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.