New Delhi, Jan 26 (.) Marking 76 years since the Constitution of India came into force, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday reflected on the making of the Constitution and the lesser-known history of India’s national emblem and motto, drawing attention to scholarly debates and historical decisions that shaped them.
In a detailed post on X, Ramesh noted that the Constitution’s drafting process has been intensely studied ever since the publication of Granville Austin’s seminal 1966 work The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation and B Shiva Rao’s five-volume The Framing of India’s Constitution, completed by 1968.
“The history of its making has continued to be analysed ever since,” Ramesh wrote, adding that while many important works have followed, “special mention must be made of the very recent book by Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History.”
Ramesh highlighted that the first two handwritten copies of the Constitution — in English and Hindi — already featured the national emblem on their covers. He said the decision to adopt the Ashokan Lion Capital as the emblem was taken by the end of 1947, drawing from the sculpture first excavated at Sarnath in 1905.
However, the now-familiar motto Satyameva Jayate was not part of the emblem initially. “It was only by early-1949 that the motto ‘Satyameva Jayate,’ taken from the Mundaka Upanishad, was added below the abacus as the national motto,” Ramesh said.
He recalled that the choice of wording itself was debated. “There were quite a few who said it should be ‘Satyameva Jayati’ and not ‘Satyameva Jayate’,” he noted, adding that eminent Sanskrit scholars were consulted before settling on the latter.
Ramesh also referred to a 1956 intervention by noted historian and then nominated MP Radha Kumud Mookerjee, who had pointed out that the original Ashokan Lion Capital included a large wheel placed above the lions’ shoulders. Despite this observation, the emblem remained unchanged, having already been widely adopted and used.
The Congress leader further noted that alternative inscriptions were considered during the Constituent Assembly’s deliberations. “In some reports issued by the Constituent Assembly in 1948, the words ‘Dharmachakra Pravartanaya’ had been used below the abacus,” he said. This phrase was later replaced by Satyameva Jayate in early 1949.
Interestingly, Ramesh pointed out that Dharmachakra Pravartanaya continued to hold symbolic space in India’s parliamentary history. “The words were lit up just above the seat of the Lok Sabha Speaker in the Old Parliament Building, and this continued till the Lok Sabha shifted to the new building in September 2023,” he wrote.
Ramesh’s post comes amid ongoing public and academic discussions around constitutional values and symbolism. By revisiting archival details and scholarly debates, he underscored the layered and deliberative nature of India’s constitutional journey — one that, even 76 years later, continues to invite reflection and reinterpretation. . SKA .
