Who among the following warned his colleagues that the Constituent Assembly was British made and was "working the British plan as the British should like it to be worked out"?

Correct — A, Somnath Lahiri. Lahiri was the sole Communist Party member in the Constituent Assembly, elected from Bengal, and he made the remark in the debates of December 1946 while the Assembly was still working under the Cabinet Mission scheme with the British still in power. His charge was that the Assembly was operating within limits the British had set — that it was a British creation working the British plan as the British would like it worked — and he told members they would do well to remember that they sat, as he put it, under the shadow of British guns. He wanted the Assembly to break out of that frame; the objection lost, and independence in August 1947 removed the ground for it.

• (b)B. R. Ambedkar — Chairman of the Drafting Committee and the Assembly's most influential member, he criticised much in the draft but not its legitimacy in these terms. His famous warnings were about the gap between political and social democracy, and about the future of the republic after its makers had gone.
• (c)Shyama Prasad Mukherjee — A member of the Assembly and of the first cabinet who resigned in 1950 over the Nehru-Liaquat pact and founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. His disagreements were on substance, particularly on Kashmir, rather than on the Assembly's British parentage.
• (d)B. N. Rau — The Constitutional Adviser to the Assembly, who prepared the first draft after studying constitutions abroad. He was an official rather than an elected member, and criticism of this kind was not his to make.

The Constituent Assembly was constituted in 1946 under the Cabinet Mission plan. Its members were chosen indirectly — the provincial legislative assemblies, themselves elected on a restricted franchise under the Government of India Act, 1935, elected the provincial representatives, while the princely states sent nominees. That indirect and limited base is what gave critics their opening, and after the Muslim League withdrew and partition took effect the surviving Assembly was overwhelmingly Congress in composition.

The Assembly answered the charge partly by its conduct. It sat for just under three years, held eleven sessions, worked through a network of committees, published its drafts and debated them at length, and the debates themselves became the record by which its work is now judged. Granville Austin's study of the period argues that the Congress within the Assembly contained a genuine range of opinion and functioned as a debating body rather than a single bloc. Lahiri's objection nevertheless remains the standard illustration of a real limitation and is quoted in every account of the Assembly's origins.

• Somnath Lahiri was the only Communist Party member of the Constituent Assembly, elected from Bengal.
• He made the criticism in the December 1946 debates, before independence.
• The Assembly was constituted under the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946.
• Members from the provinces were elected by the provincial legislative assemblies, not directly by the people.
• The Assembly first met on 9 December 1946 and adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949.

• Assuming any sharp criticism of the Assembly must have come from Ambedkar.
• Treating B. N. Rau as a member; he was an adviser to the Assembly.
• Dating the remark after independence, when the objection would have made no sense.

A who-said-it item on a named quotation. Attach the quotation to the person and the person to their party position, since the four names come from four different quarters.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The members of the Constituent Assembly from the provinces were chosen by

  • (a)direct election on universal adult franchise
  • (b)the provincial legislative assemblies
  • (c)nomination by the Viceroy
  • (d)the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League jointly

  Answer(b) the provincial legislative assemblies — an indirect election under the Cabinet Mission plan.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly, who prepared its first draft, was

  • (a)K. M. Munshi
  • (b)Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar
  • (c)B. N. Rau
  • (d)S. N. Mukherjee

  Answer(c) B. N. Rau — an official rather than an elected member.