By Rajmohan Gandhi. Speaking Tiger. November 2024. Paperback: Rs. 399..RAJMOHAN Gandhi, one of India’s most illustrious historians, has set himself to the task of unpacking the idea of fraternity in the Indian Constitution and body politic.The word fraternity, as per the Oxford Dictionary, refers to ‘‘a feeling of friendship and support that exists between the members of a group.’’ In history, before the French Revolution, the sense of fraternity was limited to religious groups, ascriptive identities such as caste groups and the elite noble families who ruled the realm.After the French Revolution, a new template of the ‘nation’ emerged. The word ‘nation’ emerged in the French as a fraternising political motif of the underclass when the Parisian crowds gathered in front of the Bastille prison demanding the release of their comrades.The delay of the representatives returning from the Bastille as they sat for lunch with the prison authorities led the crowd to berserk and storm the prison. Later, when the threat of aristocratic retribution loomed, the Third Estate labelled itself as the ‘National Assembly’.The word ‘national’ was intended to outflank those who did not owe allegiance to the revolutionary cause. When the Napoleonic war raged across Europe, it spread nationalism and republican ideals. Even the Haitian Revolution (slave revolt) invoked the spirit of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’..Even the Haitian Revolution (slave revolt) invoked the spirit of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’..Haitian coins were embossed with these three slogans. It was another tragedy of history that Napoleon sent his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to crush the uprising.What was the state of India when all this unfolded in Europe? The East India Company was in a commanding position after the grant of Dewani in 1764. Tipu Sultan of Mysore welcomed the news of the French Revolution. Both Mysore and France exchanged entreaties over a possible alliance against a common enemy, Britain. But nothing solid materialised.By some quirk of fate, Charles (Lord) Cornwallis, a British officer on the losing side in America, became Governor General of India. During 1791–92, he led two massive military campaigns to subdue Tipu. He also masterminded the 1793 Permanent Settlement in Bengal which strengthened landlordism and, in the long run, undermined fraternity since most of the parasitic landlords belonged to the upper castes and the semi-servile peasants belonged to the lower castes..Book review: Prof. Upendra Baxi’s life of law.In the course of events, one Mirza Ahmad Khan from Gujarat visited Paris in 1794. He learnt French in three months and translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man into Persian. Not much came out of it. The British had preferred the Dharmshastras as the legal code which kept the caste system intact.Jotiba Phule was perhaps the first to immerse himself perceptively into the dictums of the French Revolution. He had read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in full earnestness. He stressed the “unity of man and envisaged a society based on liberty, equality and fraternity in the place of caste hierarchy of the chatur varna system.”Caste was one of the most formidable stumbling blocks that made the manifestation of fraternity in India completely elusive.At the beginning of the book, Rajmohan Gandhi tells the sorry state of fraternity in India with the help of two tales. First is the story of a young B.R. Ambedkar who had travelled with his brothers to Masur. It was his first train ride..Jotiba Phule was perhaps the first to immerse himself perceptively into the dictums of the French Revolution..At the station, no bullock cart rider was ready to take the boys to their destination because of their caste. One rider relented and offered the reins of bullocks to the kids for fear of being polluted. The kids had a horrible night riding the cart.The second tale is about M.K. Gandhi (who also happens to be the author's grandfather). Gandhi recounted that during his childhood a sweeper named Uka used to come to his house to clean toilets. Mahatma Gandhi’s mother had forbidden him from touching Uka at all costs.When he queried his mother about the possibility of touching an Untouchable, she said that ‘‘the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch was to cancel the touch by touching any Mussulman passing by.’’To make the idea of fraternity manifest in a deeply divided India, Ambedkar called for a total “annihilation of caste” and urged his followers to practice “non-violence wherever possible; violence wherever necessary”.Gandhi, on his part, saw Untouchability as the biggest impediment. His was a non-violent approach to forging fraternity by pricking the upper caste’s conscience through persuasion.Despite the divergence between Ambedkar and Gandhi, both were oriented towards direct action. Ambedkar, in cases such as the Mahad march, forced his way through, whereas Gandhi, as shown in the book, made use of critical and violent circumstances to forge his idea of fraternity.For instance, during the ghastly riots of Noakhali, Gandhi urged upper-caste Hindu women to invite a Dalit every day to their homes and offer them food or ‘‘at least make him or her touch the food before you consume it.’’.Saurabh Kirpal’s new book offers a close examination of the 24-word equality provision in the Indian Constitution.In the Indian Constitution, the word fraternity is mentioned in the Preamble. It is linked to a citizen’s dignity and, immediately thereafter, to the nation’s unity and integrity. The first formal step towards achieving fraternity was the commitment to abolish caste prejudices and Untouchability in the Karachi Resolution of 1931.The Constituent Assembly was swift to abolish Untouchability during its deliberations. Reservations were instituted for the marginalised sections (ex-Untouchables and tribals). The bus was missed for achieving a deeper fraternity by denying Muslims and Christians a share in the reservation pie.Interestingly, Babu Jagjivan Ram, leader of the Untouchables within the Congress, and H.J. Khandekar, Congress stalwart from the Central Provinces, had recommended that seats should be reserved for religious minorities in the cabinet i.e., the executive.After lengthy discussions, however, the Minorities Sub-Committee, by the narrow margin of eight votes to seven, rejected a resolution establishing reserved seats for minorities in the cabinet.Returning to the Karachi Resolution era, the Poona Pact (1932) between Gandhi and Ambedkar was clinched after a battle of nerves. Post-victory, Gandhi did not have it easy with the orthodoxy within the Congress on the question of inter-caste fraternity.Rajmohan Gandhi shows that Gandhi supported two Bills piloted in the Central Legislature by Ranga Iyer. One pertained to the prohibition of discrimination against Dalits whilst the other strived to make it unlawful for an orthodox minority to bar Dalits from entering Hindu temples..Disagreeing, Gandhi told Patel, ‘‘They [the Dalits] could not be allowed to feel that they have been left to their fate.’’.Vallabhbhai Patel informed Gandhi that Madan Mohan Malviya and company, representing the orthodoxy within the Congress, had opposed Ranga Iyer’s Bills. Patel’s advice to Gandhi at this crucial juncture was to stay away and “let the two parties quarrel”.Disagreeing, Gandhi told Patel, ‘‘They [the Dalits] could not be allowed to feel that they have been left to their fate.’’ Unfortunately, Iyer was forced to withdraw his Bills. The orthodoxy and the so-called sanatanists also hit the streets and denounced Gandhi’s support of Iyer’s Bills.Rajmohan Gandhi also takes us through the American and French experiments in constitution-making. He shows that in both cases lofty ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity failed to include women, the Indigenous population and slaves.As per Gandhi’s indictment, ‘‘it is well known that in both countries an influential stream of politics is today driven by the insistence, whether or not openly articulated, that only a section of humanity is worthy of liberty, equality and fraternity’’ (p 64)..There is a kernel of truth in Gandhi’s words. The fact that ideas of enlightenment had their undoing at the hands of its architects was a theme that fuelled radical movements and radical thinkers in Europe. From Gracchus Babeuf to Karl Marx all thought on similar lines.Accepting Gandhi’s arguments, I would like to add that we cannot dispense with the slogans that arose from Europe because they were Eurocentric or rendered meaningless in the long run. Such exercise(s) have become fashionable among post-modern and post-colonial academics and the neo-right.In the preceding paragraphs, I mentioned the Haitian Revolution. During Napoleon’s onslaught, Polish and German soldiers fighting on behalf of the French army had defected and joined the revolting slaves. Crossing the colour line, they joined the slaves in a spirit of fraternity against the ill-treatment their countries had to face at the hands of Napoleon.On another occasion, a French army division was surprised by the fact that the slaves sang the revolutionary anthem La Marseillaise. In both cases, a sense of universality is discernible. This very universality of the ideas of enlightenment must be defended, especially when the flames of counter-revolution are raging in the contemporary political world.Fraternity, despite failing in France at the hands of Napoleon, had takers in a colony such as Haiti. All ideas of enlightenment had almost a similar fate. They were undone in the places of their origin but were taken over by those who suffered..After the French Revolution, a new template of the ‘nation’ emerged..Ambedkar had learnt his lesson about fraternity in the US from Prof. John Dewey. Dewey’s lesson that liberty alone is not enough unless it helps create “certain sorts of community”, i.e., fraternity, that respects the values of equality was repeated by Ambedkar during the Constituent Assembly debates.In 1949, Ambedkar said, ‘‘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 and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.’’This slender yet informative book by Rajmohan Gandhi must be welcomed and read by young lawyers, political scientists and historians. The language is very accessible. This makes the book palatable to the English-speaking educated laity of India.
