A quiet revisionism in constitutional history is being seeded. Some commentators now argue that Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, the Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly, was the real architect of India’s Constitution, while Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, merely polished an already finished product. This argument may sound academic, but it is not. It represents an attempt to diminish Dalit agency in India’s founding story and to erase the moral force that B.R. Ambedkar brought to the making of the Republic.
Complementary, not competing
Both men were indispensable to the Constitution’s creation, but their roles were entirely different. Sir B.N. Rau, a distinguished civil servant and jurist, was appointed Constitutional Adviser in July 1946. His assignment was technical and preparatory. Rau had in British India, helped in the drafting of the Government of India Act of 1935. Eleven years later, he had to prepare a working draft of the Constitution based on reports of the Constituent Assembly’s committees and his study of other constitutions. He examined the American, Canadian, Irish, Australian and Weimar models, and consulted jurists such as Felix Frankfurter and Harold Laski. In October 1947, he submitted his draft with 243 articles and 13 schedules. Rau’s document provided the Assembly with a starting point. He had no seat in the Constituent Assembly and no political mandate. His authority was scholarly, not representative.
Ambedkar’s task was of a different order. As Chairman of the Drafting Committee, he had to turn a legal draft into a political covenant. He carried the Constitution through the turbulence of Partition, the murder of the Mahatma and had to defend its provisions, clause by clause, in the Assembly. His responsibility was not only to refine the text but also to build consensus among sharply divided interests. Rau built the framework. Ambedkar made it a living instrument of justice.
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Ambedkar never denied Rau’s contribution. In his concluding address to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, he said: “The credit that is given to me does not really belong to me. It belongs partly to Sir B.N. Rau, the Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly who prepared a rough draft of the Constitution for the consideration of the Drafting Committee.”
He also said, “A part of the credit must go to the members of the Drafting Committee who, as I have said, have sat for 141 days… Much greater share of the credit must go to Mr. S.N. Mukherjee, the Chief Draftsman of the Constitution. His ability to put the most intricate proposals in the simplest and clearest legal form can rarely be equalled, nor his capacity for hard work.”
Thus the words which are often used to claim that Rau, not Ambedkar, was the real author of the Constitution in fact, show the opposite. Ambedkar called Rau’s work a “rough draft”, not a finished text. The Drafting Committee and the Assembly turned that raw material into the document that finally came into force in January 1950. Nor does any evidence exist to show that Rau ever claimed to be the Constitution’s author. His correspondence at that time with Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru conveys respect and cooperation. The current effort to crown him as “Father of the Constitution” distorts both the record and Rau’s own modesty.
The political motive
The campaign to elevate Rau and sideline Ambedkar is not driven by scholarship alone. It reflects a discomfort with the idea that a Dalit thinker could stand at the centre of the Republic’s founding moment. Recasting Rau as the Constitution’s principal author is an attempt to reclaim authorship for caste privilege. It tames Ambedkar’s radical legacy and turns a social revolution into a bureaucratic exercise. The Constitution is not a sterile legal document. It is, first and foremost, a social manifesto which promises the dignity of the individual. It was born out of conflict, hope and redemption. It represented the arrival of the oppressed at the table of power. To detach Ambedkar from it is to rob it of its soul.
Ambedkar’s presence in the Constituent Assembly was itself the result of a decisive act of political wisdom. He had originally been elected from Bengal, but after Partition, that seat went to Pakistan. Many within the Congress were hesitant to bring him back because of past disagreements. It was Mahatma Gandhi’s intervention that settled the question.
Though Gandhi and Ambedkar had clashed over separate electorates, Gandhi insisted that Ambedkar must be part of the Assembly. He told Congress leaders that no Constitution could claim legitimacy if the Scheduled Castes were excluded from its making.
As a result, Ambedkar was re-elected from the Bombay Presidency. Gandhi’s insistence was an act of foresight. In 1947, when the nation was fractured by religion, an alienated Dalit leadership could have deepened the divide. By ensuring Ambedkar’s inclusion, Gandhi prevented a crisis that could have weakened the new Republic at its birth. Ambedkar’s subsequent leadership proved that inclusion right. He turned the making of the Constitution into a moral enterprise that bound the country together.
Rau’s draft provided the order and structure. Ambedkar gave the Constitution its moral depth. The provisions on Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, and affirmative action bear his imprint. His speeches in the Assembly made the Constitution a living moral philosophy.
Ambedkar warned that political equality would fail without social and economic equality. He said, “How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.” That warning still remains the most powerful moral statement in India’s constitutional history.
The peril of forgetting
Every Republic must guard its memory. The attempt to raise Rau above Ambedkar is part of a larger effort to drain the Constitution of its radical spirit. It presents the founding as a matter of technical competence rather than social transformation. To honour Ambedkar is not to diminish Rau. Both served the Republic faithfully. But the Constitution is more than a legal framework. It is a statement of national purpose. It needed a scholar’s precision, but it also needed a reformer’s conviction. Ambedkar was that reformer.
When the Constitution was adopted, leaders across the political spectrum, including Nehru, Patel and Prasad, publicly acknowledged Ambedkar’s central role. None suggested that Rau was the Constitution’s principal author. They understood the difference between drafting a text and shaping a nation’s conscience.
Rau deserves admiration as a brilliant adviser. Ambedkar deserves reverence as the Constitution’s moral architect. The Constitution was not written in the calm of colonial offices but in the shadow of Partition, the Mahatma’s assassination and caste oppression. To place Ambedkar at its centre was not symbolic generosity but a statement that India’s new order would belong equally to those once excluded.
Ambedkar never claimed sole authorship. Yet, his leadership of the Drafting Committee, his defence of every clause, and his vision of liberty, equality and fraternity have defined the Indian Republic. To diminish his role is to betray the Republic’s founding promise. Rau built the structure; Ambedkar filled it with justice. Sir B.N. Rau deserves gratitude as the constitutional engineer. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar remains the architect and moral founder of modern India.
To deny that truth is to deny the Republic.
Sanjay Hegde is a Senior Advocate designated by the Supreme Court of India
Published – October 17, 2025 12:16 am IST
