In the fraught months after India’s Partition, as the Constituent Assembly laboured to convert mass aspirations into a constitutional text, a deceptively small omission from the Draft — the absence of the word “panchayat” — produced an argument that speaks to the deepest choices the nation’s framers faced. On May 10, 1948, President Rajendra Prasad sent a measured but urgent note to B. N. Rau, the Assembly’s principal constitutional adviser, urging that the Draft be rethought so that the Constitution might “begin with the village and go up to the Centre.” Rau’s courteous reply, which urged caution and procedural realism, crystallized a defining tension of the founding moment. It was an undefined contest between a Gandhian vision of village republics and the parliamentary-federal architecture the Assembly was already committed to building.
The exchange must be understood against immediate historical pressures. The Constituent Assembly was drafting a charter amid memories of communal violence, population transfers, and administrative collapse. The All-India Congress Committee had recently endorsed a panchayat base for its own party organisation, and figures like Gandhi had long championed villages as the primary units of self-government. For Prasad, who carried both moral authority and institutional responsibility as the Assembly’s president, the omission was not a mere drafting oversight; it was a missed opportunity to constitutionally anchor a decentralised method of democracy. In his letter Prasad argued that the village “has been and will ever continue to be our unit in this country” and proposed that adult franchise operate at the village level, making village panchayats the electoral college that would choose representatives to provincial and central legislatures. Such a design, he suggested, would orient the political system from the bottom up and foster civic responsibility and local self-rule.
Rau’s reply, composed with a draftsman’s eye to precedent and practicality, declined Prasad’s invitation without rancour. He reminded the President that the Assembly had already moved in favour of direct elections to lower houses — a practice customary in federations — and that reversing this course would be politically difficult. More pointedly for the mechanics of constitution-making, Rau warned that to fill the constitutional text with the full detail of local government would make the document unwieldy and risk delaying its timely completion. He proposed an alternative compromise. Rather than embed every institution of local government into the founding charter, the Assembly could preserve flexibility by drafting articles that allowed representatives to be chosen either directly by voters or indirectly by persons elected by voters. Rau’s stance revealed the dominant drafting ethic in the Assembly, to establish durable principles and leave operational details to ordinary legislation and future reform.
The Prasad–Rau correspondence is therefore both a practical exchange about drafting and a symbolic adjudication of rival national projects. One project — favoured by Prasad and many Gandhian-leaning figures — imagined the Indian polity as an aggregation of autonomous village republics. The rival project, which found greater traction in the Assembly’s majority, argued that the exigencies of nation-building after Partition required a parliamentary centre with a degree of administrative capacity and uniformity that direct, national-level elections could better secure. The two orientations were not simply technical; they were competing answers to a political question, that is, how to combine democratic depth with national coherence in a country of dizzying diversity and fragile infrastructure.
The constitutional consequence of this contest was consequential and long-lasting. Panchayats and local self-government did not disappear from the constitutional imagination; rather, they were largely framed as goals and principles rather than as the structural foundation of electoral mechanics. In the first constitutional text, measures to encourage village-level bodies found expression primarily among the Directive Principles of State Policy — obligations that guide state action but are not enforceable in court — and in the expectation that legislation would fill out the details. This path left decentralisation dependent on political will, administrative capacity and later statutory reform rather than on immutable constitutional design. It would take decades, a series of policy experiments and ultimately constitutional amendments to give panchayats the kind of sustained, statutory backing Prasad envisaged.
Viewed retrospectively, the exchange between Prasad and Rau illuminates a perennial truth about constitution-making, in that, the final form of the Constitution of India is as much the product of pragmatic judgments about governance and timing as it is the expression of moral aspiration. Prasad’s appeal captured an ethical argument about civic formation and grassroots empowerment; Rau’s reply insisted on tractable drafting and the need to fashion a constitution that could be administered in a precarious moment. Both impulses shaped the Indian Constitution — one instilling a commitment to local self-government as a national objective, the other ensuring the document remained a compact, workable instrument for immediate nation-building. The result was a compromise whose consequences India would contend with for generations in the form of a living constitution that enshrined decentralizing ideals as aims to be pursued, while postponing their full institutional realization to the path of political practice.
Arup K. Chatterjee 