THE REPUBLICadministrator who could delegate work and inspire trust and confidence
in those who had to work with him. As home minister he tackled the
princes and made them all accede to the Indian Union so that the spectre
of ‘Plan Balkan’ was soon forgotten. Belonging to a caste of substantial
peasants in Gujarat he was close to the main strata which provided the
social base for the Congress. Nehru, as prime minister and minister for
external affairs, saw India in a global context and had a vision of the
future—but he also knew how to preserve his political power by making
compromises in internal affairs which were largely dominated by Patel
until his death in 1950. Many of the aspirations of the freedom
movement had to be relegated to the background in order to meet the
exigencies of practical politics.
This was quite obvious in the deliberations of the Constituent
Assembly, which was inaugurated in December 1946 and worked until
the end of 1949. The new constitution was then introduced on 26
January 1950, the twentieth anniversary of the resolution of the National
Congress which had first specified an independent republic as the aim of
the freedom movement. Contrary to Nehru’s often repeated demand that
the Constituent Assembly should be a sovereign body based on adult
suffrage, the Indian Constituent Assembly remained the same body which
Lord Wavell had inaugurated and which was based on the very limited
franchise prevailing in British India. This assembly did not even consider
breaking new ground by producing a constitution of its own: it spent
three years in amending the existing constitution, the Government of
India Act of 1935 in its new guise as the 1947 Independence of India Act.
That this would be the fate of this assembly was not apparent from the
very beginning: it grew upon the assembly due to external circumstances
and, of course, also due to the fact that the government was actually
working within the framework of this constitution bequeathed to India
by the British.
The conflict with Pakistan greatly contributed to the conservative and
centrist attitude of the Constituent Assembly. More democratic ideas—like
that of having elected governors rather than governors appointed by the
central government—were quickly given up. In fact, the emergency powers
which had been so deeply resented by the Congress at the time of office
acceptance in 1937 and which had been omitted by the British when they
passed the Independence of India Act were now reintroduced as
‘President’s Rule’, a powerful instrument of central control. Whenever a
party controls a state which is not identical with the party in power at the
centre, there is the danger of its government being toppled by means of this
instrument. Of course, the establishment of President’s Rule must be
followed by elections within six months, but the performance can be
repeated if the results do not please the party controlling the central
government. The restoration of these emergency powers was no doubt due