Constituent Assembly of India

The Constituent Assembly of India framed the Constitution of India. It first sat on 9 December 1946 and held its final session on 24 January 1950. Dr Rajendra Prasad, elected its permanent chairman on 11 December 1946, presided. It passed the Constitution on 26 November 1949, and its members signed it on 24 January 1950.

The Sikhs and the Assembly: Hukam Singh told the Assembly in 1949 that the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946 was unjust and unfair for the Sikhs, as the Congress Working Committee acknowledged on 25 June 1946; that the Panthic Pratinidhi Board boycotted the Assembly by a resolution of 5 July 1946; and that it reversed that decision after the Working Committee promised on 10 August 1946 to give the Sikhs all possible support in removing their grievances and securing adequate safeguards. Nehru's objectives resolution of 13 December 1946 said that adequate safeguards would be provided for minorities. The Sikh members were Hukam Singh, elected from East Punjab on 30 April 1948, Bhopinder Singh Man, and Ujjal Singh, a member of the Minorities Sub-Committee who recorded his dissent in July 1947 when it refused the Sikhs weightage in the legislatures.

Key moments

• 23 November 1948: the Minorities Sub-Committee's report said it understood the Sikhs' suffering in the partition but that their claim had to be settled on different grounds.
• 26 May 1949: the Assembly accepted the recommendation to abolish reserved seats in the legislatures for minorities other than the Scheduled Castes, which Hukam Singh said the Sikhs, like the other minorities, had to give up.
• 14 October 1949: Hukam Singh moved to restore the safeguard on services in Article 296. He said the Sikhs were being told that circumstances had changed, and asked whether they had ceased to be a minority because the Muslims had got Pakistan. K. M. Munshi answered that the Sikh Scheduled Castes would be included in the list of Scheduled Castes in Punjab.
• 21 November 1949: Bhopinder Singh Man told the Assembly that the Sikhs of East Punjab could not give unstinted support or full approval to the Constitution. Hukam Singh said: "My community cannot subscribe its assent to this historic document."
• 24 January 1950: members signed the Constitution. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Hukam Singh refused to sign as a member, because he had failed to win protection for the Sikhs as a religious minority.

Why it matters to the Panth: The Sikh members' protest of 21 November 1949 is on the Assembly's own record, and Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles sets out the Sikh case from that record, under the heading Constitution Rejected.