NEARLY EIGHTY YEARS AGO, as the tricolour rose over an independent India, a nation dared to dream of what freedom might mean. Gandhi imagined a secular India where no religion could claim primacy over others. Ambedkar insisted that political democracy could not survive without liberty, equality and fraternity. They disagreed on many things, but both agreed that the Republic had to belong to all its citizens equally.
In the years since 2014, that idea has increasingly given way to another. We have watched a politics built on identities that divide us: Hindu v. Muslim, Majority v. Minority, Nationalist v. Anti-National. Before we are citizens, students, workers, farmers or even the unemployed, we are first defined through these divisions.
This is not simply the unfortunate excess of election rhetoric. It reflects a larger ideological goal. Hindutva, as developed by the RSS and the wider Sangh Parivar, imagines India through a Hindu civilisational identity. The BJP has transformed that ideological inheritance into an extraordinarily successful electoral politics by persuading Indians to see one another not first as citizens or fellow human beings, but as adversaries. The result is a political binary: an “us” to defend and a “them” to fear.
Against this politics stands one of the Constitution’s most fascinating ideas. Fraternity. It is perhaps the most neglected word in the Indian Constitution. We remember liberty, equality, and secularism. We argue about socialism. But fraternity? Fraternity sounds almost embarrassingly gentle in this age of political aggression. And yet it may be the most radical constitutional idea of them all.
The Preamble asks the Republic to promote “Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” Article 51A, which goes further, posits it as a fundamental duty of every citizen to “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood” across religious, linguistic, regional and sectional differences. The constitutional demand could hardly be more at odds with a politics built on division. Fraternity cannot be built while teaching people to fear one another. A common brotherhood is impossible when citizens are constantly reminded that their neighbour belongs to another community, another tribe, maybe even another India. The loss of fraternity, therefore, was not accidental but a consequence of this politics.
