HV Kamath: The contrarian who became legendary for his antics and interjections

Anyone who reads the debates of the Constituent Assembly of India quickly wearies of HV Kamath. He was one of the most frequent interjectors, objectors and demanders of divisions – the formal votes for which members had to move to different areas to record their choice, rather than just raise hands.
Kamath even managed to interrupt that famous moment when freedom arrived at midnight on August 14, 1947. At the Assembly’s special late night session soon after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave his famous “tryst with destiny” speech and President Rajendra Prasad was about to call on members to pledge themselves to the new nation, Kamath got up to point out there were two proposed amendments listed in his name.

Despite this, Kamath generously told Prasad that “since you have invoked the holy name of God in your address”, and since it was almost midnight, “I do not propose to move my amendments.” It was entirely gratuitous and only made to establish Kamath’s presence at this historic event. The reaction of the Assembly is not recorded but in the 2014 TV serial Samvidhaan that dramatises the creation of the Constitution, members are plausibly heard shouting at Kamath to shut up.
This was a sentiment that many, particularly Prasad and other presiding officers, clearly often felt. Kamath was industrious, energetic and, in hindsight, could be seen as prescient in many of his proposed amendments. But he also had a talent for wasting time, as on August 31, 1949, when he suggested the Assembly consider India’s position on interplanetary travel. This made member TT Krishnamachari explode that debating this “would be reducing the proceedings of this House to absurdity.”

Kamath was undaunted, as he appears to have been all his life, with nothing apparently denting the confidence in his own views, a desire to make them known and a talent in achieving this (on that date, a perhaps amused Prasad allowed a short debate).

Kamath was the prototype of the performative politician, always ready for the eye-catching moment, alert to the potential for publicity and aggressive in his actions. He would become one of the first lawmakers to be temporarily barred from Parliament for being disruptive. In 1955, The Times of India (ToI) reported that when a deputy speaker admonished him for shouting, he replied insouciantly: “It is nature’s gift.”

A kinder way to see Kamath would be as the archetypical Argumentative Indian whose insistence on expressing a diversity of views Amartya Sen, in his book of the same name, saw as ultimately valuable. This better justifies Kamath’s contribution to the Assembly debates, even if one suspects that a few weeks might have been saved without them. And while his obsession with religion and nationalism – for example, his fervent battle to have God inserted in the Preamble – can seem an odd fit with his progressive politics, it is perhaps the lack of this combination that has really lead to the Left losing many battles today.

Hari Vishnu Kamath, to give his full name, was definitely a bright man. In 1929, he was one of the just 48 people to qualify for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in the open examination.

But by 1940, he had resigned and joined the Forward Bloc faction of the Congress set up by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (Kamath would later push Nehru to have Bose’s death investigated). In July that year, when he was arrested for speaking out against India’s participation in the Second World War, the magistrate lamented that an ex-ICS member would behave in such a way.

Kamath joined the Assembly as a Congress member, but by 1949, ToI reported that the party was ready to discipline him. He was soon out and remained in Opposition with the Praja Socialist Party and later incarnations like the Bharatiya Lok Dal. Standing from Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh, Kamath lost the first election in 1952 by just 174 votes, then fought one of the first cases on electoral practices and got the Supreme Court to order a fresh election, which he won.



Kamath would win two more terms, in 1962 and 1977, and made full use of his Parliamentary time. He happily used it as a pulpit from which to make headlines. In 1948, he queried the health value of Vanaspati ghee, and in 1950 wondered about the safety of vaccines. In 1963, he ingeniously protested the endless amendments to the Constitution by suggesting an amendment to ban further amendments.

In 1965, Kamath introduced a bill to stop the supply of free electricity, water and furniture to ministers. In 1966, he suggested that Parliament reserve seats for members from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Bibulous journalists must have liked the fact that Kamath was the rare MP against prohibition. It would, he noted accurately in 1978, “be a complete success only for enforcement staff and bootleggers.” He would have been a natural at Twitter.

Kamath’s many provocations are mostly forgotten today. Even the one time he made an impact on wider culture is little remembered. In 1977, when the Janata Party government had kicked Coca-Cola out of India, and come up with a desi version, it was Kamath who suggested calling it 77 to mark the party’s moment of electoral triumph. But soon the Congress was back in power and 77 started being sidelined, first named Double Seven, which was then to become Double Cola, and finally it was dropped altogether.

Kamath did win Rs 10,000 for proposing the name, one of the rare times when he seems to have benefitted monetarily from his career. When he died in 1982, aged 75, he left a Central Bank account, the funds from which he directed should be used to fund scholarships for students. He never married, with politics evidently providing all the personal life he wanted.

Kamath is now remembered mainly by readers of the Constituent Assembly debates who are often annoyed and sometimes amused by his antics — and occasionally impressed by the moments of prescient political thinking that a career of confirmed contrarianism is always likely to bring.