India must flex reason rather than muscle in honour of its republic
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s embrace of democracy has been affirmed many times over by the ‘power of the vote’ as a lived experience. That We the People live in a republic, with no hereditary right to rule, remains far more abstract in comparison.
Three-quarters of a century ago, whether democracy would endure was seen as our big challenge. In his last address to the Constituent Assembly after the ‘final reading’ of the Constitution, on 25 November 1949, B.R. Ambedkar made a case for ‘social democracy,’ based on a union of liberty, equality and fraternity.
If any of these were to be divorced from the other, he held, it would defeat “the very purpose of democracy." The weak link, in his view, was equality: “On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality, and in social and economic life we will have inequality." Equality denied for too long in the two other spheres, he feared, would imperil our political democracy. It was India’s status and credentials as a republic, though, that pre-occupied him in the years to follow.
In the West, the concept rode into public awareness on the back of revolutions. In France, royalty was ousted from power in a fit of hair-raising fury, but America snapped apart from the yoke of Britain’s monarchy by calmly declaring itself free before it sent ‘redcoats’ packing. In both cases, arguably, the stage was set by the 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine, a French immigrant, in the US.
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