Inheritance of the nationalist movement

No constitution is simply the product of the particular assembly that happens to draft it — and this is especially true of India's. An assembly as diverse as the Constituent Assembly could never have functioned as effectively as it did if there had been no shared, background consensus among its members on the main principles the Constitution ought to embody. That consensus did not appear out of nowhere: it had been forged over decades, during the long struggle for independence itself. In a real sense, the Constituent Assembly was simply giving concrete institutional shape and legal form to principles the nationalist movement had already worked out over many years of debate — debates about the shape and form India's government should take, the values it should uphold, and the inequalities it should be committed to overcoming — and it was these earlier debates, not the Assembly working from a blank slate, that gave the final Constitution its answers.

The single best summary of the principles the nationalist movement handed down to the Constituent Assembly is the Objectives Resolution, moved by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1946, which defined the aims the Assembly would work toward. This resolution captured the aspirations and values that would eventually underlie the whole Constitution, and gave institutional expression to a set of fundamental commitments: equality, liberty, democracy, sovereignty, and a cosmopolitan (non-parochial) identity for the new nation. Among its main points: that India would be an independent, sovereign republic; that India would be a Union of what had been British Indian territories, the former Indian Princely States, and any other parts willing to join; that the territorial units forming this Union would be autonomous, exercising all governmental powers and functions except those specifically assigned to or vested in the Union; that all power and authority of the sovereign, independent India — and of its Constitution — would flow from the people themselves; that all people of India would be guaranteed and secured social, economic and political justice, equality of status and of opportunity, equality before the law, and fundamental freedoms of speech, expression, belief, faith, worship, occupation, association and action, subject only to law and public morality; that adequate safeguards would be provided for minorities, backward and tribal areas, and other depressed and backward classes; that the territorial integrity of the Republic and its sovereign rights over its land, sea and …