How ordinary people of Tamil Nadu participated in the making of the Constitution Premium

Explore how ordinary Tamilians contributed to India's Constitution, advocating for rights and representation for marginalised communities.

Tamil Nadu’s contributions to the making of the Constitution were not only through prominent personalities but also commoners.

The contributions were not only in terms of positive conception of rights but also in the negative sense. A memorable feature of the contributions from the State pertained to the safeguards for vulnerable sections of society such as Scheduled Castes (SC) and religious minorities.

It all began with the Minorities Sub-Committee of the Advisory Committee for the Constituent Assembly (CA) issuing in March 1947 a six-point questionnaire to elicit the opinion of individuals and institutions on the question of the protection of the minorities in the Constitution, according to a report of The Hindu on March 9, 1947. Headed by a Christian leader from Bengal, H.C. Mukherjee, the panel included Jagjivan Ram, C. Rajagopalachari (CR), Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, B.R. Ambedkar, S.P. Mookherjee, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, M. Rutnaswami, K.M. Munshi and Govind Ballabh Pant.

It was left to V.I. Munuswami Pillai, who was Agriculture Minister in the Council of Ministers headed by CR in the Madras Presidency during July 1937-October 1939, and his fellow SCs to demand the implementation of the concept of keeping the system of reservation in education and employment for Scheduled Castes for 10 years [which is getting renewed every 10 years]. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, independent India’s first Deputy Prime Minister and the chief of the Advisory Committee, had accepted the demand and incorporated it in the report that he presented to the CA in May 1949 for consideration.

The idea of separate electorate for the minorities figured in the deliberations of the Sub-Committee on the minorities and the Advisory Committee. Even in July 1947, the Advisory Committee concurred with the view of the sub-committee that there should be no separate electorates for the minorities.

Mohammed Ismail (Muslim League) and his colleague, B. Pocker Sahib Bahadur, both from the State, were great votaries of separate electorates. Pocker Sahib Bahadur had argued that the minorities must have a method of representing their grievances. It was for that purpose that separate representation was asked for, and when the scheme of reservation was being dropped, “automatically” the question of separate electorate arose, said a report of this newspaper on May 26, 1949. Ismail had contended that “what we want is the right to self-expression, the right of being heard and the right of association. [A] separate electorate does not mean separatism at all. It means the recognition of the difference between one group of people and another. It is not a device to separate people.”