. A Tumultuous Time The years immediately preceding the making of the Constitution had been exceptionally tumultuous: a time of great hope, but also of abject disappointment. On August , India had been made free, but it had also been divided. Fresh in popular memory were the Quit India struggle of – perhaps the most widespread popular movement against the British Raj – as well as the bid by Subhas Chandra Bose to win freedom through armed struggle with foreign aid.
An even more recent upsurge had also evoked much popular sympathy – this was the rising of the ratings of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay and other cities in the spring of . Through the late 1940s there were periodic, if scattered, mass protests of workers and peasants in different parts of the country. One striking feature of these popular upsurges was the degree of Hindu-Muslim unity they manifested. In contrast, the two leading Indian political parties, the Congress and the Muslim League, had repeatedly failed to arrive at a settlement that would bring about religious reconciliation and social harmony.
The Great Calcutta Killings of August began a year of almost continuous rioting across northern and eastern India (see Chapter ). The violence culminated in the massacres that accompanied the transfer of populations when the Partition of India was announced. On Independence Day, August , there was an outburst of joy and hope, unforgettable for those who lived through that time. But innumerable Muslims in India, and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, were now faced with a cruel choice – the threat of held eleven sessions, with sittings spread over days.
In between the sessions, the work of revising and refining the drafts was carried out by various committees and sub-committees. From your political science textbooks you know what the Constitution of India is, and you have seen how it has worked over the decades since Independence. This chapter will introduce you to the history that lies behind the Constitution, and the intense debates that were part of its making. If we try and hear the voices within the Constituent Assembly, we get an idea of the process through which the Constitution was framed and the vision of the new nation formulated.
Fig. . Images of desolation and destruction continued to haunt members of the Constituent Assembly.