Class 7 Social Science Chapter 10: The Constitution of India

The short answer

What is a constitution? A document setting out the basic principles and the basic laws of a nation.

That is the short answer, and the chapter then unpacks it into four things such a document lays out.

Four things it lays out

It gives the framework of the three organs of government, and what each is supposed to do.

It sets out checks and balances among those three, so that the whole thing stays fair, responsible and answerable. It states what citizens may claim and what they owe. And it sketches where the nation hopes to get to in the long run.

A disputed decision

Now the story, which is better than it first appears. A school reaches the state kabaddi final against a team chasing its third title.

A player is caught out. The other side insists she had already crossed back into her own area. The referee saw otherwise.

How it got settled

She does not simply rule. She produces a small official rulebook.

The two captains come over, they look at the rules together, and they agree that the player was out. The match is decided and the trophy goes to the school.

Two conditions, not one

Read that again and notice there were two things at work.

There was a rulebook. And both captains were willing to open it and accept what it said. The chapter asks directly what would have happened had they refused to consult it at all, and that is the harder question.

Why that question is the harder one

A constitution that nobody accepts settles nothing, however well written.

So a constitution needs two things in the same way the kabaddi match did: a document everybody can point at, and a general willingness to be bound by it. The second cannot be written into the first.

A rulebook for a country

That is the comparison the chapter draws. Our Constitution works rather as a rulebook does for a country.

Like any rulebook it is divided up. It currently runs to 25 parts and 12 schedules, and each part holds sections of its own. It is the largest written constitution in the world.

It has grown

At the moment it first took effect the count was smaller, standing at 22 parts and 8 schedules.

The chapter says you need not memorise the figures, and then asks a far more interesting question. Why have they increased since 1950? That points at something the later topics take up.

What the basic rules decide

The principles in a constitution settle three things about the government itself.

What kind of government there will be. How it is to be formed. And how it is to function. Those are the questions the previous chapter spent its length on.

The detail it goes into

So a constitution describes how laws get made and how they are carried out.

It says who elects the executive. It says how the judiciary is put together. And it states what rights and what duties individual citizens have.

And the values underneath

Many constitutions go further than machinery, and India's is one of them. They state the values and ideals the country has committed itself to.

Equality and justice for all. Fraternity. Pluralism. Freedom.

Which way round the two run

Here is the part worth slowing down for, because it is easy to get backwards.

The chapter says these values and ideals are usually what the laws and principles are built on in a constitution. The values come first; the rules are built to serve them. A rule is not a value, and a value is not a rule.

What most constitutions contain

Gathering it up, the chapter lists what most constitutions hold.

The values and ideals of a society. The political system. The structure of the government and how it is formed. The functions of its different parts. Guiding principles for the government. And the rights and duties of citizens.

Why any of this is needed

Return to the kabaddi field one last time, because the answer is there.

Disputes happen. They happen between players, and they happen between a government and a citizen, and between one part of a government and another. Something has to exist that both sides can consult and that neither side wrote on the day.

The limit of the comparison

A rulebook is a good comparison and not a perfect one, and it is worth naming the difference.

A game's rules can be changed by whoever runs the game. A constitution belongs to the people of the country, which is why changing it is difficult and deliberate. That is what the rest of the chapter is about: who wrote it, what shaped it, and how it changes.

Scenario:

A sports club runs a yearly tournament and has never written its rules down. For years this caused no trouble, because the same three families organised everything and everyone trusted them. This year two new teams have joined, a disputed catch has decided a semi-final, and the losing captain has walked off. The organisers say their decision was fair and that everybody knows how the club has always done things. One new captain answers that she cannot check that, and that a rule she cannot read is not a rule she agreed to.

Analysis:

A club that worked on trust until the people changed, and now needs something it never wrote.

Activity:

Think of a group you belong to and ask whether its rules are written down, and what would happen in a serious dispute.

Title:

Write the rulebook for a game you play

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Almost every group finds the agreement harder than the writing, and that is the chapter point. A rulebook is the easy half. Getting everyone to accept it, including people who lose by it, is the condition that cannot be written into the book itself.

India has the largest written constitution of any country in the world.

It began with 22 parts and 8 schedules and now has 25 parts and 12 schedules.

The chapter says you need not remember those numbers, and then asks why they have grown.

Organs, checks, rights and duties, goals: four things it lays out.

A rulebook needs two captains willing to open it.

Planning before the freedom came

India was still struggling to be free of British rule, and already it was necessary to plan how the country would govern itself.

That is the right order. You cannot design a government on the morning after independence.

The questions waiting to be answered

For a country this large, this diverse and this complicated, the list of questions was long.

What type of government should there be? What rules and principles should guide it? Who ought to be given a vote? And how were disputes to be settled?

What was hoped for the work

At the start of the process the Assembly's president, Dr Sachidananda Sinha, addressed it.

He wished its labours success and invoked divine blessings on them. He hoped the proceedings would be marked by wisdom and by toleration, by justice and by fairness to everybody, as well as by plain good sense, public spirit and real patriotism. And above all a vision that might win her a place of honour and equality among the great nations, and restore India to her former glory.

The Assembly is formed

A Constituent Assembly was formed in 1946 to answer those questions.

It began with 389 members. After the Partition of India the number came down to 299. Fifteen of them were women.

Who those members were

The membership was not drawn from one place or one kind of person.

Between them the members represented the diverse regions of India, its various professions, and its different social groups.

How they got there

Here is the detail that matters most in this topic, and it is easy to read past.

The Assembly was formed on the ninth of December 1946, and its members were elected by the provinces own legislative assemblies. Those provincial members had themselves been elected by the people.

Why that chain matters

So the line runs: the people elected the provincial assemblies, and the provincial assemblies elected the Constituent Assembly.

It is indirect. It is still a chain that reaches back to voters, and nobody who already held power simply appointed the people who would write the rules.

Who chaired it

The Constituent Assembly had Dr Rajendra Prasad as its Chairman.

The work he presided over took almost three years from start to finish, which gives some sense of how carefully it was done.

The drafting committee

The first text did not come from the whole Assembly at once. It was prepared by a Drafting Committee.

That committee was under Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who was an eminent social reformer. Independent India took him as its first minister for Law and Justice.

Two different jobs

It is worth separating those two roles, because they are often run together.

The Drafting Committee prepared the text. The Assembly debated it, amended it and adopted it. One body wrote; a much larger body decided.

Adopted, then in effect

The drafting work was finished and the document adopted as the Constitution of India on the twenty-sixth of November 1949.

It did not come into effect on that day. That happened on the twenty-sixth of January 1950, which is why we keep that date every year as Republic Day.

Why two dates and not one

The gap between those two days is not an accident, and it is the kind of detail worth noticing.

A document can be finished and agreed before the day it starts to govern. The Assembly chose when its work would begin to apply, and the day it chose is now a national holiday.

What Republic Day marks

Notice exactly what is being remembered on that day.

Not the end of British rule, which came earlier. Not the finishing of the text, which came in November 1949. It marks the day the Constitution began to operate, and so the day India became a republic.

Fifteen women among them

Return to one figure from earlier, because it deserves a second look.

Fifteen of the members were women, in an Assembly that began with 389. They took part in the debates like anybody else, and the chapter later quotes one of them on the equality of women.

Finding your own region's members

The chapter sets a task worth taking seriously: find out who from your own region took part.

It suggests the school or local library, asking teachers, parents and elders, and the official record of the Constituent Assembly kept online. These were not distant figures. Several hundred people did this work, and some of them came from wherever you are reading this.

Scenario:

A class is asked to draw a timeline of how India got its Constitution. One pupil marks a single date, 15 August 1947, and writes beside it that the Constitution began on the day the British left. A second marks 26 November 1949 and writes that India became a republic that day. A third writes that Dr Ambedkar wrote the Constitution and the Assembly simply signed it. Their teacher says all three timelines contain a real fact and a wrong conclusion, and asks the class to separate the two in each case.

Analysis:

Three timelines, three real facts, and three conclusions that do not follow from them.

Activity:

Draw the timeline yourself with all four dates on it: 9 December 1946, 1947, 26 November 1949 and 26 January 1950.

Title:

Find your own region members

Safety:

Ask an adult before using the internet.

What You Notice:

Most regions turn out to have had somebody there. Several hundred people did this work, drawn from diverse regions, professions and social groups, so the Assembly was not a small circle of distant figures.

The Assembly began with 389 members and fell to 299 after Partition.

Fifteen of its members were women.

Writing the Constitution took the Assembly almost three years.

Formed 1946, adopted 1949, in force 1950.

Ambedkar drafted; the Assembly decided.

Three sources, not one

The Constituent Assembly wrote the Constitution, but it did not write it out of nothing. Three things shaped what it produced.

What the Indian freedom movement had learnt, thought and hoped for. The civilisational heritage and culture of India. And what could usefully be learnt from the constitutions of other countries.

Why the freedom movement mattered so much

The connection here is not abstract. A number of leaders of the freedom movement were themselves members of the Constituent Assembly.

So they carried their own experience and their own ideas straight from the struggle into the document. The chapter calls the Constitution the cornerstone for an independent India.

What the struggle put into it

Several values and ideals came across directly.

Fraternity. Freedom. Justice for everyone, and equality for everyone. The preservation of India's cultural heritage. And one more that is easy to miss: the idea of using the Constitution itself as a tool for achieving those very things.

That last one is unusual

Notice what it says. The document was not meant only to record values already achieved.

It was meant to be the means of reaching them. A constitution as an instrument rather than a monument.

And the practical questions

The struggle also supplied answers to a set of how-and-what questions the Assembly had to settle.

How was every adult citizen to be given a vote? How were the powers of executive, legislature and judiciary to be kept apart? How was each person to be guaranteed their fundamental rights? What process should govern an amendment? And how should the Centre and the States stand towards each other?

The second source: India's own heritage

In Grade 6 the question was what makes India one country, and what unity underlies its diversity. That idea of India being one country sits inside the Constitution.

Certain fundamental principles were already embedded in the culture.

Five of them

That people may hold differing points of view, and that this is acceptable. That Nature is sacred. That learning and knowledge are worth pursuing. That women are owed respect.

And two phrases worth knowing. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam, which makes one family of the world. And sarve bhavantu sukhinah, which is an invocation for the wellbeing of all creatures.

Expressed a little differently

The chapter adds a careful qualification here, and it is a good habit to copy.

All these principles find a place in the Constitution, though you may find them expressed a little differently. An idea can survive into a legal document while changing its clothes.

Governance already tried here

India had also experimented with many systems of governance, as earlier chapters showed.

The janapadas. The sanghas. Rulers and their councils. Kautilya's saptanga. Rajadharma. Across all of them there was a great emphasis on the duties and the role of the people in governance.

Which is why duties are in there

So it was natural that the makers would carry those ideas of civilisational heritage into the Constitution.

Fundamental Duties are part of it, and that emphasis on duty is where they come from.

The third source, and how it is framed

Now the borrowing, and the framing matters. The chapter introduces it with a line from the Indian tradition: a no bhadrah kratavo yantu vishwatah, which means may fine ideas reach us from every direction.

Set up that way, studying other countries is not a confession of weakness. It is the tradition being followed.

Which countries were studied

The makers studied the constitutions of France, the USA, the UK, Ireland, Australia and other countries with a democratic system.

The purpose is stated precisely: to explore their usefulness for our context. Not to copy, but to test what would work here.

What came from where

Three examples are given, and they are worth keeping straight.

The ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were adopted from the French constitution, which had taken them in turn from its Revolution of 1789. The Directive Principles of State Policy as a notion. America helped shape how an independent judiciary would be understood here.

The 1789 declaration

The French Revolution of 1789 also produced its famous Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Its focus was liberty, justice and equality for everybody.

Through that document such ideals travelled widely, and many constitutions, the French one included, adopted or adapted its values and principles.

Borrowed, or chosen

It is worth being clear about what all this means, because the word borrowing can sound weak.

A borrowing made after study, chosen because it suits your context, and framed by a tradition that welcomes thought from every side, is a decision rather than an imitation. The Assembly took what it judged useful and left the rest.

And the document as an object

One last thing, which belongs to none of the three sources and to all of them. The Constitution is not only a legal document.

Its text was written out by hand by the calligrapher Prem Behari Narain Raizada. Its pages were illustrated by Nandalal Bose and his team, with scenes drawn from our history, running from Mohenjo-daro to the freedom movement. The three influences are visible in the object itself.

Scenario:

A visiting speaker tells a school assembly that the Indian Constitution is largely a copy of European documents, and offers two pieces of evidence. The first is that liberty, equality and fraternity appear in it and came from France. The second is that the Directive Principles were inspired by Ireland and the independent judiciary by America. A teacher asks the class whether the evidence is accurate, and then whether the conclusion follows from it. One pupil says the facts are right so the conclusion must be too.

Analysis:

Accurate evidence, and a conclusion that does not follow from it.

Activity:

Pick one country whose constitution the makers studied and find out one thing about how its government works.

Title:

Trace each idea to its source

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The first two columns fill up and the third holds three or four specific items. Several entries get circled, because equality and freedom appear in both the struggle and the French borrowing, which is the point: an idea arriving from two directions at once is reinforced rather than merely imported.

The Constitution text was written out by hand by the calligrapher Prem Behari Narain Raizada.

Its pages were illustrated by Nandalal Bose and his team, with scenes running from Mohenjo-daro to the freedom movement.

The chapter frames the study of other constitutions with a line meaning let noble thoughts come from every side.

Three sources: the struggle, the heritage, the world.

France liberty, Ireland principles, America courts.

What the Constitution does with the three organs

The last chapter gave the three organs and the separation of powers. The Constitution deals with all of it thoroughly.

It defines clearly what each organ does, what it is responsible for, and how it is to be held to account. And it lays down the electoral system, so that each citizen entitled to a vote is actually able to cast one.

Three tiers, not one government

There is another division besides the three organs, and it runs downwards rather than sideways.

Government here works at three levels: central, state, and local, the last of these through Panchayati Raj. Certain functions and responsibilities stay with the centre, while others are handed to the states.

Three more things in the Constitution

Beyond the machinery sit three further items, and the chapter treats them as core.

There are the Fundamental Duties. There are the Fundamental Rights. And there are the State Policy Directive Principles, generally called the DPSP.

What the DPSP are

They represent in essence the social and economic vision its framers had for India.

They are goals the government ought to try to reach. They show the direction the makers wanted the country to take, so that India would be better for everybody. One example: that every person in the country is owed a decent standard of living.

And here is the catch

Suppose the government makes no effort towards that standard of living.

You have no judge before whom to raise it. The Directive Principles are more like guidelines than strict rules, and that is not an oversight.

Fundamental Rights are different

A Fundamental Right is a promise that must be kept.

If somebody wrongs you for being who you are, the courts are open to you, and a judge can act. That is the difference, and it is the heart of this topic.

Done deliberately

The chapter says plainly that the people who wrote the Constitution set it up this way deliberately. Some rights were to be claimable straight away, which are the Fundamental Rights. And they wanted some bigger goals which might take time to achieve as the country progressed, which are the Directive Principles.

So the two are not parallel

That is why learning them as two matching lists misses the point.

One is enforceable now. The other is a direction of travel. The design holds both because a country needs both, and knowing which is which tells you what you can actually demand.

Some examples of each

Among the Fundamental Rights are the Right to Equality, which includes equality before law under Article 14, the Right to Freedom, which includes protection of life and personal liberty under Article 21, the Right against Exploitation, and the Right to education under Article 21-A.

Among the Directive Principles are Article 38 on social, political and economic justice, Article 41 on a welfare government, Article 44 on a uniform civil code, Article 47 on nutrition and public health, Article 48-A on protecting the environment and wildlife, and Article 49 on protecting monuments of national importance.

The duties side

The Fundamental Duties include abiding by the Constitution and respecting its ideals, the National Flag and the National Anthem.

Also defending the country when called upon. Valuing and preserving our composite culture. Protecting the natural environment, forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and showing compassion to living creatures. Striving towards excellence. And, as a parent or guardian, providing education to a child between six and fourteen.

A living document

The makers knew that new laws and rules would be needed as time passed. Changes are called amendments, and they are not easy.

Any amendment is rigorously debated in Parliament before it is accepted. Some require debate in the legislative assemblies too. Opinions are often sought from the general public, and some changes begin with popular movements.

Three changes that actually happened

Part IV-A, holding the Fundamental Duties, was added in 1976.

The Panchayati Raj system was not in the original Constitution at all; it was brought in by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992.

And one that came through a court

The third route is different again and worth knowing. There was a time when people could not fly the national flag at their homes.

That changed in 2004. One citizen took the view that showing pride in his own country was his right, and he put the rule before a court, and the Supreme Court agreed, holding that flying the flag falls within the Fundamental Right to free expression. So we may now fly the tricolour, remembering it must never be dishonoured.

The Preamble

The core values of the Constitution guide policy and decision-making, and the government is expected to follow them. Citizens are expected to practise them as best they can.

Those values run all through the document, and the Preamble is where their essence is set down.

What the Preamble says

We, the people of India: the Constitution was framed and brought into force by the people acting through those they elected, not handed down by a king or any outside power.

Sovereign means the people hold supreme right to decide internal and external matters, and no outside power can dictate to the government. Socialist means Wealth is made by society together and ought to be shared out, with government regulating ownership of land and industry to reduce inequality. Secular means complete freedom to follow any religion, with no official religion and equal respect for all beliefs. Democratic means the people hold the same political rights, choose who governs, and hold those people answerable. Republic means whoever heads the state is put there by election rather than by birth.

And the four it promises

Justice: citizens cannot be discriminated against on grounds of caste, religion or gender, social inequalities must be reduced, and the government ought to act for everybody wellbeing, and above all for those least advantaged.

Liberty: no unreasonable restrictions on what citizens think, how they express it, or how they act on it. Equality: all equal before the law, social inequalities ended, equal opportunity ensured. Fraternity: all of us behaving as members of one family, with nobody treating a fellow citizen as inferior. Socialist, Secular and Integrity were added to the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment in 1976.

Scenario:

Two people arrive at a legal aid office on the same morning. The first has been refused a job because of the community she belongs to, and wants to know whether anything can be done. The second points out that his village still has no proper drinking water. The Constitution promises everybody a good standard of living, he says, so he wants to take the government to court over it. A trainee tells both of them that the Constitution protects them equally and that each should file a case. Her supervisor says only one of the two can proceed.

Analysis:

Two complaints, both referring to the Constitution, and only one of them enforceable.

Activity:

Look at the list of Fundamental Rights printed at the front of this book and pick the one you think protects you most often.

Title:

Sort the articles into two columns

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The columns sort cleanly, and the sentence most people write is about what they can demand today. That is the practical value of the distinction: the first column is enforceable now and the second is the direction the country is meant to travel in.

A citizen won the right to fly the national flag at home by challenging the rule in court in 2004.

The Panchayati Raj system was not part of the original Constitution.

The words Socialist, Secular and Integrity were added to the Preamble in 1976.

Right: go to court. Principle: no court to go to.

Duties 1976, Panchayati Raj 1992, flag 2004.