How the Indian Constitution Borrowed from the World

When B. R. Ambedkar presented the draft Constitution to the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, a critic accused him of having merely copied foreign constitutions. Ambedkar's reply was pointed: 'There is nothing to be ashamed of in borrowing. It involves no plagiarism. Nobody holds any patent rights in the fundamental ideas of a Constitution.' What the framers did, over three years of deliberation, 11 sessions, 165 days of debate, was not copy but adapt: they surveyed every major constitutional experiment in the world, chose what they judged suited to India's circumstances, and modified it to fit.

The result is a document that is simultaneously the longest written constitution in the world (originally 395 articles, now over 470) and one of the most synthesised. Its debts are numerous and acknowledged. What follows is a guide to what came from where, and why the framers made each choice.

The deepest structural debt is to Britain, specifically the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy that India inherited from colonial rule and chose to retain. The Cabinet system (the executive is drawn from and accountable to the legislature), the role of the Prime Minister as head of government with the President as constitutional head of state, parliamentary privileges, the office of the Speaker, and the procedure for legislation all derive from Westminster practice.

The Rule of Law, the principle that the state itself is bound by law and that no person is above it, is a Diceyan inheritance, articulated by the Victorian constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey and embedded in the Constitution through Articles 13 (laws inconsistent with fundamental rights are void), 21 (no deprivation of life or liberty except by procedure established by law), and the writ jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

The prerogative writs, Habeas Corpus, Mandamus, Certiorari, Prohibition, and Quo Warranto, came directly from English common law. Habeas Corpus, the most important ('you shall have the body', requiring the state to produce a detained person before a court), dates to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. Its Indian form is in Article 32 (Supreme Court) and Article 226 (High Courts), and it has been one of the Constitution's most used protections, including, notoriously, its suspension during the Emergency.

Single citizenship, where every Indian is a citizen of India and not of their state, is a British inheritance too, contrasting with the dual federal-state citizenship of the United States. The framers chose it deliberately to build national unity over regional identity.

The American influence is most visible in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution's Part III (Fundamental Rights, Articles 12–35) was directly modelled on the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, with adaptations. The right to equality (Articles 14–18), freedom of speech and expression (Article 19), and protection against arbitrary arrest (Article 22) mirror the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments in structure and intent.

The most consequential American import is judicial review, the power of the courts to strike down legislation that violates the Constitution. In the US, this was not explicit in the text but was established by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803). The Indian framers made it explicit: Article 13 states that any law inconsistent with fundamental rights 'shall, to the extent of such inconsistency, be void.' The Supreme Court of India's power to invalidate Acts of Parliament on constitutional grounds flows directly from this, and has been exercised more than any other constitutional court in the world.

The independence of the judiciary, including appointments, tenure, and removal, was also shaped by the American model. Federal judges in the US have lifetime tenure to insulate them from political pressure; Indian judges serve until a fixed retirement age (65 for the Supreme Court) but cannot be removed except by impeachment, mirroring the American protection.

The Preamble's opening words, 'We, the People of India', are a conscious echo of the US Constitution's 'We the People of the United States.' Both invoke popular sovereignty as the source of constitutional authority, a Rousseauian idea given American form and transplanted into the Indian context.

Ireland's 1937 Constitution gave India two specific gifts. The first and more consequential is the Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV, Articles 36–51). Ireland's Constitution included 'directive principles of social policy', non-justiciable goals the state should pursue, drawn from the Catholic social teaching tradition and from the ideas of the Irish nationalist movement. Ambedkar and the framers saw in this a device for encoding long-term social and economic goals without making them immediately enforceable in courts, which would have been impossible given India's poverty at independence.

The DPSP include directions to secure adequate livelihood, equal pay for equal work, a living wage, the right to education, the prevention of concentration of wealth, and the protection of the environment. They are 'fundamental in the governance of the country' but cannot be enforced by a court; the political tension between enforceable fundamental rights and aspirational directive principles has been the subject of Indian constitutional jurisprudence for decades.

Ireland also gave India the method of presidential election. The President of India is elected by an electoral college of elected members of Parliament and state legislatures, with votes weighted by population, a system designed to make the presidency represent the federal character of India rather than being chosen by a direct national vote. Ireland uses a similar indirect mechanism.

The framers considered two federal models: the American model (residuary powers with the states) and the Canadian model (residuary powers with the centre). They chose Canada. The British North America Act (1867), Canada's founding constitutional document, gave the Dominion government a general power to legislate for 'Peace, Order and Good Government', residual authority that the Indian Constitution replicates: Article 248 gives Parliament exclusive power to legislate on matters not enumerated in the State List or the Concurrent List.

Canada also gave India the device of the Governor-General (the President in India's case) appointing the heads of provincial/state governments, the mechanism by which the central government maintains a constitutional link to state administration. The Governor of an Indian state is appointed by the President on the advice of the Union Cabinet, not elected by the state, a centralising device directly borrowed from Canada's federal design.

The advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the power to give a non-binding opinion on questions of constitutional importance referred to it by the President, comes from Canada's Supreme Court Reference procedure. Article 143 of the Indian Constitution establishes exactly this.

The French Revolution's trinity, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, is explicit in the Preamble, which commits India to 'Justice, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.' Fraternity is particularly interesting: it appears nowhere in the US or UK constitutional tradition and was added by Ambedkar, who saw it as the constitutional answer to caste, the idea that all Indians owe each other a civic solidarity that cuts across birth group.

The concept of a Republic, a state in which sovereign power rests in the people and their elected representatives and not in a hereditary monarch, comes partly from the French republican tradition. India's choice to become a republic (rejecting Dominion status under the British Crown) owed as much to the French model as to any other.

France also contributed to India's emergency provisions. The French Constitution permits broad executive power in crises, and India's Article 352 (National Emergency), Article 356 (President's Rule in states), and Article 360 (Financial Emergency) reflect a constitutional willingness to concentrate power temporarily, a provision France had normalised and India's framers, scarred by Partition and aware of the state's fragility, built in as insurance.

The Weimar Republic's Constitution (1919) was the most ambitious democratic constitution of its time, and its failure is the most instructive constitutional catastrophe of the twentieth century. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowed the President to rule by emergency decree, bypassing Parliament, 'if public order and security are seriously disturbed or endangered.' Adolf Hitler exploited this provision to consolidate power after the Reichstag fire in 1933.

India's framers knew this history. Yet they still included emergency provisions, Articles 352, 356, and 360, partly modelled on Weimar's Article 48. The difference was supposed to be Parliamentary oversight: the Lok Sabha must approve a National Emergency within one month, and can revoke it by simple majority. The Emergency of 1975 showed that this safeguard was insufficient when the ruling party held a large majority, a lesson that produced the 44th Amendment (1978), which tightened the conditions and added the requirement of a Cabinet written decision.

The Weimar lesson in Indian constitutional law is cautionary: borrowing a provision designed for crisis management does not guarantee it will be used only in genuine crises. The constitution's text matters less than the political culture that surrounds it.

Australia's 1901 Constitution contributed two specific provisions. The Concurrent List, which covers subjects on which both Parliament and state legislatures can legislate with central law prevailing in case of conflict, is an Australian device (Australia's Section 51 enumerated concurrent powers). India's Seventh Schedule replicates this three-list structure.

The freedom of trade and commerce clause, that trade, commerce, and intercourse among the states shall be free (Article 301), is modelled on Section 92 of the Australian Constitution, which struck down state barriers to interstate trade. The Indian version is weaker (Parliament can impose restrictions for public interest), but the structural idea of a constitutional guarantee of a national market comes from Australia.

South Africa's 1909 Act contributed to the amending procedure. The requirement that certain constitutional amendments require a special majority, two-thirds of Parliament present and voting, comes partly from South Africa's precedent of entrenching some provisions against simple-majority change.

Behind the specific constitutional provisions lie the European Enlightenment thinkers who shaped the very idea of a written constitution as the foundation of legitimate government.

John Locke (1632–1704) provided the foundational theory: government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, exists to protect natural rights (life, liberty, property), and may be resisted when it violates those rights. Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) is the ancestor of every fundamental-rights provision in the Indian Constitution.

Montesquieu (1689–1755) provided the theory of separation of powers: that legislative, executive, and judicial authority should be held by different institutions to prevent tyranny. The Indian Constitution does not adopt a strict separation (the executive sits inside the legislature in the Westminster model) but does separate the judiciary sharply from the other two branches, and the doctrine of checks and balances is central to how the Constitution works.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) provided popular sovereignty, 'We the People' as the ultimate source of authority. The Preamble's opening is a direct application of this idea. Rousseau's concept of the General Will, what the community as a whole needs as opposed to what particular interests want, also echoes in the Directive Principles, which represent long-term community goals over short-term political convenience.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) shaped the framers' thinking on representative government and liberty. His 'On Liberty' (1859) drew the line between the individual's sphere (into which the state should not intrude) and the social sphere (where collective action is legitimate), a line the fundamental rights provisions try to draw, imperfectly and contestedly, in Indian law.

The borrowings are real, but so is the Indian innovation. Several features of the Constitution have no direct Western precedent.

The most important is the Fundamental Duties (Article 51A, added by the 42nd Amendment in 1976). Neither the US, UK, nor French constitutions enumerate duties of citizens; rights without corresponding duties is the Western liberal tradition. India's list of eleven duties (respect for the Constitution, the national flag, the national anthem; protection of public property; promotion of scientific temper) draws on the Soviet Constitution's model of paired rights and duties, but is shaped by Gandhian and Indian nationalist ideas about civic responsibility.

The Directive Principles themselves, while formally borrowed from Ireland, were filled with content drawn from the Indian independence movement: protection of cottage industries (Gandhian), abolition of child labour, promotion of equal pay, protection of cow (reflecting Hindu cultural concerns). The content is Indian even when the device is Irish.

Most distinctively, the Constitution's treatment of caste is without global parallel. Articles 15 and 16 (prohibition of discrimination and equality in public employment) are US-inspired, but the reservation system, constitutionally mandating positive discrimination by caste group, has no Western model. Ambedkar designed it specifically for the Indian situation: a society in which birth group determines life outcomes so thoroughly that formal equality is not enough. The framers knew this was different from what they had borrowed, and they said so.

Understanding where the Constitution came from clarifies why certain Indian political debates are structured the way they are. The tension between Fundamental Rights (justiciable, US-inspired) and Directive Principles (aspirational, Ireland-inspired) is the constitutional form of the economy-axis debate: the right to property and freedom of trade are Fundamental Rights; state ownership and redistribution are Directive Principles. For decades, Parliament and the Supreme Court fought over which prevailed.

The strong-centre Canadian model explains why Indian federalism debates are different from American ones: states do not have residuary powers, and the centre can override state legislation in ways that would be unconstitutional in the US. Every argument about GST, delimitation, or Governors' authority is an argument about whether the Canadian model the framers chose was right for India.

And the emergency provisions, borrowed with awareness of Weimar's catastrophe and used against Weimar's warning during 1975–77, are the clearest reminder that borrowed institutions are only as strong as the political culture that operates them. The Constitution is a set of rules; it is not self-enforcing.