Social Justice

Calling the Indian Constitution 'liberal' does not mean it is liberal only in the narrow, classical Western sense, where rights of the individual are always privileged over the demands of social justice and community values. The Indian Constitution's liberalism differs from that classical model in two important ways. First, it was always deliberately linked to social justice rather than kept apart from it. The clearest example is the constitutional provision for reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The framers recognised that merely granting a formal, abstract right to equality was not enough to overcome the injustices these groups had suffered for centuries, or to give their right to vote any real, substantive meaning. Special constitutional measures were therefore built in to actively advance their interests — reservation of seats in legislatures, and provisions enabling the government to reserve public-sector jobs for these groups. This commitment to combining liberty with social justice was genuinely ahead of its time: affirmative-action programmes in the United States, for comparison, only began after the 1964 Civil Rights Act — almost two decades after India had already entrenched caste-based affirmative action directly in its Constitution. The second way Indian liberalism differs traces back to two distinct historical streams described by K.M. Panikkar in In Defence of Liberalism (1962): the first stream began with Rammohan Roy, who emphasised individual rights and, in particular, the rights of women; the second stream included thinkers such as K.C. Sen, Justice Ranade and Swami Vivekananda, who introduced t …