The Founding Mothers

Women Who Wrote Themselves Into India's Constitution

We grew up hearing about the Father of the Nation and the other founding fathers. But behind the freedom struggle and the drafting of the Constitution stood women who deserve the same place in our history books. I call them the Founding Mothers  and this piece is dedicated to them.

When India's Constituent Assembly convened in 1946 to write the founding document of a new nation, popular memory of that moment is almost entirely male: Ambedkar, Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad. What many people don’t know is that fifteen women sat in that Assembly too, out of nearly 300 members, women who had already spent decades in the freedom struggle, in the fight against child marriage, and in the suffragist campaigns that made their presence in that room possible at all.

They came from wildly different backgrounds. Ammu Swaminathan helped found the Women's India Association in Madras in 1917 and spent her Assembly years pushing for reform of inheritance and marriage law. Annie Mascarene, the first woman on the Travancore State Congress Working Committee, argued forcefully against centralising too much power in the new republic. Durgabai Deshmukh, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Sarojini Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Sucheta Kripalani, Renuka Ray, Purnima Banerjee, Kamla Chaudhry, Leela Roy, Malati Choudhury, Begum Aizaz Rasul, and Dakshayani Velayudhan  the Assembly's only Dalit woman member  each brought a different vision of what citizenship in independent India should mean.

Today, the story of one member whose fingerprints are on two of the most consequential documents of the twentieth century: India's Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If you have ever read the opening line of the UDHR  "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights"  you have already encountered the legacy of an Indian woman most people have never heard of.

Hansa Mehta

Born on 3 July 1897 in Surat, Hansa Mehta grew up in a family steeped in public life; her father, Manubhai Nandshankar Mehta, served as Dewan of Baroda State. After early education at Baroda College, she went to the London School of Economics to study sociology and journalism. It was in England that she first encountered the suffragette movement, an experience that shaped the rest of her working life. She returned to India and married Dr. Jivraj Mehta, a physician who later became Gujarat's first Chief Minister — but her own career was never going to be a footnote to anyone else's.

Mehta joined the Indian National Congress and threw herself into the freedom struggle, courting arrest and imprisonment during the Civil Disobedience Movement and again during Quit India in 1942. But she refused to let nationalist politics crowd out feminist politics. As President of the All India Women's Conference, she campaigned for a uniform civil code, an end to child marriage, and equal rights to property, inheritance, and education for women. For Mehta, colonial subjugation and women's subjugation were two forms of the same problem, and both needed legal solutions.

She was one of fifteen women among nearly 300 members of the Constituent Assembly. She sat on the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights, Minorities, and Tribal and Excluded Areas, and on the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights  in the rooms where the actual architecture of Indian citizenship was decided, clause by clause. Her place on that Sub-Committee was not a given. When it was formed in February 1947, the Assembly secretariat initially saw no need for a second woman member, since Rajkumari Amrit Kaur already held a seat. It took Rajendra Prasad personally overriding that decision a month later, citing her standing at the United Nations, to bring her in.

Official records show Mehta spoke on the floor of Constitution Hall only three times in three years on the day she presented her credentials, once during the debate on the Aims and Objects Resolution, and once more in the closing days of the Assembly. That sparse record understates her role considerably. Much of her constitutional work happened off the floor: in sub-committee sessions that ran through entire days, in her room at Constitution House, which became an informal meeting point for the Assembly's women members, and simultaneously, seven thousand miles away, at the United Nations.

During the Assembly sessions, she pushed hard for a Uniform Civil Code, arguing that religious personal laws too often left women unprotected in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The proposal failed in the Sub-Committee by a single vote — she was one of just four dissenting members, alongside Amrit Kaur, Minoo Masani, and B. R. Ambedkar. She and Amrit Kaur filed a formal note of dissent afterwards, pressing for a civil code within five to ten years and for guarantees that fundamental rights provisions could never be read to block future legislation against child marriage, purdah, or polygamy. The UCC was ultimately placed in the Directive Principles rather than made an enforceable right  a compromise that still echoes through Indian legal debates today. She had more success on another front: her arguments helped shape what became Articles 14, 15, and 16 the constitutional guarantees of equality before law, non-discrimination, and equal opportunity in public employment.

Mehta's constitutional work was never confined to Delhi. As India's delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission through 1947 and 1948, she helped draft what would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights  and her position there fed directly back into the Indian drafting process. Indian government ministries treated the evolving UN Declaration as a benchmark the Constitution needed to measure up against; her reports from the Commission's sessions in Lake Success and Geneva were circulated across ten government departments, and an inter-departmental committee was formed specifically to compare the Declaration's provisions against India's own draft Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles. In 1949, she wrote her own detailed comparison of the two documents and concluded that the new Constitution held up well against the international standard. Looking back on those years later, she said it had been valuable to sit on both bodies at once, able to weigh the Fundamental Rights of the Constitution against the human rights being debated at the UN in the same breath.

What's striking, reading her Assembly interventions, is her impatience with "protective" gestures toward women that stopped short of real equality. She wanted citizenship, not chivalry. In her final floor speech, days before the Constitution was adopted, she told the Assembly that whether it turned out to be a good Constitution or a bad one would depend on how it was made to work, and that it would fall to future voters to elect people who would work it in the interest of the people. She reminded her fellow members, again and again, that a constitution is not just a legal text but a moral instrument  and that half the country's population could not be an afterthought in it.

This Independence Day, I salute the Founding Mothers of our country and their meticulous, hard-won work in writing our Constitution.