D/Answer the following questions in not more than 100 words.
2. Why is it important to promote fraternity in India?
3. There is a balance of power among the three organs of government. Justify this statement. Why is this necessary?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
The people of India, and indeed much of the world, are living through deeply troubled times, marked by rising hate and inequality. A new leadership is gaining strength and electoral support in country after country around the world. These are leaders who are authoritarian, divisive and polarising, who reflect, amplify, legitimise and indeed valorise bigotry and prejudice, targeting minorities of many kinds.
There is simultaneously a precipitous decline in the civility of our public discourse, in which hectoring and blighting one’s adversaries are seen as markers of high oratory and political muscularity. These together constitute in India a grave threat to our constitutional values, and most of all to fraternity.
While submitting the Draft Constitution to the President of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad, on 21 February 1948, B R Ambedkar wrote that the drafting committee had added a clause on “fraternity” in the Preamble (even though it was not part of the Objective Resolution) because “the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now.”
...fraternity remains the least understood, least discussed, and doubtlessly the least practiced of the four pillars of constitutional morality spelt out in the preamble of India’s Constitution: justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
India arguably today stands more divided than it ever was since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi amidst the bloodbath of Partition. Once again today, I am convinced that we must again echo Ambedkar: that the imperative for fraternity was never greater, since the birth of India’s constitution.
Yet fraternity remains the least understood, least discussed, and doubtlessly the least practiced of the four pillars of constitutional morality spelt out in the preamble of India’s Constitution: justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is forgotten not just by those chosen to uphold our Constitution, it is lost even in our public and social life, in which the aggressive use of oppositional identities remains, for most political parties, the most reliable instrument to harvest votes with. And prejudice and inequality are produced and reproduced in our hearts and homes.
Fraternity for Us
The word fraternity is derived from French to mean brotherhood, friendship, community and cooperation (Asthana 1992: 118). It is in all these senses that, while drafting India’s Constitution, Ambedkar laid great stress on fraternity. “Fraternity,” he said, “means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians—if Indians are seen as being one people.1 It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life.” He was convinced that “without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than a coat of paint.” He explained, “Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.”
Ambedkar dreamed of an India in which divisions of caste and religion would gradually fade away in the spirit of fraternity. He recognised, though, that fraternity “is a difficult thing to achieve.”
Feminists often have rightly criticised the idea of fraternity as “brotherhood,” as the word—both in language and, according to some, in imagination—excludes any “sisterhood.” Mary Louise Pratt (1994) argues that the nation was imagined as a deep, horizontal comradeship of men as brothers. Women inhabitants of nations, according to her, were neither imagined as nor invited to imagine themselves as part of this horizontal brotherhood. Women were citizens of a nation only in their instrumental capacity as the producers of citizens. So, women inhabitants of modern nations were not imagined as having intrinsically the rights of citizens; rather, their value was specifically attached to (and implicitly conditional on) their reproductive roles.
Bandhuta is a beautiful, iridescent word derived from Sanskrit, reflecting the idea that we are all bound to and with each other.
Even Ambedkar used the language of brotherhood in explaining his understanding of fraternity. But the Hindi-language Constitution uses the word bandhuta, which is free from these implicit gendered exclusions. Bandhuta is a beautiful, iridescent word derived from Sanskrit, reflecting the idea that we are all bound to and with each other. It can also be understood as an ideology of friendship. Bhiku Parekh (2008) traces rich traditions of friendship in Indian classical texts, bonds between individuals that are voluntary, reciprocal, of intrinsic rather than instrumental value, and often a source of kindness.
Many Forms
The Constitution views fraternity significantly as a source of affirming “