Rajendra Prasad Presided Over the Constituent Assembly, Served 12 Years and 107 Days as India's First President, and Is the Only President Elected Twice, in 1952 and 1957

On 24 January 1950, H. V. R. Iyengar, the Constituent Assembly’s returning officer, told the House that only one nomination paper had been received for the office of President of India. The candidate was Dr. Rajendra Prasad, proposed by Jawaharlal Nehru and seconded by Vallabhbhai Patel, and Iyengar declared him elected.

Prasad took office on 26 January 1950, the Presidency of India’s official profile says, and held it until 13 May 1962. That is 12 years and 107 days. He won the elections of 1952 and 1957 for the post, and no one since has been elected to it twice. What follows takes his life in dated steps and marks the places where the sources differ.

A Bihar lawyer who came first in the Calcutta entrance list

Prasad was born on 3 December 1884 at Ziradei, a village in Bihar. The Congress party’s own biographical page places it in the Saran district of north Bihar and says he passed the Calcutta University entrance examination in 1902, aged eighteen, standing first in the first division. Britannica records that he took an MA in economics at Calcutta in 1907, passed the Master of Laws examination in 1915, practised at the Calcutta High Court and moved in 1916 to the Patna High Court, where he founded the Bihar Law Weekly.

The Presidency’s profile credits him with helping to form the Bihari Students’ Conference in 1906. The Congress page dates the conference to 1908, so the year is not settled. The Congress page adds that the body produced nearly all of Bihar’s political leadership of the 1920s.

The servant who did not know the guest

On 10 April 1917 Mohandas Gandhi reached Patna with Rajkumar Shukla, a Champaran peasant who had spent months urging him to see the indigo districts for himself. Shukla took him straight to Prasad’s house. Prasad’s own history of the campaign says he was away, at the All India Congress Committee meeting in Calcutta and then in Puri, and that the only person at home was a servant who “did not recognize the distinguished guest” and treated him as an ordinary visitor.

Gandhi remembered the day more bitterly in his autobiography. The servants paid him no attention, he writes, and “There was strict untouchability in Bihar”: he could not draw water at the well while the servants were using it, because they did not know his caste.

Gandhi moved on to Muzaffarpur that evening. There Ramnavmi Prasad, one of the lawyers who called on him, said he had wired for both Brajkishore Prasad and Rajendra Prasad. Both came, Brajkishore from Darbhanga and Rajendra from Puri, by Gandhi’s account. Gandhi told the lawyers he would have “little use for your legal knowledge”. He wanted clerks and interpreters, and he warned that some of them might have to give up their practice for an indefinite period.

When the district authorities ordered Gandhi out of Champaran and then summoned him for disobeying the order, Prasad was telegraphed to come at once with volunteers. He left Patna by the 7 a.m. train on 18 April 1917 with H. S. Polak, Mazharul Haque, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha and Shambhusharan, and reached Motihari at 3 p.m. Gandhi’s hearing that day was already over, and our account of the Champaran satyagraha covers what he said in court and how the case ended.

That evening the party agreed an order of succession in case Gandhi went to jail. Prasad’s book lists it: Haque and Brajkishore first, then Dharanidhar and Ramnavmi Prasad, and after them Prasad himself with Shambhusharan and Anugrah Narayan.

Eight thousand statements and a history written afterwards

By mid-June 1917, Prasad’s book says, the statements of more than 8,000 tenants had been recorded under Gandhi’s personal supervision. When Gandhi left for Ahmedabad on 16 August, Prasad and Ramnavmi Prasad stayed on in Champaran.

Prasad wrote the history of the campaign in Hindi in 1918 and 1919. The English translation appeared in 1928, and the 1949 edition’s publishers note that Gandhi’s autobiography sends readers who want the details to Prasad’s account. The Congress page calls the meeting with Gandhi a turning point in his career.

Jail, an earthquake fund and the Congress chair

Britannica says Prasad gave up his law practice in 1920 to join the non-cooperation movement and was imprisoned several times. From August 1942 to June 1945 he spent nearly three years in jail with the Congress Working Committee, whose members were arrested on 9 August 1942, as our piece on Quit India records.

When an earthquake struck Bihar on 15 January 1934, Prasad was in jail. He was released two days later and began raising money for relief. The Congress page says his fund passed 38 lakh rupees (3.8 million) while the Viceroy’s fund stayed at about a third of that, and that the party made him president of its Bombay session that year. Britannica lists him as Congress president in 1934, 1939 and 1947. The Congress page says he took over in 1939 when Subhas Chandra Bose had to be relieved of the office.

In September 1946 he was sworn in as minister for food and agriculture in the interim government that preceded independence, Britannica adds.

In the chair of the Assembly

The Constituent Assembly chose Prasad as its permanent chairman on 11 December 1946. Sachchidananda Sinha, the temporary chairman, had two valid nomination papers before him and no rival candidate, and he declared Prasad elected. How the Assembly was chosen, what the Objectives Resolution said and how long the draft took are in our piece on the Constituent Assembly at work, and the Drafting Committee’s side is in our account of Ambedkar and the writing of the Constitution.

Prasad chaired the House through the passing of the Constitution on 26 November 1949. His closing address that day reviewed the Constitution’s features and then turned to the people who would work it. “After all, a Constitution like a machine is a lifeless thing,” he said, and went on: “India needs today nothing more than a set of honest men who will have the interest of the country before them.”

The same day he answered a question about the Hindi text. Algu Rai Shastri asked when a Hindi translation would appear. Prasad replied that the Assembly had by its own resolution directed him to publish one by 26 January, and said it was not the moment to prepare the Constitution in Hindi, debate it and adopt it. He would, he added, have it translated into other languages as soon as possible.

One office, three votes

The Constitution carried a stopgap for the first President. Article 380 made whoever the Constituent Assembly elected the President until a President had been chosen under the regular provisions and had entered office. The Seventh Amendment omitted the article from 1 November 1956. Britannica says Prasad was “unanimously elected provisional president” in 1950. The Presidency’s profile dates his election to 26 January, but the Debates show the declaration on 24 January and the 26th as the day he took office.

Scroll’s 2016 account, which names no archive for its dates, says the choice was contested inside the Congress. Nehru preferred C. Rajagopalachari, then Governor-General, and wrote to Prasad on 10 September 1949 that Rajagopalachari might continue. At a meeting of Congress members of Parliament on 5 October 1949 Nehru proposed Rajagopalachari, and the members interrupted him loudly, according to Scroll.

DNA India reports that the first election under the Constitution was held on 2 May 1952, with the result declared on 6 May. Prasad polled 507,400 votes to 92,827 for the independent K. T. Shah, and three other independents polled between 533 and 2,672.

The second election was held on 6 May 1957 and the result came on 10 May. DNA India gives Prasad 459,698 votes against 2,672 for Chowdhry Hari Ram and 2,000 for Nagendra Narayan Das. Factly puts his share of the votes polled at 98.99 per cent, the highest any winner has had, with Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s 98.25 per cent in 1962 second.

DNA India also says Nehru had wanted Radhakrishnan for the post, that Prasad openly sought a second term, and that most Congress members, including the party president U. N. Dhebar, favoured him. After consulting Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru reluctantly accepted the party’s wishes, the report says.

The claim that nobody else has won twice can be checked by counting. Factly counts 15 contested elections to the post, plus the unopposed one of 1977, so 16 in all up to 2022. The Presidency’s own list of former presidents runs from Prasad as the 1st to Ram Nath Kovind as the 14th, and Factly calls Droupadi Murmu the 15th. Sixteen elections and 15 office-holders leave one repeat winner, and the 1952 and 1957 results show it was Prasad.

What a constitutional President could do

In the 1949 closing address Prasad had described the office he was about to fill. It was as well, he said, that the President’s position was “that of a Constitutional President”. Ministers, he said, “tender advice to the President who is bound to act according to that advice”. No provision of the Constitution said so as far as he knew, and he hoped the convention under which the British monarch acts on ministers’ advice would take root in India too.

The first public test came in 1951. On 2 March Prasad wrote to Nehru that he had been invited to preside over the opening of the rebuilt Somnath temple in Gujarat and saw no objection. Nehru replied the same day: “I confess that I do not like the idea of your associating yourself with a spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple.”

Prasad answered on 10 March that the temple had been built entirely from private subscriptions, that he visited other places of worship whenever he felt inclined, and that the invitation came from the state’s Rajpramukh, who chaired the temple’s trustees. On 13 March Nehru wrote that if Prasad could not refuse, “I would not like to press my point any further.” The letters are printed in Nehru’s Selected Works, National Herald notes. On 22 April Nehru wrote again that the affair had become a matter of debate and that his objection was to the government’s association with the temple.

Prasad went. ThePrint’s reproduction of his speech of 11 May 1951 has him telling the gathering that he visited dargahs, mosques, churches and gurdwaras “with the same feeling of respect” that he brought to the temples of his own faith.

Retirement, the Bharat Ratna and the last years

The Congress page says Prasad announced in 1960 that he would retire, and that he held to it although many urged him to stand a third time. He left office on 13 May 1962. Britannica gives failing health as the reason.

The same year he received the Bharat Ratna. The Ministry of Home Affairs lists him as the 11th recipient, after Bidhan Chandra Roy and Purushottam Das Tandon in 1961 and before Zakir Husain in 1963.

The Presidency’s profile says he spent the rest of his life at the Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. Among his books Britannica names his autobiography Atmakatha and India Divided, both from 1946, and Mahatma Gandhi and Bihar, Some Reminiscences, from 1949. He died on 28 February 1963, aged 78.