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

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.”

However, the minorities’ sub-committee had rejected the idea of separate electorate. Z.H. Lari, who was a representative of the League from the then United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), stressed that there should be no provision which would isolate one section of people from the mainstream of public life. The minorities must aspire to become an integral part of the nation. They should claim only such safeguards as were consistent with this aspiration, calculated to give them an honoured place in the governance of the country not as a separate independent entity, but as a welcome part of the organic whole.

The CA had received ideas from the commoners, who had laid the stress on both positive and negative perspectives. An advocate of the Madras High Court, K.V. Sundaresa Iyer, opined that if the Constitution would “provide a certain amount of immunity and protection for communal customs and culture from unjust statutory interference,” every community would feel assured of its place “notionally, if not geographically,’ said an article, titled “The People and the Making of India’s Constitution,” published by the Cambridge University Press in January 2022. Iyer questioned the rationale behind the government stepping “into the field of inter-dining, or dowry, which is a purely personal and economic question.” However, governed by the spirit of republicanism, framers of the Constitution had rightly rejected Iyer’s idea.

An individual, S. Oppiliappan, a resident of Kattunedungulam village of the Sivaganga district, sent a hand-written memorandum in Tamil to the CA secretariat, according to “Assembling India’s Constitution,” a recent publication from the Penguin Random House. Though the CA secretariat and the Press Information Bureau office were headed by two Tamilians (H.V.R. Iyengar and A.S. Iyengar), they could identify the key points of the sender of the memorandum with great difficulty. The authorities could not establish the community the author belonged to, but they speculated that he might be a Hindu SC or Dalit. Oppiliappan’s main demand was that members of his community should have freedom of worship and autonomy to manage their own community, states the publication.

The broad sense of freedom, as sought by the Kattuedungulam resident, has been enshrined in Article 25, which is titled Right to Freedom of Religion. Subject to certain restrictions such as public order and morality, the Article says, “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.”

What people of this country, especially the youth, have to keep in mind is that the Constitution is an outcome of not only the collective efforts of outstanding legal luminaries and political leaders but also those of persons such as Oppiliappan.

Published – February 18, 2026 07:00 am IST