen representatives, enact, adopt and give to ourselves this Constitution.”
For Rau, the common good subsumed everything. But the Preamble of the final Constitution written by Ambedkar emphasised equality and social justice, and especially fraternity, about which there is no emphasis or special mention in Rau's draft. Ambedkar, along with progressive members, transformed it into a moral Constitution with transformative potential for a nation with liberty, equality, and fraternity.
5. Parliamentary Democracy
Rau only provided a skeletal framework, which mainly focused on administrative explanations and power boundaries, basically taken from the Government of India Act 1935. Ambedkar and the Assembly fleshed it out with detailed provisions on the President, Prime Minister, federal relations, emergency powers, and more. Given the circumstances, India adopted a Union-oriented federation.
6. Size
Rau’s draft had about 240 Articles. The final Constitution under Ambedkar had 395 Articles, making it a comprehensive written Constitution. While Rau’s work was a technical contribution, Ambedkar’s leadership created a secular, socialist-oriented, democratic, sovereign republic.
In the final session of the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949, of the 285 members present, 284 praised Ambedkar’s role wholeheartedly. TT Krishnamachari, a member of the Drafting Committee, explained emotionally how difficult the task would have been without Ambedkar. One member had died. Two lived too far away to attend any meeting. One went to America. Another was ill. Krishnamachari himself was absorbed in administrative work.
The entire burden fell on Ambedkar, who, despite severe illness, worked 18 hours a day to complete the draft. Rajendra Prasad, Nehru, and others endorsed these words and expressed the nation’s gratitude.
All this is historically recorded. Yet the Manuwadis continue to shout that Ambedkar did not write the draft or did not write it alone. The same forces even claim that the Indian Constitution is nothing but the Manusmriti.
This argument itself is dishonest. In any democracy, no Constitution is written by one person. It is created through the collective deliberation of all social forces represented in a Constituent Assembly. In societies where the oppressed have political strength, democracies become more egalitarian. Where they are weak, democracy becomes an instrument of the powerful.
If Ambedkar alone had the power to write the Constitution, no Constituent Assembly would have been needed. And if he had full freedom, all his ideals—sovereign socialism, Buddhist egalitarianism—would have been enshrined as fundamental rights. But India had not undergone the social revolution required for a fully Ambedkarite Constitution.
Thus, only as much of Ambedkar as the circumstances permitted could enter the Constitution. The truly revolutionary Ambedkar still remains outside it. Because his radical ideas on social and economic equality were not adopted, today Brahminical Hindutva and predatory corporate capitalism are able to dismantle even the existing Constitution.
Merely because diverse groups had united in the anti-colonial freedom struggle, neither Indian society nor the majority of the members of the Constituent Assembly had evolved into citizens who genuinely accepted social and economic democracy alongside political democracy. If India today is still unprepared for Ambedkar’s vision of Buddhist civility and enlightened socialism, how prepared could it have been then?
Therefore, the claim that Ambedkar “single-handedly wrote” the Constitution is as true as the claim that many of his radical aspirations were deliberately kept out of the Constitution by the dominant political–social forces of the time.
Any proposal placed by Ambedkar or by any other member would first be discussed in the relevant subcommittee. Only after receiving its approval would it come before the full Assembly. If consensus did not emerge, proposals were either accepted, rejected, or modified based on majority votes.
Members of the Constituent Assembly introduced nearly 7,500 amendments, of which only 2,500 were actually debated.
In this entire process, as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, Ambedkar used his extraordinary erudition and deep concern for the oppressed to reason calmly and analytically with the members on the constitutional and political consequences of accepting or rejecting various amendments. Some other progressive forces occasionally supported his efforts. Yet the Assembly rejected many amendments that could have made this country far more humane, and it accepted several that planted the very seeds of our present deterioration.
Therefore, unless we understand the class–caste background of the Assembly and the ideological leanings of the majority of its members, we cannot truly understand the intellectual and political labour Ambedkar undertook to make the Constitution as pro-oppressed as possible.
After the Poona Pact, Ambedkar was deeply worried about what would happen to the rights of Dalits and other oppressed groups if India attained independence under the domination of upper-caste Hindus. He even questioned the very necessity of a Constituent Assembly that would inevitably be largely savarna and elite.
He proposed that if a Constituent Assembly were to be formed, the proportion of Hindu upper-caste members should not exceed 40%.
Ambedkar expressed his idea of the ideal composition of the Constituent Assembly in his address ‘Communal Deadlock – And a Way to Solve It’, delivered to the Scheduled Castes Federation.
Nevertheless, as per the agreement reached by the dominant classes and communities who led and would benefit most from the freedom movement, and with British concurrence, India’s Constituent Assembly was constituted in 1946.
Since the Government of India Act, 1935, had introduced a limited franchise, elections to the provincial Assemblies in 1937 (and again in 1946) were based on restricted voting rights: only income-tax payers and university graduates were treated as “responsible citizens.” Less than 17% of Indians had the right to vote; about 95% of them belonged to the upper classes and upper castes. This was the socio-economic and caste background of the electoral college.
These provincial and central legislatures then elected 292 members to the Constituent Assembly. An additional 93 members were nominated by princely states.
After Partition, the Muslim League members withdrew, and the Assembly finally had 299 members—229 elected through limited franchise and 70 nominated by princely states.
Ambedkar’s lifelong struggle was not merely to secure numerical representation for Dalits and the oppressed, but to ensure substantive representation—representation of their genuine interests. He knew that Dalit representatives could reflect Dalit aspirations only if elected independently of the dominance of upper caste Hindus.
Hence, during the Round Table Conferences (1929–32), he demanded separate electorates for Dalits. The British agreed, but Gandhi’s fast and the resulting Poona Pact forced Dalits into reserved seats within the Hindu electorate.
In the elections of 1937 and 1946, a two-stage procedure was followed in reserved constituencies. In the first round, only Dalit voters chose four Dalit candidates. In the second round, all voters of the constituency (including non-Dalits) chose one among those four.
Ambedkar’s detailed studies revealed a shocking pattern. The Dalit candidate who ranked first in the Dalit-only round would often come last in the general round and lose due to overwhelming non-Dalit votes.
To rectify this structural flaw, Ambedkar fought hard within the Constituent Assembly. Of the seven major subcommittees, the Minorities Committee, chaired by Vallabhbhai Patel, dealt with this issue.
Ambedkar proposed that a winning Dalit candidate in a reserved constituency must secure at least 50% of Dalit votes, ensuring accountability to Dalits rather than dependence on upper caste majorities. But 28 out of 31 members opposed this proposal and it failed.
In Ambedkar’s absence, one member, Nagappa, proposed a milder alternative. In a general (non-reserved) constituency, a winning non-Dalit candidate must secure at least 35% Dalit votes.
Patel reacted furiously, calling the proposal an act of “ingratitude” towards Gandhi by Dalits. The proposal was defeated by an even larger majority.
Today, we witness the consequences. Political democracy itself has become hollowed out and distorted—one of the root causes of our current crisis, wherein substantive Dalit representation remains structurally undermined.
In his alternative constitutional proposal written in 1947, ‘State and Minorities’, which he presented to the Constituent Assembly in the form of a memorandum, Ambedkar explains that liberty, equality, and fraternity are a trinity; none can exist without the others. He wished that our Constitution too should realise all three simultaneously.
Freedom without equality, he argued, becomes a freedom available only to the privileged. Ambedkar clearly recognised that all democracies existing until then had offered liberty alone, not equality. Therefore, he wanted the Indian Constitution to do otherwise and make equality a fundamental right.
For this reason, he argued that the nation’s wealth must be nationalised. He proposed a transformative programme: nationalise land, make cooperative farming compulsory, and thereby dismantle the walls of caste and class built on the sweat of the poor. In the political sphere, he suggested another radical measure: no majority community should have more than 40% representation in government or legislatures.
But in the Constitution that came into force in 1950, equality did not become a fundamental right, nor was wealth nationalised. Instead, provisions relating to preventing concentration of wealth and ensuring sufficient resources for a life of dignity were placed under the Directive Principles of State Policy.
As Article 37 makes explicit, Directive Principles are only guiding ideals and not enforceable rights; governments cannot be taken to court for failing to implement them. The Constituent Assembly diluted Ambedkar’s core vision and reduced these radical ideas to ornamental principles in the Constitution.
Nevertheless, on January 26, 1950, India became a Republic—an enormous civilisational leap. Whatever was achieved was because of the light that Ambedkar provided and because of the awakening produced by the struggles of oppressed peoples in India and across the world.
Today, even that achievement is in danger. Though political equality exists, social and economic inequalities have only intensified. The Brahminical caste order, which deepens social inequality, and capitalism, which has increased economic inequality, have grown remarkably stronger over the past 75 years, especially during the eight years of Modi’s authoritarian rule.
Our political democracy and constitutional system did not mandate the creation of social and economic equality. Ambedkar’s vision in this regard was rejected by the Constituent Assembly. Hence, using the very same political structures, Brahminism and capital have consolidated themselves and today assumed a fascist form.
Metaphorically speaking, the Ambedkar within the Constitution is under a deadly attack from the combined forces of capitalists and Hindutva Brahminists led by Narendra Modi. On the other side, those who embrace Ambedkar only rhetorically—like Dhritarashtra’s blind embrace—claim to be his true followers while undermining his ideals.
Both forces aim to kill Ambedkar’s vision. For that, they assault the Constitution from both inside and outside.
In today’s context, unless the Ambedkar kept out of the Constitution is brought into it, even the Ambedkar within the Constitution cannot be saved.
Shivasundar is an activist and freelance journalist. Views expressed are the author’s own.