How were the members of the Indian Constituent Assembly elected?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, indirectly by the members of the Provincial Legislative Assemblies. The Constituent Assembly was constituted in 1946 under the Cabinet Mission Plan: the seats allotted to each British-Indian province were filled by the elected members of that province's Legislative Assembly, voting by the single transferable vote system of proportional representation. No seat was filled by a popular vote — the electoral college was the provincial legislators themselves, who had been returned in the 1946 provincial elections on a restricted (non-universal) franchise. The princely states' seats were not elected at all; those representatives were to be nominated by the rulers of the states.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) There was no direct election to the Constituent Assembly and no universal adult franchise behind it. India's first direct election on universal adult franchise was the 1951-52 general election, held after the Constitution had already been adopted and brought into force.  (c) The Governor-General had no power to nominate members of the Assembly. Nomination applied only to the seats reserved for the princely states, and there the nominating authority was the ruler of the state concerned — not the Governor-General.  (d) Party organisations had no formal role in the election. The Congress, the Muslim League and others won seats in proportion to their strength inside each Provincial Legislative Assembly — the electing body was the legislature, not any party committee.

Concept: The Constituent Assembly was an indirectly elected body created under the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946. Of its total strength of 389, 296 seats were allotted to British India and 93 to the princely states. The British-Indian seats were distributed among the provinces roughly in proportion to population — about one seat per million people — and, within each province, among three communities: Muslims, Sikhs and General. The elected members of each Provincial Legislative Assembly then chose their province's representatives by proportional representation with a single transferable vote.

State PCS 2026 Q11 — Indian Polity PYQ with Answer

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