All together now

The Constitution of a Republic may spell out the rights and liberties of citizens, but what about fraternity? No Constitution by itself can guarantee fraternity, but without it, rights and liberties become legal pieces of paper, or even instruments that the strong can use against the weak, as in any court of law.

Fraternity requires, first and foremost, that there be a basic set of resemblances between people. It is not that everybody must be the same, but at the foundational level they must be similar.

While equality and liberty can be enacted by law, fraternity requires to be carefully nurtured on account of its perpetual frailty. BR Ambedkar realised this perhaps more clearly than most of his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly.

Equality of rights, opportunities and even ends (such as in ‘reservations’) can be felicitously expressed in legal terms, and realised too, without too much difficulty.

Likewise, the liberty to express one’s views, or the liberty of movement and assembly can also be rather easily accomplished by law. In both cases they require upright enforcement agencies and a consistent executive disposition.

But when it comes to fraternity, however, we must pause and not let the rolling cadence of the trumpet calls dull our senses. Liberty, equality and fraternity are often expressed in the same breath, and they should, but they cannot be put to life, or made to work in an identical fashion.

Fraternity comes to the fore when citizens realise that their destinies are entwined and that their ambitions are interwoven. John Rawls, the political philosopher, once wrote that to establish fraternity citizens must recognise that they are involved in one other’s fate.

Unless there is a clear and unequivocal acceptance that all citizens share a baseline similarity for which reason there is an uncalculating respect for the other, fraternity and, with it, the idea of the Republic cannot develop.

While liberty and equality can be expressed unambiguously in terms of laws and even in the language of rights, fraternity is best put into effect through policies.

These policies must be customised to meet specific threats that divide citizens principally on account of the accidents of birth. Community, creed and economic divisions are the most persistent socially divisive forces and when these are sanctioned by birth it becomes all the more difficult for fraternity to come to life.

A good object lesson in the making of fraternity is France after the Third Republic in 1881.

The monarchy and the socialists had by then wasted themselves fighting each other giving room for the Republicans to take over power. The principal agenda of the Republicans was to create a basic set of resemblances among all its citizens.

In order to create a basic set of similarities between people the Third Republic set out to aggressively implement a state run educational system whereby all children in France would get quality education from the best instructors available.

These school teachers were referred to as Soldiers in Black (Hussar Noire) as they wore black suits and went about most determinedly in their task of creating the French citizen. The famous sociologist Emile Durkheim, also a Hussar Noire for a while, said that the first duty of a citizen was to resemble the other.

Through education, health and public services the Third Republic gave an object demonstration on how to create fraternity. At the time of the French Revolution only about 20 per cent of the people spoke French.

The Hussar Noire saw to it that over time everybody spoke French and read the same school books and this united France like never before. The effects of the Third Republic are still strong in France in spite of the contrary pressures exerted on it by the European Union.

Even today the French state makes sure that health, education, energy and transportation are world class and available to all its citizens.

If we want to make India a true republic it must address the question of fraternity frontally and devise policies that universally deliver public goods at quality levels. Only then can there be a basic set of similarities between people without which attaining fraternity is like whistling for the moon.

The messy ideological debate between socialist left and capitalist right, between market forces and anti- market advocates has taken our attention of the need to attend to the needs of fraternity which demands a basic set of resemblances between citizens.

If public goods are only free but sub-standard then the rich will go elsewhere for these amenities leaving the poor stranded with what nobody really wants. This is the situation in India for which reason the idea of the Republic has a utopian ring about it in our country.

The writer is a professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University.