Let’s celebrate the will of our historic forebears and act on unfulfilled promise
In the popular imagination, India is a spatial entity. It has a map, a shape—it is a piece of the earth cut out from the rest of the land on this planet, delimited by strict ideas about what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. It is this entity that marks the 75th year of its independence today. That milestone, though, is defined in time. Seen on that axis, India also has a temporal being. That India is vastly older, and the cultural-civilisational legacy it has bequeathed us is substantially more fluid in space. Its borders were shifting, its shapes protean, and the histories it created were marked as much by mobility and traffic as by sedimentation. That India is more a river than an island. We inhabit an amalgam of those two Indias today.
India born on August 15, 1947, is, therefore, part of a larger journey. Even to define it, we have to refer to events beyond that timeline, to the two centuries of unfreedom we experienced under British colonialism. On that momentous day, we see it in an act of triumphant self-creation done in clear contradistinction to the epoch that preceded it. Fundamentally, we were to be free. Freedom, at that moment, was an accomplishment and yet also an ideal to aspire for.
The foreign yoke had been thrown off, but it would be a matter of celebration only for the elite classes, many of whom had collaborated with and continued to prosper under the British if this new freedom was not equally available to everyone. For freedom to be real, every Indian had to own it, be a part of it, feel and breathe it. Like water flowing equally to all parts of a container, freedom had to be evenly and universally present. And for a historically stratified society, this could only be the start of a journey, an aspiration.
We furnished ourselves with a roadmap for this new journey—a Constitution that was a pioneer in the world on many counts. Primarily, it declared political equality without any caveats. Caste, religion, gender, region, ethnicity, none of these usual differentiators would matter. Each Indian is invested with the right to vote, and that vote has equal value whoever it comes from. Social equality, as the founders of the nation envisaged it, should flow logically from that as a consequence. Economic equality, to the extent it was thought about, was perhaps to be the consequence of that consequence. Optimism, therefore, was built into the source code that runs us as a nation.
The reality has turned out a bit more complex, of course. Those who had been ambivalent or sceptical—including B R Ambedkar, who famously distinguished between political and social equality—proved to have a deeper grasp of the challenges that would confront us. Democracy has many meanings, defined along many axes, but in a basal performative way, it is about elections—a mechanism through which the demos decide how we are to be governed. And here, the vote, defined in classic liberal terms as an ‘individual’ right, turned out to be subject to behavioural patterns that could only be defined by seeing it enacted on a ‘collective’ plane.
There was a founding paradox here. We were to create a system where even the lone voice of heterodoxy has to be respected, where even a minority of one has equal value. But in practical terms, we sought to do it via a system that privileged the majority opinion and thus created grounds for such opinion to be manufactured and manipulated. Class, caste, religion, ethnicity, even gender...all the various forms of collective being that had been theoretically eliminated were always in the reckoning.
In August 2022, as we look back at that rose-tinged horizon and pivot to our often grimy present, we must find ourselves called to action on a promise yet to be fulfilled. While we negotiate a meaningful treaty with modernity, we cannot forget the Dalit boy killed in a Rajasthan village for merely drinking water from a common pot—in that same August of 2022. Or women, facing layer upon layer of discrimination, even in elite institutions in our cosmopolises.
Or our minorities, on whom must never be raised questions of belonging. Or the Adivasis, the most deeply Indian amongst us. If we are not to be unworthy inheritors, we must find ourselves enjoined to the task of giving the ideals of 1947 flesh and lifeblood. What we must celebrate is the will of our historical forbears, those who gave us the capacity to think and act in pursuit of those universal human values.