The Republic and ‘We the People’
On January 26, 2026, India celebrated the 77th anniversary of the promulgation of the Constitution of India. The Preamble begins with the words ‘We, the People of India’, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign, Socialist, Secular Democratic Republic’. The people of India also resolved to secure to the citizens justice, social, economic and political, liberty, equality and fraternity. This is as it should be. The concept of the Republic is centred on popular sovereignty held and exercised by ‘We the People’. Seventy-seven years after the promulgation of the Constitution we are compelled to ask the question – where are the people of India in a free constitutionally democratic India? The people we should recollect are not a demographic but a political category; the holders of popular sovereignty.
The promulgation of the Constitution was an important milestone in our history. But it was not a magic wand that waved away the mega-story of social and economic unfreedom in the country. We promised ourselves and our fellow citizens freedom from want, but traditional and new modes of unfreedom persist, they blight the lives of millions of people, think poverty, think ill-health, think child malnutrition, think slums with festering open drains where people are condemned to live, and think of young people digging into rubbish bins to retrieve anything of value.
It is possible to eradicate social and economic freedom. It is difficult but witness how Scandinavian societies have managed to secure a fair life for their people. For that we need a caring society, collective action that sensitises the people to the grammar of freedom, and a sensitive power elite. We need to foster solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, and in Frantz Fanon’s words the ‘Wretched of the Earth’. We have to be writers, poets, dramatists, public speakers and literary figures with a conscience and purpose, who through prose and poetry fire sentiments of fraternity.
We need to be conscious that political democracy falters if the government and the people do not care about others, about their ill health and misery, or about the fact that a particular community is subjected to double disadvantage by reasons of ethnicity/caste/gender/religion. Without fraternity, we continue to live in the Hobbesian state of nature, isolated and cut off from civic virtues that complete us as human beings. Fraternity enables us to come together in networks of shared concerns about illbeing, establishes relationships of trust with our fellow citizen and establishes that we care, or should care about those fellow citizens who do not have access to the same advantages of life as we have.
Dr Ambedkar was painfully aware of the contradictions of Indian society and the promises of the Preamble. He termed public conscience fraternity. But because of the caste system that created self-contained units mutually indifferent to each other, there is no shared sympathy in the community. Someone can be treated with contempt but there is no outrage. No one rises in protest at the sight of a fellow citizen not being treated as human. As part of a way of way of thinking that reduced Hindus to caste, caste Hindus did not see the untouchables as like them, let alone as fellow members of a community.
Today, we are polarised along the lines of manufactured histories
Dr Ambedkar was prescient. Today we have become indifferent to atrocities against the marginalised castes, women, transgender people, and our fellow citizens who belong to the minority community. Today we ask where the people who care about each other are? Today, we are polarised along the lines of manufactured histories. Our, admittedly, fragile togetherness has been further shredded. We have come to inhabit ghettos of the mind and imaginaries. How many of us bothered to mourn the loss of shared culture, a culture that allowed to think freely without being constricted by taboos and imaginary walls?
We forget the history of shared traditions, because if the past weighs heavily on the present; the present weighs even more heavily upon the past. It is time that we recollect our shared history and legacy. We must know our past with all its glorious victories and abject defeats, all its blemishes and its warts, everything that tells us why we must remember history and come to terms with the past. Above all we must give the past its due if we want to provide an alternative to naked, brutal power that has become the reason to divide a political entity called the people.
Sadly we see around us manifestations of power, not of fraternity. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass says: ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less. ‘The question is’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master – that’s all.’ The ruling class speaks and its words become masters of us all.
There is a lesson we learn from here. Before we set out to examine and reexamine history, we must know who is writing it. Study the historian before you study the facts, advises the great historian E.H Carr. The facts, he goes on to suggest, are not like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. ‘They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the fisherman catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use-these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wishes to catch.’
And the biggest fish in our society is communalism. Dodging the heels of nationalism the reduction of Indians to Hindus and Muslims continues to haunt histories written by court historians. It relentlessly feeds into hate-speech and physical acts of violence. For extremist elements of the Hindu right wing our Muslim fellow citizens have neither names nor distinct biographies; neither different belief systems nor languages. Nor do they have unique political affiliations. The minority is just a sack of potatoes and a mash of potatoes as Karl Marx had once said of the proletariat. Perhaps it is easier to inflict violence on people when they are faceless, and when they belong to a group that has been stereotyped and vilified in and through the politics of hate.
Today, memories of the complexities of 700 years of our history, and memory of what Islamic cultures gave to a Hindu civilisation and vice versa, has been smothered by ‘Hindu only’ rhetoric. Shrill demands that the wrongs inflicted by Mughal rulers in the past should be rectified, mainly by bringing down mosques, and by the reconstruction of temples are doing the rounds. Revenge is heady but deadly. It inflicts a thousand cuts not only on the body of the so-called enemy but on the body politic.
Communalism has gravely harmed Indian society because Indians have become indifferent to the plight of other members of the Republic. The categorisation of Indians into religious slots, and the essentialisation of religious groups, exactly as the colonial government had done, is one of the gravest misfortunes of our history. We ‘the people of India’ gave to ourselves a constitution, but we the people of India have been once again divided by cynical power politics. This is the tragedy of contemporary India; the closing in of the Indian mind through stories of enmity manufactured by politicians. The brunt of this fabricated enmity has fallen on the minority community of Muslims.
The poet Jigar Moradabadi in 1960 wrote searingly of the difference between what politicians do, and what we as human beings who are conscious of a shared humanity do; ‘Unka jo kaam hai, woh ahl-e-siyasat jaanein/mera paigam mohabbat hai, jahan tak pahunche (Let the politicians do their job, my message is that of love wherever it reaches). Let us at least begin to think how well-meaning citizens can move the country forward, and prevent its slide into un-necessary social divisions. One way of doing this is to focus on our shared inheritance.
On the 650th anniversary of poet and statesman Amir Khusrau on May 28, 1956, Nehru delivered a speech titled ‘Amir Khusrau – Symbol of India’s Composite Culture’. India has been after a dream he said. It has been realised at times and slipped away at other times. What is that dream? ‘Many streams and rivers of ideas and languages and cultures have flowed into India from other countries and joined her vast cultural bloodstream…For thousands of years, I would say, it has always been India’s consistent effort to synthesise and adopt the thoughts and ideas that flowed in, and to change and be changed by them.’
Hindus have a great deal in common with the world of Islam and vice versa
Once we recognise that Hindus have a great deal in common with the world of Islam and vice versa, we can restore to the centre of consciousness our sanjhi virasat. We might have the opportunity of inhabiting once again a rich world of many cultures that gave to India magnificent architecture among other gifts of history. Nowhere is the coming together of two forms of aesthetics more apparent than in art and architecture under Mughal emperors. Mughal style is constantly underpinned by a strict geometric structure in accordance with the arts of the Islamic world, writes George Michell. This had a direct impact on India. While the principles of Mughal style are commonly found throughout the Islamic world, the patterns used in India may be distinguished from those that appear in the buildings and arts of other Muslim countries through their expression in indigenous materials, textures and colours. Take for example the lotus finials on the domes of Mughal mosques and tombs, and flowering plants on the borders of marble panels, woven sashes and shawls.
Vivid compositions crammed with identifiable details of everyday life illustrated the Persian translations of Ramayana and Bhagwata Purana that told the world about the wonder of Rama.
When we appreciate the beauty of our shared inheritance in the form of delicate and intricate weaves, gloriously sculpted domes, miniature paintings that recreate the amorous love affair of Radha and Krishna during the Holi festival, and tremendously inspiring landscapes, the smog produced by toxic court historians of our times clears. We are able to think, we exercise the freedom to appreciate, imbibe, and appropriate art forms that resonate with shared traditions. We think. Art is neither solely Hindu nor completely Muslim, it is sheer beauty, it belongs to us, it constitutes the aesthetic context of our lives that allows us to think beyond the here and now towards infinity. It is then that we understand the significance of thinking freely, because we do so in the context of a creative culture constituted by shared legacies.
And when we think beyond the world of inanities, we are free of, well, inanities. Our thinking gives us an insight into a different kind of history. This history speaks to us and tells us of rulers reaching out to their people irrespective of religion, of people coming together in webs of shared beliefs, of Hindus serving in the Muslim emperor’s army, and Muslims serving in the armies of Hindu kings, of Mughal monarchs marrying into Hindu families and adopting their language and rituals, and of policies of tolerance for other religions.
Take the gifted artist Syed Haider Raza who had in 2013 drawn upon Gandhi’s philosophy of tolerance and inclusiveness to create magnificent art. The core thematic unity of his works was sympathy for the pain of others, prayer, truth and peace. According to his biographer Yashodhara Dalmia, Raza drew upon many religions to generate creative energy.
In his work Sanmati, the deep orb at the centre creates a spiritual geometry formulating Gandhi’s favourite prayer which speaks of the oneness of all religions. The lines speak of Allah and Ishwar as names of the same God (Allah Ishwar Tero Naam). ‘The glowing circle creates bands of yellow, ochre, blue, red and its nuanced shades which radiate and transform in different directions. A believer himself, Raza, until the end of his life would visit churches, temples, and mosques, losing himself in meditation.’
There is much to be learnt from Nehru
Think of how deprived, how desolate and how much poorer the philosophy of art and our visual culture would have been if Raza had not looked beyond the religion and culture into which he was born, towards the creative genius of other cultures, and to Gandhi’s message of peaceful coexistence. This has been lost to us under the rule of a crude majoritarian ideology.
Or take the issue of language. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that the two languages that influenced Muslim thought were Arabic and Persian. The influence of Persian has no element of religion about it, the language and the traditions associated with it came to India in the course of thousands of years and impressed themselves powerfully over north India. Persia was the France of the East sending its culture and language to all its neighbours.
There is much to be learnt from Nehru. He helps us to recollect that Persian was the language of the court, of record keeping, of the judicial process, of poetry and of literature. It was the language of high culture, and of classical education of both Hindus and Muslims. When Ram Mohan Roy, the founder of the Bengal Renaissance, wrote his first work Tuft-e-Muwaddin, he wrote it in Persian, while the preface was written in Arabic.
Finally let us recollect the Sufis. A work on Sufi Poems: A Medieval Anthology compiled and translated by Martin Lings begins with the proposition that the Hindu expression of the Supreme Identity has necessarily its equivalent in all other religions. In Islam of which Sufism is the innermost aspect, the truth is expressed in the poem by Mansur-Al-Hallaj: ‘I saw my Lord with the eye of the Heart/ I said: ’Who art Thou?’. He answered ‘Thou’. We might well be reading a commentary on the Advaita. These are the memories out of which a people are made, not by military parades and crude floats.
Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.
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