would only last a short time, until June 1948 at the latest – the projected
date of British departure according to Attlee’s announcement – by which
time an Indian constitution would be written. Lord Mountbatten had,
on Nehru’s request, agreed to stay on as governor-general of the new and
temporary Dominion of India to ensure continuity of administration and
smoothness of transition (Mountbatten held this post until June 1948).
At any event, the document produced by the discussions turned out to be
the longest written constitution in the world, reflecting awkward compro-
mises and containing frankly irreconcilable principles that had to be
reconciled by hiding them in minor sections of the constitution.
The composition of the Constituent Assembly, with its Congress
majority, reflected the Congress’s strength in the 1946 elections – elected
not under universal adult franchise but a limited property franchise, it did
not represent the social forces that might potentially have supported a
consensus to the left. Its president was Dr B.R. Ambedkar, long a voice
of dissent from the nationalist mainstream, having been willing to use the
interested assistance of the British administration to safeguard the position
of the backward castes, and from August 1947 a member of Nehru’s
first Cabinet. This Cabinet was itself a balancing of divergent forces in
what was effectively a national coalition. Notably, Vallabhbhai Patel and
Rajendra Prasad within the Congress, and Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, also
in the Cabinet though a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, together
represented right-wing upper-caste Hindu opinion; Patel also remained a
central pro-capitalist voice within the Congress.
The unresolved nature of the debates on what an independent India
was to look like was reflected in the debates of the Constituent Assembly.
Minoo Masani, former Congress Socialist and soon to be the main
spokesman of Indian capitalist interests, classified opinions in the
Assembly along two axes: ‘modernists’ and ‘traditionalists’, ‘socialists’ and
‘non-socialists’. Even this is shorthand; it did not nearly reflect all the
interests and points of view to be reconciled. Moreover, the arrangement
of political opinion did not divide neatly along parallel axes: both ‘mod-
ernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ opinion divided along socialist and capitalist
lines. Matters were not made any simpler by many followers of Gandhi
claiming, as Gandhi himself was occasionally, though not consistently,
wont to do, to be socialists themselves – the boundaries of ‘socialism’
were fuzzy and there was no agreed-upon adjudicator to decide who could
claim to be within them. Gandhi, regularly invoked in the debates of the148 INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING THE NEW INDIA