Ambedkar’s Preamble

India's Constitution was adopted and came into force on 26 January 1950. Its preamble is a short statement of the values the new republic claimed to hold and hoped to nurture. Who actually shaped those few lines has long been settled in the standard accounts, and this book argues that the standard accounts have it wrong.

Aakash Singh Rathore makes the case that B.R. Ambedkar was the author of the Preamble. Ambedkar is widely honored as the chief architect of the Constitution, yet what he did as chairman of the Drafting Committee is seldom examined in any detail. His near single-handed work on the Preamble has gone almost unnoticed, and the text is often credited instead to B.N. Rau. Rathore sets out to correct that record.

The book follows the intellectual history of the six ideas at the heart of the Preamble: justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity and nation. Each has its own chapter, and in each Rathore traces the idea back to Ambedkar's own writings and speeches. The result is an argument that the Preamble is, at its core, an Ambedkarite document.

Along the way, the book brings forward facts about modern Indian history and about Ambedkar's radical political thought that conventional accounts have passed over. It offers a different way of reading the founding text of the Indian republic, and of understanding the thinker behind it.