A recent lament on social media was that the NCERT had removed a lesson on the French Revolution from the Class IX social science textbook. It subsequently transpired that the lesson had merely migrated from Class IX to Class X. The episode merely illustrated, yet again, that social media can be both an instrument of education and an instrument of disinformation. But that is another matter.

The anxiety over the alleged deletion was understandable. The French Revolution occupies a special place in the political imagination of democracies because it popularised the immortal trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity. Schoolchildren are expected to imbibe these values early because democratic societies cannot survive for long if citizens cease to believe in them.

The more interesting question, however, is whether independent India ever seriously intended to pursue equality and fraternity in the first place.

For over seven decades politicians across the ideological spectrum have proclaimed their commitment to an equitable social order. Every election manifesto contains solemn references to social justice, inclusive growth and empowerment of the marginalised. Yet the practical politics of independent India appears to have moved steadily in the opposite direction.

In order to cultivate vote banks politicians continuously seek reservations and more reservations for one group or another. Demands for fresh quotas emerge with remarkable regularity. Communities that spent decades arguing for social advancement now find themselves compelled to demonstrate backwardness. Political success increasingly depends not upon convincing citizens that they are equal participants in a common enterprise, but upon persuading them that they belong to separate and competing categories.

The paradox becomes sharper when one observes demands for inclusion from castes belonging to religions whose central theological proposition is that all believers are equal before God. Indeed, equality has frequently been advanced as one of the moral arguments for conversion from the Hindu fold. Yet electoral politics appears capable of transforming even communities founded on egalitarian doctrines into claimants for separate political recognition.

The responsibility for this development cannot be placed entirely upon politicians. Politicians merely harvest crops that others help sow. The more uncomfortable question concerns the role of India’s public intellectuals.

How often does one encounter a social scientist, historian, journalist or television commentator arguing that the endless multiplication of reservations may perpetuate precisely those identities that an equitable society should gradually render irrelevant? Such voices, if they exist, are remarkably difficult to find.

Instead, analyses are largely confined to explaining which caste equations favour which political party and why. The euphemisms are fascinating. Caste calculations become “caste engineering” or “social engineering”. Electoral mobilisation along communal lines becomes “coalition building”. Politicians who successfully assemble combinations of mutually suspicious groups are complimented for their strategic brilliance.

Engineering, after all, was once associated with building bridges. In modern Indian politics it increasingly appears to consist of constructing compartments.

The framers of the Constitution certainly envisaged a different destination. In a celebrated judgement delivered in 1954, the Supreme Court expressed the fervent hope that the Constitution would create: “a new order with its new allegiance springing from the same source for all, grounded on the same basis: the sovereign will of the peoples of India with no class, no caste, no race, no creed, no distinction, no reservation.”

The Court, one suspects, was carried away by its own eloquence. The decades that followed witnessed not the gradual disappearance of these distinctions but their institutional consolidation.

Reservations introduced as temporary correctives acquired a permanence that few had anticipated. The debate shifted from whether such distinctions should eventually disappear to how many additional categories ought to be included within them.

Sociologist André Béteille observed that while equality of opportunity strengthens citizenship, equality based upon permanent group identities may weaken it. The observation rarely receives the attention it deserves.

An equitable society requires citizens to think of themselves primarily as citizens.

This does not imply that caste, religion, language or region should disappear from private life. Every society contains multiple identities and affiliations. The problem arises when these become the principal organising principles of public life and political competition.

Once every election becomes an exercise in demographic arithmetic, every census becomes politically charged and every public policy becomes a negotiation among organised groups. Equality before the law gradually gives way to equality of bargaining power.

The French historian and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democratic societies possess an irresistible passion for equality, but not always for liberty or excellence. India appears to have developed a variation of that tendency: a passion for equality among groups accompanied by an extraordinary indifference to equality among citizens.

The distinction is not trivial.

A society organised around groups inevitably incentivises individuals to think and act through the prism of group interests. Victimhood acquires political value. Backwardness becomes a resource to be protected rather than a condition to be overcome. Advancement creates anxiety because prosperity may threaten eligibility for state benefits.

No society can indefinitely pursue equality by rewarding the preservation of inequality.

Edmund Burke warned his electors in Bristol in 1780 that he would not sacrifice his judgement to popular demands, declaring that he acted according to “the instructions of truth and nature” rather than the instructions of opinion. Such intellectual courage is in short supply in contemporary India.

Politicians have little incentive to question a strategy that repeatedly delivers electoral victories. Public intellectuals, who ought to challenge convenient orthodoxies, often limit themselves to explaining electoral behaviour rather than examining its moral consequences. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself.

India continues to invoke equality as an aspiration, fraternity as a constitutional virtue and social justice as a national objective. Yet our political vocabulary, our institutional incentives and our public discourse frequently move in the opposite direction.

Perhaps the equitable society appears eternally unreachable not because human beings are incapable of creating one, but because we continue to reward almost every behaviour that prevents its emergence.

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