‘We, the People’, and our imagined community

Today, our nation stands deeply divided and polarised, with no fraternal feelings either within communities

Society is an aggregation of individuals, and therefore, the primary unit is an individual. Millions of individuals aggregated on the basis of certain commonalities, such as co-habiting in one geographical location, shared history, culture, race, religion, language, etc., do form a nation. Benedict Anderson, one of the foremost thinkers on the concept of ‘nation’, defines it as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.

“The nation is imagined as ‘limited’ because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion people, has finite if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations”. It is imagined as a ‘sovereign’ because within the realm, the Ruler will have the supreme power to control and guide the affairs of its citizens. “Finally, it is imagined as a ‘community’ because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this ‘fraternity’ that makes it possible, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”, says Anderson.

Having considered this, let us now turn to the ‘imagination’ of our nation as seen in the making of our Constitution. That is the vision document that sets out what we wish to be as a nation. We must remember that our Constitution was drafted in the background of the partition of our country into two nations on the basis of religion, resulting in the death and displacement of millions of people.

Society is also a segregation of individuals. It segregates people on the same grounds that it aggregates, such as race, religion, caste, language, etc. Thus, on the eve of independence, our society came to be aggregated and segregated at the same time. Clearly, there was a fragmentation of the imagination, too, as to what we wanted to be as a nation.

Pakistan, being born as the ‘Islamic Republic’ went down the slippery slope of religious extremism in the next 70 years, with every group claiming to be ‘more Islamic than thou’, and its Army becoming the ultimate defender of the faith and arbiter of rival claims. Indian leaders, with an avowed intent not to reduce India to a ‘Hindu Pakistan’, kept the ethnic and religious identities at bay and strove to resurrect the ‘individual’ at the centre of the political and juridical cosmos, instead of placing the ‘community’, or a communal identity, as the basic unit of society. This vision was reflected in the Constitution, wherein all the rights, duties and obligations devolved to the individual and not his group identity, such as caste, religion, and linguistic frames.

Since religion remained a deeply eviscerating part of our independence, those who stayed back in India soon got into the act of healing the differences and reconciling with the given reality to build a new nation. Learning to live with differences and accepting and accommodating multiple and pluralistic faiths, languages and cultures became not only a normative idea but an existential necessity. Unity in diversity was not merely a slogan but a deeply felt need.

A liberal, secular democracy with socialist leanings determined to reduce poverty and inequality, both social and economic, became the primary objective of the first generation of our leaders.

In his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, on the eve of the adoption of the Constitution, Babasaheb Ambedkar articulated the ‘imagination’ of our nation:

“Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it, social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as the principles of life. These principles are not to be treated as separate forms in a trinity. They form a union of trinity…Liberty cannot be divorced from Equality, and 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 and Equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.”

Thus, ‘Fraternity’ came to be at the core of the ‘imagination of our nation’, not because it was a noble ideal but because it was a necessary pre-requisite to prevent further mutinies, divisions and more bloodshed. Gautam Bhatia, the well-known Supreme Court Lawyer, writes in his book The Transformative Constitution, “as Ambedkar visualised it, the principle of fraternity would interrogate, undermine, and eventually break down the hierarchical social relations that over the centuries had come to be treated as ‘natural’. Fraternity would reject ‘forms of domination’, characterised by ‘social patterns’, power relations and other systematic structures.” What was sought here was a fundamental alteration in the structure of Hindu society. Similarly, Equality and Fraternity were also our solemn promises to the minorities.

This ‘imagination’ of our nation is now sought to be torn asunder. All the pledges that ‘We, the People’ made to ourselves in the Constitution are now being undermined, starting with Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Note how both Anderson and Ambedkar stress ‘Fraternity’ as the core constituent of a nation. The absence of fraternal feelings, or a sense of horizontal comradeship between the majority community and the minorities and within the ‘layers of graded inequality’ that have existed for centuries in the ‘Chaturvarna’ system -- and more particularly with those outside the ‘Chaturvarna’ system, the ‘Panchamas’ – was the concern that agitated Ambedkar.

Today, more than 70 years after the articulation of that vision, our nation stands deeply divided and polarised, with no fraternal feelings either within the majority community or between the majority and the minority communities. The seeds of ill-will and hatred have been spread far and wide by the very leaders who have sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, while often repeating the mantra of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and claiming to be inspired by the ideals of Swami Vivekananda. May better sense prevail, lest we create another Pakistan out of ourselves. Nations may exist without Justice and Equality, but not without Fraternity.

Postscript: More than 2,900 cases of communal or religious rioting were registered in India between 2017 to 2021, the Union Minister of State for Home told the Rajya Sabha on December 7, 2022.

(The writer is a former Cabinet Secretariat official)