Dispatch #59: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
In this dispatch we will examine the 'trinity' of liberty, equality and fraternity that are the hallmarks of the Preamble to the Constitution
It is quite possible for this new born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.
This was Dr Ambedkar, in his famous speech in the Constituent Assembly, on 25th November 1949. Revisiting his speech in 2022 one can only say that his prophecy still stands true. That day he gave three warnings which, if unheeded, might cost India her democratic system. He warned us against choosing the path of anarchy, giving away our liberties at the feet of a leader and prioritizing political democracy over social democracy.
His first warning was that if India does not abandon protests and bloody revolutions as methods to achieve social and economic objectives then this ‘Grammar of Anarchy’ will undermine Constitutional methods. He urged us to ‘hold fast to constitutional methods’. His second warning was on avoiding hero-worship or showing disproportionate amounts of devotion for a leader. While giving this warning, he reminded us what JS Mill once cautioned when he said ‘not to lay liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enables him to subvert their institutions’. The third warning was around the sequencing of social democracy and political democracy. He urged us to make our political democracy a social democracy. By social democracy, Ambedkar meant a way of life that gives primacy to the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. He considered these principles as a ‘trinity’.
He added:
They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them. We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.
- Ambedkar
This was not the first time Ambedkar emphasized social democracy over political democracy. In the ‘Annihilation of Caste’ (AOC) in the 1930s, he engaged with the idea of social reform versus political reform. He argued that social reform is a precursor to political reform since the caste system in India acts as a deterrent in forming the real society. The isolation and discrimination, that has their roots in caste, has given birth to the anti-social spirit. The anti-social spirit prevails when one group ‘has interests of its own which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is protection of what it has got.’ He further added that the notion of purity and the prejudice that follows has resulted in the deprivation of fellow-feeling in Indian society.
He was always very apprehensive about relying too heavily on political reforms while totally ignoring the social reforms. In his book ‘India’s Founding Moment’, author Madhav Khosla argued that precisely for the same reason Ambedkar wanted a strong central state rather than village republics as idealized by Gandhi. Only a strong state, using the Constitutional authority, can transform the society and act as an antidote to regressive social forces. According to him the sequencing of social and political reforms is important. Social reforms should precede political reforms. It is precisely the same idea of social and political mobilization that Amit Ahuja has addressed in his book ‘Mobilizing the Marginalised’. Ahuja argues that political parties representing dalits in states like Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra have not been great electoral successes because these states have had a history of strong social mobilizations. Hence the SCs in these states already have some sort of organizational structure outside the political realm. On the other hand dalit politial parties in UP or Bihar have played a dominant role in national politics and have also formed the government at the state level. This was possible because of the absence of any form of social mobilization in these two states. The dalits have to organize themselves politically to demand welfare and other rights from the state. The dalits in TN and Maharashtra are better-off than their counterparts in UP or Bihar only because in the former set of states social mobilization happened before political mobilization as compared to the latter set of states.
For Ambedkar, an ideal society would be based on liberty, equality and fraternity. He equated fraternity with democracy and remarked that it enables free modes of contact with others. For him fraternity was ‘an attitude of respect and reverence towards one's fellow men’. Liberty, according to Ambedkar, would mean the right to free movement, right to property and also the right to choose one’s profession. On the idea of equality, he first highlighted the origins of inequality: physical heredity, social inheritance in terms of family, education etc. and finally unequal outcomes due to an individual’s own efforts. While he justified being treated unequally on the basis of an individual’s own efforts, he claimed that unequal treatment due to social capital, inheritance, connections and wealth would not be a ‘selection of the able’ but a ‘selection of the privileged’.
Author Aakash Singh Rathore in his book ‘Ambedkar’s preamble: A secret history of the Constitution of India’ has narrated the story how the trinity of liberty,equality and fraternity made its way into the preamble to the Constitution.
Ambedkar’s first intervention in connection to the trinity was to change the ‘freedom’ clause from Nehru’s Objectives Resolution to the ‘liberty’ clause in his ‘Proposed Preamble’ from States and Minorities which was later adopted in 1949. Hence the ‘freedom of thought, expression, worship, vocation, association……’ was changed to ‘liberty of thought, expression, belief,faith and worship…..’. One of the reasons for changing freedom to liberty in the preamble, according to Rathore, is that since Ambedkar added the fraternity clause (more on this later), the catchphrase ‘freedom, equality and fraternity’ would have sounded odd. But there are other reasons as well.
Ambedkar was always against the Gandhian version of the Constitution based on village republics and the idea of ‘Swaraj’. He would find Hindu majoritarian undertones in the association of freedom and spiritualised idea of Swaraj by Gandhi. He understood Swaraj as freedom for Hindu majority, while keeping the ‘depressed class’ or Dalits still subjugated. He distrusted Gandhi’s sincerity about Dalit welfare, especially after the Poona Pact. According to him, Gandhian Swaraj or freedom means freedom from foreign domination while keeping the social order intact, which allowed one caste to dominate the other. Because of this reason he preferred using liberty rather than the Gandhian notion of freedom, in the preamble.
Rathore further explains that:
The long history of the national movement, the conceptual status of Swaraj within it, the mystification of the term ‘freedom’ in relation to Swaraj, and the almost universal exclusion of the untouchables from the predominant understanding of both concepts were among the overarching factors that provoked Dr Ambedkar to eschew those easy associations in his newly conceived preamble. If the concept of freedom was contaminated by a Brahmanically imbrued Swaraj, then why risk its residue in the very document that articulates liberation from caste oppression as every Dalit’s birthright? Liberty, forget Swaraj, is every Indian’s birthright- Dalits and non-Dalits alike.
Liberty, then, was far more preferable than freedom. Dalit liberation, which preconditioned and provided the barometer for the achievement of every Indian’s freedom, both seventy years ago and today, was, in Dr Ambedkar’s view, the very essence of the revolution that was signalled by the Preamble to India’s Constitution.
-Rathore
Ambedkar’s idea on equality can be found in the set of books that he wrote on the history of equality in India. This collection of books was aptly titled as ‘Revolution and counter-revolution in ancient India’. Through this collection, Ambedkar chronicled the rise and fall of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent. He regarded Buddhism as the most egalitarian religion. Buddhism, argues Rathore in the book, was ‘a revolution against the inequities of caste and gender inequality, and equality was the fundamental principle of that revolution’. The counter-revolution happened on three fronts:
Politically: When Pushyamitra Shunga vanquished the Mauryan dynasty and persecuted Buddhists
Legally: When the Buddhist egalitarianism was destroyed by Dharmashastras and Manusmriti
Ideologically: By the rigid caste system
For Ambedkar, the Constitution was the counter to the counter-revolution against egalitarianism.
Rathore writes:
The equality clause as it appears in the final draft of the Preamble may seem to be stated sparsely. But as was revealed by an exploration of Ambedkar’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India, the clause can be understood to encapsulate the entire march of the civilizational history of India’s egalitarian revolution.
-Rathore
In the book, Rathore claims that it was Ambedkar who added the fraternity clause to the Preamble which was absent from Nehru’s Objectives Resolution. This was not the first time Ambedkar dabbled with the idea of fraternity. His concept evolved from 1936 when he wrote the AOC speech for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal up till the 1950s when he adopted Buddhism. He has used other terms like ‘sangathan’ and ‘Maitri’ or ‘Metta’ for fraternity at different junctures of his intellectual engagement with the idea of fraternity. The fraternity clause which Ambedkar entered into the draft Preamble on 6 February 1948 went something like this:
“Fraternity, assuring the dignity of every individual without distinction of caste or creed”
This was completely Ambedkar’s articulation of fraternity which he equated with the dignity of individuals. He was drawing heavily from his own writings from the 1930s, especially the AOC, where he systematically demolished the legitimacy of Varna system and caste in India.
Later, the members of the Drafting Committee added the terms ‘class’ and ‘nation’ to the fraternity clause which read something like this:
“Fraternity, without distinction of caste, class or creed, so as to assure the dignity of every individual and the unity of the Nation”
In several sittings of the Drafting Committee between 11 to 21 February, 1948, the clause was amended again and it was this version that finally went to the Preamble:
“Fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the Nation”
When Ambedkar sent the draft Constitution to the president of the Constituent Assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad, he enclosed a note with the draft that had this written on it:
“The committee has added a clause about fraternity in the Preamble although it does not occur in the Objectives Resolution. The committee felt that the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now and that this particular aim of the new Constitution should be emphasized by special mention in the Preamble.”
When he was writing this note, Ambedkar would have been thinking about how caste in India has destroyed the ‘public spiritedness’; ‘demoralized’ and ‘disorganized’ Indian society.
Ambedkar added:
An anti-social spirit is found wherever one group has ‘interests of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is protection of what it has got. This anti-social spirit, this spirit of protecting its own interests is as much a marked feature of the different castes in their isolation from one another as it is of nations in their isolation. The Brahmin’s primary concern is to protect “his interest” against those of the non-Brahmins and the non-Brahmin’s primary concern is to protect their interests against those of the Brahmins. The Hindus, therefore, are not merely an assortment of castes but they are so many warring groups each living for itself and for its selfish ideal.
-Ambedkar
In his book titled ‘Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy’, author Aishwary Kumar argues that Ambedkar was a radical thinker. Certainly, his contribution of giving the trinity- liberty,equality and fraternity- to the Preamble is one of the several other debts that this country owes him.