The Constituent Assembly debates mark a decisive turning point with regard to the state policies of group preference which have existed in India since the early 20th century. Provisions for special representation in the legislatures and reservation in government employment had been instituted by the colonial state as well as by some princely states, primarily for groups designated as minorities or 'backward'. The question of minority safeguards, as colonial policies for the accommodation of minorities were termed, had been critical at various stages of the negotiations leading up to Indian independence. The colonial state deemed a satisfactory resolution of this question to be a precondition for any advance towards self-government.
This paper focusses on a neglected aspect of India's constitutional history: the withdrawal of political safeguards for religious minorities during the making of the Indian Constitution. Ever since the introduction of the constitutional reforms of 1909, which instituted separate electorates for Muslims, religious minorities had been the prime beneficiaries of the colonial state's policies of group preference. In constitutional drafts and deliberations, political safeguards encompassed provisions for reserved seats in legislatures, quotas in government employment reserved posts in the cabinet and the creation of administrative machinery to ensure supervision and protection of minority rights. All the minority groups hitherto preferred were included within the ambit of these provisions in the initial proposals and in the first draft of the Constitution, published in 1948. In a remarkable reversal, however, by the final draft religious minorities were excluded from the purview of all political safeguards, which came to be restricted mainly to the 'scheduled castes' and the 'scheduled tries'.
These radical changes in minority safeguards are explained mainly in terms of the partition of the country in the literature on the Indian Constituent Assembly debates. This traumatic event, it is argued, hardened opinion within the Indian National Congress against groups that represented communal interests. Moreover, the Congress no longer had to conciliate a powerful Muslim League and had few real checks in the way of pushing its agenda through. Most importantly, it is suggested, the political parties representing the two main religious minorities pressing for political safeguards, the Muslim League and the Sikh Panthic Party, were in disarray and therefore unable to prevent a united front in resisting the revocation of safeguards.
... Analyses (of) the debates on minorities in the Constituent Assembly reconstruct the grounds on which special provisions for minority groups were legitimated or opposed in these debates. In the dominant nationalist opinion represented in the House by the Congress and its Supporters among minority representatives, the backwardness of a group was regarded as creating legitimate grounds for group-preference provisions whereas perceived need to preserve a distinct cultural identity was not. This nationalist vision rejected political safeguards for minorities as a matter of general policy. Safeguards were regarded as legitimate only in the case of certain groups and only for the specific purpose of ameliorating the social and economic disabilities of backward sections.
This marked a shift from the manner in which communal safeguards had been envisioned and defended in colonial policy. That policy, which sought to balance the numbers of different communities in representative bodies, public services and other arenas, had a twofold rationale. As it was based on the notion that India was a conglomeration of communities rather than a nation, the presence of members of different communities in the legislatures and the services was regarded as a desirable goal in itself. Minority safeguards were thus defended as a mechanism that would facilitate the political accommodation of different communities. They were also valued as a means of ameliorating the conditions of disadvantaged groups. As the maintenance of a political balance between different communities was regarded as an unacceptable basis for minority safeguards in the Congress nationalist vision, the case for safeguards for religious minorities became weakened .... Our understanding of the retraction of group-preference provisions for religious minorities during the drafting of the Indian Constitution is (brought out) by an analysis of the legitimating vocabulary on minority safeguards in the Constituent Assembly debates.
... Safeguards ... for the religious minorities were more problematic, given their implicit grounding in the notion of the cultural distinctness of groups. Bereft of legitimacy in the nationalist scheme, their presence in the future Constitution was precarious from the outset ...
The dominant opinion during (the late) period regarded only grounds relating to backwardness as constituting a legitimate basis for claims for special provisions, and these grounds were regarded as attaching to lower castes and tribals and not to the religious minorities. Further, the claims of the religious minorities for reservation in the services appealed to the now discredited vocabulary of the intrinsic importance of giving representation to every community in the administration, to the duty of the state to balance the interests of different communities. These notions, which had guided colonial policy on the subject had few supporters in nationalist circles during this period.
In the dominant opinion in the house, quotas in the public serves could not be endorsed as a general principle of governance but were admissible for a limited purpose. They were viewed as a mechanism that would reduce disparities in the levels of development between different sections of the population and thus assist in the assimilation of these groups into the rest of the population as well as in the development of the nation. These grounds were regarded as creating a case for quotas for the scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes and the other backward classes but not for the religious minorities.
As in the case of political-representation provisions, an analysis of the legitimating vocabulary for reservation in the services suggest that the retraction of quotas for religious minorities during the making of the Constitution was always a likely outcome. (Source: The Economic and Political Weeldy]
