On 29 August 1947, the Constituent Assembly of India, in just two weeks after attaining Independence, resolved and approved the appointment of a Drafting Committee, with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as its Chairman, to finalise and give shape to the Indian Constitution for making India a Republic.
Unfortunately, contributions of Rau and his compatriots remain largely unnoticed or find not much more than a foot note reference when recognising the framers of our Constitution. This write up is therefore, an effort to pay tribute and remember the contributions of Shri BN Rau and his compatriots.
Rau was born on 26 February 1887 into a family of scholars and doctors, and his own record as a student was formidable — first in Madras Presidency at matriculation, a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and also a Tripos that nearly won him the Senior Wranglership. He entered the prestigious Indian Civil Service in 1910, and moved into the judiciary in Bengal, and over the following decades built a fornidable reputation as one of the most respected legal minds of his generation. Rau must also be known for his contributions to revising the entire Indian statutory code - between 1935 and 1937. His contribution was recognised by the British who bestowed him with the knighthood in 1938. He also served as a judge of the Bengal High Court from 1939, and even served briefly as the Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir state,1944–45. His illustrious career had already set him apart from his collegues and therefore it was no wonder that he was chosen to be the Advisor for the framing of the Constitution, much before the Constituent Assembly ever met.
In July 1946, the interim government appointed Rau as Constitutional Advisor to the Constituent Assembly — a title that undersold the weight and contributions of Dr Rau, that followed.
Over the next year and more, Rau researched and worked hard to study and examine the working constitutions of more than sixty countries, from the United States, Canada and Ireland to Switzerland, Australia and several Latin American republics. He not only studied their Constitution but also examined how they actually functioned in practice. He also travelled to the US, Canada and the UK for consultations with sitting judges and constitutional scholars. Anecdotal reference confirms that during one of his visits and the meeting that followed with an expert resulted in a small but consequential result: Justice Felix Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court advised him against writing an American-style "due process" clause into the Indian Constitution, warning that it would place an undue and unpredictable burden on the judiciary. Rau took this advice. The phrase that eventually went into Article 21 — "procedure established by law" — carries the trace of that conversation in a Cambridge study room, half a world away from Delhi.
By early 1948, Rau's own draft — running to some 240 articles across twenty-five parts and thirteen schedules — was ready. It proposed a parliamentary system of government, a strong federal union, an independent judiciary with the power of judicial review, a chapter of fundamental rights, and provisions for national emergencies: the architecture that a reader of the Constitution today would still recognise instantly. When the Drafting Committee took up its work after 29 August 1947, it was this document painstakingly prepared by Rau, that was placed before the Drafting Committee.
Why, then, is the name of Dr Rau and his compatriots so rarely spoken alongside the framers of contributions- Ambedkar, Nehru Patel and others?
Perhaps because Rau never served the Constituent Assembly as an elected member and more importantly he rarely spoke of his own role in public. He described what he and his small team did as "technical work" — research, structuring, drafting — carried out away from the floor of the Assembly and away from the press gallery.
Public memory tends to attach itself to the visible act of debate and decision, not to the invisible labour of preparation that makes debate possible in the first place. Yet without Rau's year of comparative constitutional study, the Drafting Committee would have had to build from first principles in far less time than the moment demanded.
Rau did not do this work alone, and it is worth naming his principal partner in this task. The Constituent Assembly Secretariat, set up in May 1946, had its own overall Secretary, H. V. R. Iyengar, but the two officers who did the closest textual work were Rau, as Constitutional Advisor, and Surendra Nath Mukherjee, an equally able ICS officer who held the office of Joint Secretary and Chief Draftsman. Where Rau's contribution was the comparative research and the first full draft, Mukherjee's work included the craft of legislative drafting — taking the reports of the Assembly's many subject committees, and later its clause-by-clause decisions, and rendering them into precise, internally consistent legal language. The two roles were complementary and both fed directly into the Drafting Committee under Ambedkar.
Ambedkar himself acknowledged their contributions in the Assembly on 25 November 1949, the day before the Indian Constitution was adopted. Dr Ambedkar told the House that the credit given to him for the Drafting of the Constitution does not really belong to him alone, and named both Rau and Mukherjee for compiling the committee reports and preparing the draft.
This write up must therefore serve as a reminder that like many other aspects of nation building, the Indian Constitution also is not an outcome of the labour of one person, or even of two. It was the result of painstaking labour of love for the nation that must also belong to a small Section of the Secretariat, largely unnamed even in most histories, whose works laid the administrative groundwork for India's first elections on universal adult franchise.
His public life did not end with the Constitution. Rau went on to represent India at the United Nations, serving on the Security Council during the tense moments of the opening months of the Korean War. He later became a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague — one of very few Indians of his time to sit on that bench. Other newly decolonised nations sought his counsel as they wrote their own constitutions, an acknowledgment for Rau beyond India's borders, a recognition that curiously remained unnoticed in India.
Rau died in Zurich in November 1953, a little over three years after the Constitution he had done so much to shape came into force.
Today, as we mark the anniversary of the day the Constituent Assembly formally handed the drafting task to Ambedkar's Committee, it is worth remembering that a Constitution — like most enduring institutions — is rarely the work of a single hand or a single moment of decision. It is built, first, out of unglamorous, painstaking preparation: reading, comparing, travelling, listening, and writing drafts that others will later argue over, amend and adopt as their own. Rau, Mukherjee and the quiet officers who worked alongside them did that work for India, largely without asking to be remembered for it. On a day set aside for the Committee that took their draft forward, they deserve to be named alongside it.
There is a lesson in this for our own moment, and it is one I would especially offer to the younger generation now finding its political voice. Much of what today's youth — loosely grouped as Gen Z, though the sentiment runs wider — are asking for is entirely legitimate: opportunity, accountability, a fairer share of a country still working through the inequalities of caste, creed and circumstance that the Constitution itself set out to correct but has not yet fully undone. Some other demands, voiced in the heat of the moment, ask for more than any constitutional democracy as vast and layered as India's can deliver overnight, and a few of the means chosen to demand them have strayed from the very constitutional norms they invoke. Both things can be true at once.
What the stories of Rau and Mukherjee offer is not a lecture on patience for its own sake, but a working example of a different route to change: unglamorous, often invisible, sustained over years and task undertaken without any expectation of credit.
The Indian Constitution built by Dr Ambedkar and others - Rau, Mukherjee - has given a framework for the nation that has now outlasted three generations. This was done not by demanding recognition, but by doing the work regardless of whether recognition ever came. That, perhaps, is the more durable form of protest — building something that lasts long after the applause, or the outrage, has moved on.
Jai Hind
Jai Bharat
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