Modi’s Selective Reading of Gandhi Turns Duties Into a Tool of Authoritarianism

In his letter to citizens on Constitution Day, November 26, the prime minister waxed eloquent about the people’s primary responsibility to perform their duties – without, at any point, upholding their justiciable fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution or other constitutional guarantees central to leading a dignified life.

In that letter, he referred to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Bhagwan Birsa Munda, and Shri Guru Teg Bahadur, and fallaciously claimed that they gave primacy to duties, which Modi said “the Constitution also emphasises through a dedicated chapter on fundamental duties in Article 51A.”

“These duties guide us on how to collectively achieve social and economic progress,” he wrote, invoking Mahatma Gandhi, who, according to Modi, “believed that a duty well performed creates a responding right and that real rights are a result of the performance of duty.”

Modi acted against Gandhi’s resolution on Fundamental Rights

Modi is right in quoting Gandhi’s view that the rights of individuals flow from the duties they perform. But this is only one part of Gandhi’s thinking on the relationship between rights and duties. While stressing the need for citizens to discharge their duties, Gandhi never shied away from proclaiming that they must simultaneously fight to secure their rights – and defend them with all their strength when those rights are violated by the state, by entrenched customs, or by regressive social practices.

Gandhi himself moved a resolution on Fundamental Rights in 1931 at the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress. It included, among other things, freedom of the press, freedom to profess religion, equal rights and obligations for all citizens without discrimination on the basis of sex, and above all, religious neutrality of the state. All these principles are integral to the Constitution of India. Tragically, Modi is violating all these rights.

This was glaringly evident on the eve of Constitution Day, November 25, when, as prime minister representing the state, he unfurled the saffron flag atop the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, thereby violating the ideal of the state’s neutrality towards religion. Earlier, on January 22, 2024, while participating in the consecration of the same temple, he again breached this neutrality by declaring that “Ram is Rashtra” – Ram is the State – and “Dev is Desh,” a deity is the country. His actions and pronouncements directly negate his duty to uphold the Constitution’s vision of India as a secular republic, which remains part of its basic structure.

Gandhi flagged rights and duties simultaneously

Modi selectively quotes Gandhi to defend his indefensible effort to assign primacy to duties over rights. In fact, while Gandhi held that rights cannot be obtained without performing duty, he emphasised with equal insistence that rights must be safeguarded with vigour.

In a letter to M.S. Masani on June 4, 1934 – almost three years after he moved the resolution on Fundamental Rights – Gandhi wrote: “What is necessary is that labourers or workers should know their rights and should also know how to assert them.” At the same time, he added, “since there never has been any right without a corresponding duty, in my opinion a manifesto is incomplete without emphasising the necessity of performance of duty and showing what that duty is.”

This dual emphasis on rights and duties was central to his philosophy of satyagraha, the fulcrum of India’s non-violent freedom struggle. It makes clear that, for Gandhi, the rights–duties binary never meant elevating duties by erasing the rights of the people.

Gandhi’s apprehensions

More importantly, Modi has fulfilled Gandhi’s long-standing fear that a ruler in India would urge citizens to perform their duties while arrogating all rights to himself. On June 28, 1947, speaking at a prayer meeting in New Delhi, Gandhi warned: “He who is ruler for a moment gets it into his head that he has been created by God solely to rule over people, that he has the right to hang some, to imprison others and to fine some others. He wants that all the duties should be discharged by the people. He says he has derived his right to rule from God.”

Modi’s Constitution Day letter does precisely what Gandhi feared only two months before independence.

During the 2024 general election campaign, Modi made the preposterous claim that God had sent him with a purpose and that he was conscious of being a “non-biological” being. Now he expects citizens to perform their duties without offering any example of how he has fulfilled his own.

Gandhi cautioned: “…there are no such two classes here that one of them should exercise only rights and the other discharge only duties. If a ruler shirks his duties while the people do theirs, then the people become the ruler.” A ruler, he said, survives only by doing his duty and considering himself a trustee of the people. But, he warned, “if he becomes authoritarian he cannot survive in this age.”

By expecting citizens to perform duties while he himself exercises rights, Modi behaves like an authoritarian claiming divine sanction to rule — putting at risk the very survival of India’s Constitution and democracy.

S.N. Sahu served as an officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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