Every schoolchild can recite the Preamble to the Constitution: Justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. The first three have generated debate in courts, politics and academia. The fourth, however, has passed almost unnoticed. Yet fraternity may be the most consequential of all the constitutional values because it is the one value that law alone cannot create.
The neglect is curious because the Constitution does not treat fraternity as an afterthought. It appears in the same sentence as the other three, carrying equal constitutional weight. The framers placed it there deliberately. The question is why we have spent 75 years largely ignoring it, and what that neglect has cost us.
The answer begins with a distinction that was explicit during the Constituent Assembly debates but has since faded from constitutional discourse. Liberty and equality define the relationship between the citizen and the state. Fraternity defines the relationship between citizens themselves. That distinction makes all the difference. If the state violates liberty or equality, courts can intervene. But what recourse exists when citizens cease to regard one another as fellow citizens? When disagreement hardens into hostility and difference into suspicion, fraternity begins to disappear. B R Ambedkar understood this with unusual clarity. In his final address to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, he warned, “Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.” His warning stemmed from a frank assessment of Indian society. “How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation?” he asked. He was reminding us that nationhood is not a given but an achievement, and fraternity both its condition and proof. The Constitution’s concern with fraternity did not end with the Preamble. Article 51A(e) makes it a Fundamental Duty of every citizen to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood across religious, linguistic and regional differences.
Seventy-five years later, the original anxieties have not diminished. Though we have never been more connected technologically, we have rarely been more estranged socially. Public debate has grown louder, sharper and more vicious, while mutual understanding has become thinner. The greatest damage caused by hate-filled discourse — whether political, religious or digital — is not that it offends. Democracies have always survived offence. Its deeper damage lies in the erosion of trust.
Trust is the invisible infrastructure of a functioning society — the assumption that strangers can deal with one another in good faith. When that assumption erodes, no law can fully restore it. The economy depends upon it. Democracy depends upon it.
Liberty and equality are justiciable, enforceable and actionable before a judge. Fraternity belongs to a different category. If liberty and equality are the fundamental rights of citizens, fraternity, for me, is the fundamental right of the nation. No court can manufacture mutual respect. No statute can create a sense of common belonging. No government programme can legislate trust. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that fraternity lies entirely beyond the reach of law and the government and the courts are helpless spectators.
The Constitution and the criminal law contain a substantial architecture designed to protect social harmony. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Articles 15 and 25 protect citizens against discrimination and safeguard freedom of faith. Article 51A(e) imposes a duty to promote harmony and common brotherhood. Criminal law goes further. Sections 153A, 153B, 295A and 505 of the IPC, along with provisions protecting places of worship, were enacted to preserve civic peace and prevent communal hostility.
These provisions may not create fraternity, but they exist to prevent its systematic destruction. The challenge, therefore, is not the absence of legal safeguards. It is their uneven enforcement. Courts cannot command affection, but they can act against hatred, intimidation and attacks on equal citizenship. The law cannot manufacture fraternity, but it can — and must — prevent its destruction.
It is worth asking what 75 years of neglecting fraternity has produced. Consider what the government’s own data tell us. For more than a decade, roughly 2 lakh Indians have been surrendering their citizenship every year, amounting to nearly 9 lakh in the last five years alone, according to information placed before Parliament. Many of those leaving are successful entrepreneurs and professionals. Their decisions reflect multiple factors, but the scale of the phenomenon raises a legitimate question: What role do social climate and civic confidence play in such choices?
History suggests that prolonged social conflict leaves economic scars that persist long after the headlines disappear. India has already learned this lesson. Punjab was once the most prosperous state in the country, with the highest per-capita income as recently as the mid-1980s. The decade-long militancy and communal discord that followed devastated the investment climate. Punjab slipped from first place in per-capita income rankings and, between 2014-15 and 2022-23, it ranked 18th in economic growth among 21 major states. The damage was not merely economic; poisoned atmospheres take generations to clear.
The irony is difficult to miss. We have spoken of India becoming the world’s third-largest economy and a fully developed Viksit Bharat by 2047. Yet public institutions have often appeared insufficiently concerned about an atmosphere of anxiety and periodic lawlessness that seems to corrode such ambitions. Lynchings, targeted demolitions and the normalisation of communal hostility are not merely law-and-order failures. They are fraternity failures. When such acts go unpunished, they send a signal — not just to minorities, but to every entrepreneur, investor and family weighing its future.
Polarisation may have delivered electoral dividends to those who have practised it. But a nation cannot continuously inflame its divisions for short-term political advantage and expect to contain its economic consequences.
Fraternity is not a pious wish inscribed in a preamble and ceremonially quoted on national occasions. It is the social oxygen without which neither liberty nor equality can survive, and without which no economy, however ambitious its targets, can truly flourish. Ambedkar warned that without fraternity, liberty and equality would be no deeper than coats of paint. For three-quarters of a century, we barely noticed the paint peeling. We are beginning to see the cracks now.
The framers placed all four values together for a reason. It may be time we did the same.
Quraishi is former chief election commissioner of India and author of An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election
