Constituent Assembly – December 6, 1946

By the December 1946, the elections to the Constituent assembly had taken place. On 6 December 1946, ,the Constituent assembly met for the first time.

• The members of the constituent assembly were elected by the Provincial assemblies by method of single transferable vote system of proportional representations.
  
• Total membership of the constituent assembly was 389, out of which 292 the representatives of the states were, 93 were representatives of princely states and 4 were from the chief commissioners provinces of Delhi, Ajmer-Mewar, Coorg and British Baluchistan.
  

  The elections for the 296 seats assigned to the British Indian provinces were completed by July-August 1946 .
  

• Congress won 208 seats and Muslim league won 73 seats.
  

  After this election, the Muslim league refused to cooperate with the Congress. The political situation got worse and Hindu Muslim riots started. The Muslim league demanded for a separate Constituent assembly for Muslims in India. So, the British declared that the decisions of the Constituent assembly would not be valid in the Muslim majority areas. Thus the working of the assembly got virtually crippled.

• The membership of the Constituent assembly became 299 after this reorganization and it met on December 31, 1947.
  
• The Constituent assembly was the First parliament of Independent India.
  
• Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha was the first president (temporary Chairman of the Assembly) of the Constituent Assembly when it met on December 9, 1946.
  
• Dr. Rajendra Prasad then became the President of the Constituent Assembly, and who later become the first President of India.
  
• The Vice President of the Constituent Assembly was Professor Harendra Coomar Mookerjee, former Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University and a prominent Christian from Bengal who also served as the Chairman of the Minorities Committee of the Constituent Assembly. He was appointed Governor of West Bengal after India became a republic.