Composition of the Constituent Assembly

The Constituent Assembly's membership was worked out under a scheme roughly following the plan put forward by the British Cabinet Mission. Under this plan, each Province and each Princely State or group of States was allotted seats broadly in proportion to its population, at roughly the ratio of one seat for every ten lakh people — as a result, the Provinces then under direct British rule were to elect 292 members, while the Princely States were allotted a minimum of 93 seats. Within each Province, seats were further distributed among the three main communities — Muslims, Sikhs and the general population — again in proportion to their respective populations, and members of each community in a Provincial Legislative Assembly elected their own representatives by proportional representation using the single transferable vote; representatives of the Princely States, meanwhile, were to be selected through consultation rather than election.

Partition, under the plan of 3 June 1947, changed this picture significantly: members who had been elected from territories that now fell under Pakistan ceased to be members of the Assembly, reducing its total membership to 299. The Constitution itself was adopted on 26 November 1949; 284 members were actually present on 24 January 1950 and appended their signatures to the Constitution as it was finally passed, and the Constitution came into force two days later, on 26 January 1950. All of this took place against the horrifying backdrop of the violence that Partition itself had unleashed across the subcontinent — a fact that makes it all the more striking that the framers not only managed to draft a constitution under such immense pressure, but also drew the right lessons from that very violence: the Constitution committed itself to an entirely new conception of citizenship, in which not only would minorities be kept secure, but religious identity itself would carry no bearing at all on a person's citizenship rights. …