Rajendra Prasad

Early life and Champaran

Prasad was born into a landed family in Zeradei, Bihar, and studied at Calcutta University, where he earned degrees in economics and law before practising as a lawyer in Bihar. He was already a respected public figure — active in local education and civic institutions — before entering nationalist politics in earnest. He joined Mohandas Gandhi in the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917, one of a small group of Bihar-based colleagues — with Brajkishore Prasad, J.B. Kripalani and others — who organised the collection of testimony from indigo cultivators and later ran schools and welfare work in the district. The campaign marked the start of Prasad's long association with Gandhi and with Congress politics in Bihar, and he went on to give up his legal practice to devote himself to the nationalist movement.

Congress leadership and imprisonment

Prasad became a prominent Congress organiser in Bihar through the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s and rose within the party leadership over the following two decades, including relief and organisational work following the major Bihar earthquake of 1934. He was imprisoned repeatedly by the colonial government for his role in civil disobedience campaigns, including during the Civil Disobedience Movement of the early 1930s and the Quit India Movement of 1942, when much of the senior Congress leadership was detained for extended periods, in Prasad's case for close to three years. He served as Congress president in 1934 and 1939, and again in 1947 during the transfer of power, presiding over the party through the final negotiations for independence and Partition.

Constituent Assembly and the presidency

Prasad was elected president of the Constituent Assembly of India in December 1946, presiding over its sessions through the drafting and adoption of the Constitution of India, which came into force on 26 January 1950. On the same day he was elected the first President of India by the Constituent Assembly acting as a provisional parliament, and he was subsequently re-elected, serving two full terms until 1962 — the only person to hold the office for more than one term to date. As president, he generally exercised the role within its constitutionally limited, largely ceremonial bounds, though he was at times reported to have pressed his own views privately on legislation such as the Hindu Code Bills.