As the United States celebrates 250 years of its Independence today, it is worth scrutinizing the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776. Specifically, we focus on 35 words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Authored by Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the American republic and its third president, these are the most consequential lines ever written in the history of mankind.

“With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history,” President Donald Trump rightly said about the Declaration. This was because, for the first time in history, philosophy got translated into polity. To be precise, the philosophy of the great philosopher of liberty, John Locke (1632-1704), got a concrete shape. This is why former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said, “Europe was created by history; America was created by philosophy.”

The sum and substance of Locke’s political arguments is that a government and its laws, in order to be in accordance with the will of God, have to be reasonable. This is an implicit and cogent denial of the legitimacy of absolute government. This is how the idea of responsible government germinated. Further, since God has created all men, they are His property. This also makes all men “equal and independent,” all of them being His property.

The Lockean imperative is not just about equality among men but also making property a fundamental, inalienable right. Locke wrote that “every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’ This nobody has any right to but himself. The ‘labour’ of his body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this ‘labour’ being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”

Apart from being an assertion of the right to property, the use of the term “unalienable Rights” by Jefferson and other Founding Fathers was a masterstroke for the cause of individual liberty and limited government. For, if God has endowed human beings with inalienable rights, only He can take them away. A natural corollary is: no one else can take them away. The Founding Fathers put inalienable rights beyond the reach of any legislature; they became sacrosanct—even literally—because the Creator Himself had endowed men (which, in this context, included women) with them.

Similarly, the words “the pursuit of happiness” are also very specific. The philosopher and author Ayn Rand correctly wrote, “Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.” This was an assault on various collectivist ideologies and welfarist measures even before they were born, let alone articulated.

In contradistinction to the US Constitution, our own Constitution didn’t put any rights on a pedestal. Well, there were Fundamental Rights, but they were not sacrosanct. The very First Amendment in 1951, within a year of the enactment of the Constitution and a year before the first general election, curtailed three Fundamental Rights: to Equality, Freedom of Expression, and Property. In the following years, the first two Rights were further curbed: the dangerous and divisive UGC Equity Regulations highlight the extent of erosion; as for free speech, hardly a day passes when we don’t hear of some ban or demand for a ban on a movie, song, book, etc. As for the right to property, it has ceased to be a Fundamental Right; it is now just a legal right.

At the heart of the contradistinction is the essential difference between the guiding spirits. The American Constitution was illumined by the classical philosophy of liberty, which places the individual above everything else, whose interests the political system is expected to serve. The Indian Constitution (or at least the one that is currently operational), on the other hand, implicitly and even explicitly (Directive Principles of State Policy) bestows the state the authority (both moral and institutional) to work for a collectivity, which can be variously interpreted by politicians in accordance with their ideology or even expedience.

Two roads diverged—and two nations chose differently. We all know the results.

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