Expanding freedoms

A vast majority of Indians are yet to get true independence

Seventy years ago, India achieved political freedom from the British. It has, against the odds, maintained its unity and independence for these fraught decades. This is no mean achievement, given that few expected such success from the fledgling Indian state. But this minimal success — the maintenance of political freedom — has not been expanded upon in all these decades. In particular, Indians who have been granted political freedom have continued to be deprived of other aspects of freedom. The independence celebrated on August 15 is a strictly unidimensional thing.

The political freedom that Indians have understood as their right for seven decades has not been matched by a corresponding economic freedom. The Indian government, early on in India’s tenure as an independent country, moved to strip many economic freedoms from the population; property rights were never truly protected, and socialist-style restraints on entrepreneurship were introduced. The two-and-a-half decades since 1991 have seen some of that being lifted — but far from all. India continues to be a state with a bias towards interfering in the normal conduct of business affairs, in private contracts between two citizens. The presumption is not towards economic freedom but towards the opposite. Economic activity is still seen as being conducted at the pleasure of the state. Until political freedom is accompanied by genuine economic freedom, Independence Day will continue to commemorate an incomplete freedom.

In any case, as Amartya Sen wrote, the links between individual freedom and a certain minimum level of economic prosperity and social dignity are deep — nominal freedom is meaningless without the capability to live a free life. This continues to be a facet of the Indian experience. Members of marginalised communities — some religious minorities, Dalits, women, indigenous tribes — possess the right to vote and the technical benefits of freedom, but widespread discrimination in their daily lives means that their capability to enjoy that freedom is greatly impaired. Even for those who were not born into social stigma or marginalisation, the continuing prevalence of abject poverty in India means that vast numbers of individuals live on a subsistence level of income, rather than one that permits them to take full advantage of the freedoms that have been decreed as being theirs since 1947. That is why beneath the glitz of the high-rise shopping malls or the sheen of start-ups, a vast, confusing and poor India lurches onward. It shares little with the country’s jet-setting globalists, high-powered intellectuals or high-rolling industrialists. 

True freedom means individuals have the ability to access the broadest possible choices about how to live their lives. It also means these choices should not be affected by government interference, that they should be independent of prying eyes and prying actions. True freedom thus requires a certain basic level of income and a certain minimal level of personal dignity. This has been denied to much of India. How can the right to free movement, for example, be seen as anything but a farce when most Indians have no capability to move from one place to another in India in comfort? When they still have to sleep on the floors of railway carriages, ride on the roofs, or walk long distances alongside bad roads? How can freedom without the right to privacy be seen as complete? On Independence Day, Indians should reflect on how much of the struggle for freedom is still to be waged.