Context

• Some commentators now claim that Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, the Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly, was the true architect of the Indian Constitution.
• Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, merely refined an already complete text.
• It reflects not only an effort to reinterpret history but also a conscious attempt to marginalise Dalit agency and dilute the moral vision that Ambedkar infused into India’s founding document.
• A careful reading of history reveals that while Rau and Ambedkar played complementary roles, Ambedkar’s leadership gave the Constitution its enduring soul.

Rau and Ambedkar: Complementary Roles, Not Competing Claims

• As Constitutional Adviser appointed in July 1946, Rau’s task was technical and preparatory.
• Drawing upon his experience as a civil servant and his involvement in drafting the Government of India Act of 1935, he produced a working draft informed by comparative study of constitutions from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and Weimar Germany.
• In October 1947, he submitted this preliminary draft to the Constituent Assembly, a framework that provided the foundation for subsequent deliberations. However, Rau held no political mandate.
• His expertise was scholarly, not representative; his document a starting point, not the final covenant of the Republic.
• Ambedkar’s task, by contrast, was profoundly political and moral. As Chairman of the Drafting Committee, he inherited Rau’s draft but had to transform it into a living document capable of uniting a newly independent, fractured nation.
• He carried the Constitution through the turbulence of Partition, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and the complex debates of the Assembly.

The Politics Behind Revisionism

• The recent campaign to elevate Rau as the real author of the Constitution is not rooted in new archival evidence or scholarship.
• Rather, it reflects a discomfort with the prominence of a Dalit intellectual at the heart of India’s national founding.
• This reinterpretation seeks to reclaim constitutional authorship for caste privilege, recasting Ambedkar’s radical social vision as a mere bureaucratic exercise.
• In doing so, it attempts to domesticate the transformative potential of the Constitution, reducing it from a manifesto of social justice to a technocratic manual of governance.
• Such revisionism ignores the profoundly moral dimension that Ambedkar brought to constitution-making.

The Moral Centre: Ambedkar’s Vision and Legacy

• His intellectual and moral leadership turned the making of the Constitution into an act of social redemption.
• His imprint is most visible in the provisions on Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, and affirmative action, mechanisms through which the Republic sought to dismantle centuries of caste-based exclusion and inequality.
• His speeches in the Assembly articulated a vision of democracy rooted not merely in institutions but in the moral conscience of society.
• Ambedkar’s warning remains one of the most powerful statements in Indian constitutional history:

Memory and the Republic

• To elevate Rau above Ambedkar is to participate in a larger project of draining the Constitution of its radical, transformative spirit.
• It reframes the founding of the Indian Republic as a matter of technical competence rather than moral courage.
• Yet, the Constitution was conceived not in bureaucratic serenity but amidst Partition’s violence, Gandhi’s martyrdom, and the persistent wounds of caste oppression. To centre Ambedkar in this narrative is not symbolic generosity, it is historical truth.
• India’s founding leaders, including Nehru, Patel, and Rajendra Prasad, recognised Ambedkar’s central role.
• None claimed that Rau was the principal author. They understood the difference between drafting a text and shaping a nation’s conscience.
• Rau deserves admiration as a constitutional engineer; Ambedkar deserves reverence as the Republic’s moral architect.

Conclusion

• The Indian Constitution is both a legal and moral document, an affirmation of liberty, equality, and fraternity against centuries of hierarchy and exclusion.
• While Sir B.N. Rau’s scholarship laid its technical foundations, it was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar who breathed life into it, giving it purposes and conscience.
• To deny Ambedkar’s primacy is not merely to misread history; it is to betray the Republic’s founding promise of justice and dignity for all.