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Dr. Ambedkar and the Fraternity Clause in the Preamble

Aakash Singh Rathore

[Note: This essay is an extract from the Chapter Four of the Aakash Singh Rathore’s book, Ambedkar’s Preamble, titled ‘Fraternity: Affection for Everyone, Hatred for None’.]

The Preamble finalised by the Drafting Committee under the Chairmanship of Dr. Ambedkar on 21 February 1948 was much debated in the Constituent Assembly, as it had modified Nehru’s Objectives Resolution that had been unanimously and solemnly passed by it on 22 January 1947. However, there was one glaring exception: the ‘fraternity’ clause.

The ‘fraternity’ clause elicited universal and effusive praise from the Constituent Assembly. It was a subject of discussion in each of the Assembly’s three readings, from the moment it was introduced to the world in February 1948 right until Dr Ambedkar’s famous final speech on 25 November 1949 that led to the Assembly’s vote to adopt the Constitution the next day. Constituent Assembly member Thakur Das Bhargava (from East Punjab), whom Dr Ambedkar later identified in his famous final speech as one of the always-contrarian ‘rebels’ who kept him on his toes throughout the drafting process, had this to say during his speech on 6 November 1948:

I think, Sir, that the soul of this Constitution is contained in the Preamble and I am glad to express my sense of gratitude to Dr. Ambedkar for having added the word ‘fraternity’ to the Preamble.

J.B. Kripalani commented:

Again I come to the great doctrine of fraternity which is allied with democracy. It means that we are all sons of the same God, as the religious would say, but as the mystic would say, that there is one life pulsating through us all, or as the Bible says, ‘We are one of another’. There can be no fraternity without this. So I want this House to remember that what we have enunciated are not merely legal, constitutional and formal principles, but moral principles; and moral principles have got to be lived in life. They have to be lived throughout. These things, we have to remember if our Constitution is to succeed.

Dr. Ambedkar’s Addition

The fraternity clause had been personally added by Dr Ambedkar to the Preamble on the morning of 6 February 1948. All previous drafts of the Preamble did not mention it.

The Congress Working Committee’s (CWC) Expert Committee ‘declaration’ of July 1946 did not mention the word ‘fraternity’. Nehru’s Objectives Resolution passed on 22 January 1947 did not mention it. B.N. Rau’s preliminary draft Constitution, which formed the basis of what the Drafting Committee was meant to work with, did not mention it. Indeed, in every source document that was influential, either in terms of borrowed clauses and articles, or in terms of historical significance, the term ‘fraternity’ was absent. This included the 1930 Indian National Congress’ famous ‘Declaration of Purna Swaraj’, which influenced the date the Constitution of India was adopted, and the 1935 Government of India Act from which our Constitution liberally borrowed.

The word ‘fraternity’ did not even feature in any of the unofficial alternative constitutions that were being drafted by various outliers, minority parties and rivals to the Congress. For example, The Gandhian Constitution of Free India that was published in 1946 by Shriman Narayan Agarwal and included a foreword by M.K. Gandhi. Then there was M.N. Roy’s Constitution of Free India: A Draft, published in 1944 under the auspices of the Radical Democratic Party. Again, in March 1948, right in the midst of the Constituent Assembly and the drafting of our Constitution, the Socialist Party of India prepared its own draft entitled Draft Constitution of the Indian Republic, with a foreword by Jayprakash Narayan. It included a preamble, ‘fundamental rights’, and even ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’. But what it did not include, like its rivals from among the Gandhians or M.N. Roy, or anybody else for that matter, was the term ‘fraternity’.

Need ‘Never Greater than Now’

On 21 February 1948, Dr Ambedkar packed up the working draft Constitution created by the Drafting Committee since it first met on 30 August 1947. Sending the completed draft to the president of the Constituent Assembly, Dr Ambedkar enclosed an important cover note explaining the Drafting Committee’s methods and decisions, and a clear and forthright confession of its departure from the Objectives Resolution, along with its justification. That note read in part:

The committee has added a clause about fraternity in the Preamble although it does not occur in the Objectives Resolution. The committee felt that the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now and that this particular aim of the new Constitution should be emphasized by special mention in the Preamble.

In other respects the Committee has tried to embody in the Preamble the spirit and, as far as possible, the language of the Objectives Resolution.

This was the right decision and would prove to be universally recognized as such. The ‘fraternity’ clause was met with enthusiasm across all the spectrums represented in the Constituent Assembly, and as the clear brainchild of Dr Ambedkar it certainly played a role—augmented by his formidable charisma, oratorial skill, dexterous wit and encyclopedic knowledge—in building upon his already enhanced reputation and profile within the Constituent Assembly itself.

Dr Ambedkar’s note to the president of the Constituent Assembly mentioned that the need for fraternal concord was never greater than now, an obvious allusion to the ongoing tragedies in the wake of Partition. But there was another underlying discord in Dr Ambedkar’s mind as he wrote this note: the contentious and divisive omnipresence of caste. And given the battery of assaults on Brahmanism and Brahmanical patriarchy that were inscribed into the body of the enclosed Constitution, as well as being unleashed in the form of the Hindu Code Bill, now being rewritten by Dr Ambedkar, ‘the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now’.

Fraternity in Ambedkar’s Thought

This was not the first time that Dr Ambedkar had spoken of fraternity. It had been frequently referred to in Dr Ambedkar’s own writings and speeches.

The centrality of the idea of fraternity to Dr Ambedkar’s thought cannot be overestimated. He not only appealed to it in the Drafting Committee and the Constitutional Assembly Debates, or roughly the period from 1947–50, where Dr Ambedkar took recourse to ‘fraternity’, he made judicious use of the term even in Annihilation of Caste (1936) and through essays like ‘The Philosophy of Hinduism’ and the ‘Hindu Social Order’, probably written during the period that he began working on the Hindu Code Bill (1947–51). It also appeared in books like Riddles in Hinduism (composed somewhere between 1951–53), a later important interview (on All India Radio in 1954) and a late speech on ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’ (an oblique reference, speaking of ‘love and justice’ in 1956), right up to his final, posthumously published masterpiece, The Buddha and His Dhamma (written between 1953 and 1956, published in 1957 after his death).

With such frequent use in so many different contexts, it is difficult to pin down one specific definition of the term that Dr Ambedkar consistently used over the twenty years that he took recourse to it. Its own meaning seemed to change, along with the synonyms that he employed while describing it. But in a very general way, there was a pattern to the evolution of the concept in his thought over the decades, which is broadly discernible and not too contentious.

Dr Ambedkar’s earliest major reference to the three principles of liberty, equality and fraternity can be found in Annihilation of Caste, where Dr Ambedkar referred to them as the foundations of an ideal society. He did not refer to Buddhism in this context, instead he chose to refer to the French Revolution. Thus, at this stage Dr Ambedkar was treating these principles as occasioned by the French Revolution. Even at a later stage, when he wrote ‘The Hindu Social Order: Its Essential Principles’, Dr Ambedkar discussed the principles in the context of the French Revolution. So, even here he did not refer to Buddhism as the source of these principles.

But in 1954, during an All India Radio interview, Dr Ambedkar seemed to have completely changed his point of view:

My social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one, however, say that I have borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my master, the Buddha.

One of India’s finest contemporary philosophers, Pradeep P. Gokhale, has reasoned that when Dr Ambedkar said he derived his philosophy, which was enshrined in the three principles, from the teachings of the Buddha, his statement was not to be taken literally. Instead, it was to be interpreted in the context of the would-be Buddhist phase. What Gokhale aimed to show was that though Dr Ambedkar originally accepted these socio-political principles from the context of the French Revolution, he gradually reinterpreted them as ethico-religious principles. Thus, when Dr Ambedkar came to the conclusion that Buddhism was the ideal religion, towards the end of his life, he reappropriated this ‘trio of principles’ as being rooted in the Buddha’s teaching, his dhamma.

Although the specificities of Gokhale’s story may be contentious, his reconstruction of Dr Ambedkar’s ‘trio of principles’ teaches a very important lesson. That lesson is that we need to understand Dr Ambedkar’s thought not as a static or constant viewpoint, but as a dynamic flow instead. I believe that his ideas evolved in accordance with new information that came in: new facts, momentous events, discovery of new literature. This was one of the virtues of his pragmatic philosophy that he learned from John Dewey.

The Influence of Deweyan Pragmatism

Indeed, Dewey’s work, and even his words, were woven in throughout Dr Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, where he first spoke of fraternity at length:

I would not be surprised if some of you have grown weary listening to this tiresome tale of the sad effects which caste has produced. There is nothing new in it. I will therefore turn to the constructive side of the problem. What is your ideal society if you do not want caste is a question that is bound to be asked of you? If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And why not? What objection can there be to Fraternity? I cannot imagine any. An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. In other words, there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men.

This passage has great many ideas packed into it, Deweyan and otherwise. One of them is the surprising remark about fraternity, that it ‘is only another name for democracy’. This then is a callback to a similar remark of his about justice; that it ‘is simply another name for liberty, equality, and fraternity’. Obviously, Dr Ambedkar had an organic view about how the political, social and juridical realms are related. And indeed the economic and the ethico-spiritual too, as his long-standing ideological battle on two simultaneous fronts attested—that is, one battle using Buddhism against the Hindu orthodoxy on the right; and the other using Buddhism against the Indian Marxists on the left.

Justice and democracy were imperilled by both of these defective ideologies according to him. The left one sacrificed political liberty for the sake of economic equality, and had the threat of totalitarianism constantly looming over it. The right one exploited freedom (political liberty) to sustain social inequality. We have seen Dr Ambedkar’s entire life as a series of overlapping, complex and evolving, but perennial, struggles not just to overcome but to actually solve the dilemma of false alternatives on offer to India by the votaries of its left and right. This was exemplified through how he lived justly, personally working tirelessly in a democratic spirit. At least as long as he lived the principles of justice, he could sustain and preserve them, until the time came when this subjective way of being could be institutionalized. To institutionalize a subjective or personally practised ideal is to make it objective. To make Dr Ambedkar’s subjective way of living justly an objective thing, it must take on legal, political and social actuality. As far as Dr Ambedkar saw it, it could be made objective through a democratic Constitution that proactively guaranteed both liberty and equality in equal measure.

Hence, Dr Ambedkar perceived at that time the need to devise a better alternative to the dominant form of freedom, which he characterized as non-inclusive Swaraj. This concept meant freedom from the external bondage of the British, but a freedom that afforded license for the internal bondage of the Dalit-bahujan and minority communities by an unfettered Hindu majority, which for millennia had been seeped in the ideology of Brahmanism through its vast philosophy and literature.

And hence, Dr Ambedkar also perceived the need to devise a better alternative to the towering leftist ideological critique of inequality. The leftist critique focused exclusively on class conflict. But for Dr Ambedkar, caste, not class, was the primordial conflict throughout India’s long history of inequality, an inequality that was graded and thus largely immune to the revolutionary impulse as the leftist ideology understood it.

Fraternity as Goodwill

For all these antinomies, these impossible dilemmas—the failure of justice to be realized till date on Indian soil, the false or incomplete liberty on offer by the nationalist movement, the erroneous appraisal of the causes and cures of inequality by the leftists—the way through, the only way through, was by appealing to fraternity, that too in its more authentic understanding, as metta. Or pushing it even further, not just fraternity understood as metta, but—as Dr Ambedkar stated during an impromptu 1956 speech before a Buddhist gathering, just fifteen days before his death—metta understood as love, justice and goodwill. Dr Ambedkar’s use of the word ‘goodwill’ in his 1956 speech is important; for, recall from 1948 that it was the urgent need for ‘goodwill’ that, according to Dr Ambedkar, justified the inclusion of the new ‘fraternity’ clause into the Preamble. In 1956, goodwill was supplemented with love.

But make no mistake, Dr Ambedkar was no beatnik, no Dharma Bum, no hippie—you need love, but love is not all you need. As logicians say, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Sufficiency begins to be satisfied when we bring in justice, liberty, equality, dignity, nation, all taking objective form through institutionalization. Love (metta, fraternity) is what permits these institutions to flow and to function in the spirit of democracy. And this explains why Dr Ambedkar added ‘fraternity’ to the Preamble.

But that is only one part of the explanation.

The Incommensurability Problem

Dr Ambedkar was not the only political thinker who found himself struggling with the problems of reconciling the different demands of democratic principles like liberty and equality. The whole history of Western political philosophy has grappled with it, and a variety of solutions have been thrown up by a variety of authors, be it philosophers or statesmen.

Reconciling freedom and equality in particular has proven an intractable difficulty, as an increase in one seems to imply a decrease in the other, and yet both seem necessary in equal measure. There are of course factions who just come down in support of one over the other, such as libertarians, who champion liberty come what may, or hard-core egalitarians, who prioritize equality instead.

Dr Ambedkar sought recourse to ‘fraternity’ in an effort to address the commensurability problem between liberty and equality. We see this in various writings of his where he depicted fraternity as the basic principle which sustains both equality and liberty:

Without fraternity, liberty would destroy equality and equality would destroy liberty. If in Democracy liberty does not destroy equality and equality does not destroy liberty, it is because at the basis of both there is fraternity. Fraternity is therefore the root of Democracy.

So much for the conceptual problem of reconciling the democratic principles. After all, there was not much at stake there other than to apprehend intellectually that it could be done. But what about the practical problems? Dr Ambedkar well understood that the conceptual problem was the easiest problem that he faced. Far more serious was the institutional problem. That is, harmonizing persons, given what they were, to the democratic institutions that embodied the constitutional principles. What he slowly discovered, and it took time, was that the commensurability problem existed only on one plane, whereas the practical problem entailed in the institutionalization of democratic principles existed at two interrelated planes simultaneously.

Constitutional Morality

On 4 November 1948, with the ink on the Preamble not yet dry, Dr Ambedkar introduced the Drafting Committee’s new draft Constitution with his famous appeal for ‘constitutional morality’:

While everybody recognizes the necessity of the diffusion of Constitutional morality for the peaceful working of a democratic Constitution, there are two things interconnected with it which are not, unfortunately, generally recognized. One is that the form of administration has a close connection with the form of the Constitution. The form of the administration must be appropriate to and in the same sense as the form of the Constitution. The other is that it is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution, without changing its form by merely changing the form of the administration and to make it inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution. It follows that it is only where people are saturated with Constitutional morality such as the one described by Grote the historian that one can take the risk of omitting from the Constitution details of administration and leaving it for the Legislature to prescribe them. The question is, can we presume such a diffusion of Constitutional morality? Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

The trope to take note of is ‘top-dressing on an Indian soil’. This was the articulation of an incommensurability between institutions—Parliament and bureaucracy in particular—and persons as social beings. And while the vast majority of commentary and celebratory evocation of Dr Ambedkar’s notion of ‘constitutional morality’ that we find in newspapers, journal articles and books indicate that constitutional morality is something that we as Indians should aspire to, this was not what Dr Ambedkar was saying. He had discovered, in the Constituent Assembly, a new plane where the tension between an individual person and democratic institution did, and would continue long into the future, to play out: in the assemblies, legislatures, ministries and judiciaries of an independent and sovereign democratic republic. Constitutional morality was the call for public officials and public servants to transcend the values and principles that they had been imbrued with in Indian social life, and adopt the values and principles laid out before them ever-so succinctly in the Preamble.

Public Conscience

What about the rest of us who are not public officials? About this problem, Dr Ambedkar had already been thinking long and hard ever since Annihilation of Caste, where he first spoke of ‘fraternity’. ‘Public conscience’ was the term that Dr Ambedkar employed to capture the ideas surrounding the individuals who constitute our social life more generally. By public conscience, he referred to ‘conscience which becomes agitated at every wrong, no matter who is the sufferer’ and ‘leads an individual to join the struggle to remove that wrong’. Public conscience was conditioned upon ‘fellow feeling’, the phrase that Dr Ambedkar had used to describe ‘fraternity’.

In his essay on ‘The Hindu Social Order’, Dr Ambedkar had commented extensively on the contradictions not between liberty and equality as such, but between our espoused democratic principles (‘top-dressing’) and our actual social practices (‘Indian soil’). Caste lay at the crux of this contradiction. The democratic principle we stand for is equality; but thanks to caste, the social principle we follow is graded inequality. The democratic principle we stand for is liberty; but thanks to caste, the social principle we follow is fixed occupation. Hence, Dr Ambedkar wrote:

Caste has killed public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. Caste has made public opinion impossible. A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to his caste.

At work, then, are two overlapping contradictions, both about the incommensurability of our democratic institutions championing liberty and equality—and our undemocratic social milieu, where caste dictates the practices opposite to our democratic principles. And for both of these, as well as for the prior purely conceptual problem of incommensurability, ‘fraternity’ must bear the manifold burdens; it does so at the level of the institutions themselves in the form of constitutional morality, and it does so at the purely social level in the form of public conscience.

Fraternity as Maitree (Metta)

Towards the end of his life, Ambedkar realised that even fraternity was inadequate. As he wrote in Riddles in Hinduism,

… what sustains equality and liberty is fellow feeling, what the French Revolutionists called fraternity. The word fraternity is not an adequate expression. The proper term is what the Buddha called Maitree.

What fraternity could do, metta / maitree could do too. What fraternity could not do, metta could do that too. This was beautifully captured in some of the last words ever written by Dr Ambedkar (in his treatise, The Buddha and His Dhamma:

Love is not enough; what is required is Maitri. It is wider than love. It means fellowship not merely with human beings but with all living beings. It is not confined to human beings. Is not such Maitri necessary? What else can give to all living beings the same happiness which one seeks for one’s own self, to keep the mind impartial, open to all, with affection for every one and hatred for none?

[For references to the quotations, see the original book available online. This is an extract from Aakash Rathore’s book, Ambedkar’s Preamble, published by Penguin Books, 2020. Aakash Singh Rathore is a public intellectual of international repute, author of nine books, has taught Politics, Philosophy and Law at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi, and has also held many international professorships.]

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We, the People: Why Fraternity is the Soul of the Indian Constitution

John Kurien

November 26 is Constitution Day.

On November 26, 1949, we, the people of India, gave ourselves a Constitution. Its Preamble, that majestic opening statement, is more than a preface. It is the moral compass of our Republic.

We often focus, rightly, on its promises of justice – social, economic, and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship; and equality of status and of opportunity. These are the foundational pillars of our democracy.

Yet, standing alongside these three, is a fourth ideal that is less celebrated but, in many ways, the most profound: fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation.

On this Constitution Day, it is time we recognise fraternity not as a supplementary ideal, but as the very soul without which the other three cannot breathe.

A vital distinction

A constitution is the legal blueprint for a state. It creates institutions – parliament, the judiciary, the executive – that can deliver justice and guarantee liberty. The state bestows upon its citizens political equality, the fundamental right of “one person, one vote”.

This was India’s revolutionary step, wiping away centuries of feudal and colonial hierarchy in a single, legal stroke.

But a nation is not built by legal statutes alone. A nation is a shared imagination, a feeling of “we-ness”, a common belonging. This cannot be legislated into existence. You can decree rights – not solidarity. You can enforce laws – not sisterhood and brotherhood.

This is where fraternity enters, not as a political concept but as a social and spiritual one. It is the bridge between the state that the Constitution created, and the nation we are perpetually in the process of becoming.

Ambedkar’s radical interpretation

The term “fraternity” has its roots in the French Revolution’s cry of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” But for BR Ambedkar, who introduced the term fraternity into the preamble, its inspiration was far deeper and more universal. He infused the European term, but with the profound spirit of Buddhist maitri or metta.

The French “fraternité” was largely a secular bond between citizens in a republic. Ambedkar’s fraternity, inspired by maitri, was something more radical: an unconditional affection for all and hatred for none. Maitri is not limited by citizenship; it extends to all living beings. It is an active, empathetic love, a conscious breaking down of the inner barriers of prejudice and ill-will that separate human beings.

For the man who had spent a lifetime battling the entrenched hatred of the caste system, this was not a sentimental ideal. It was a necessary social medicine. The state could outlaw untouchability, but only a transformation of the human heart – a cultivation of genuine fraternity – could eradicate the contempt that underpinned it. “Hatred for none” was the active antidote to the poison of caste.

An Indian foundation

This concept of universal love is not exclusive to Buddhism. It finds a powerful echo in the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, whom we commemorated just weeks ago. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus told, is a lesson in fraternity – defining one’s “neighbour” beyond all tribal and religious lines. And Jesus’s words on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” are the ultimate embodiment of “affection for everyone and hatred for none”.

Ambedkar was, therefore, anchoring the Indian Republic in a timeless, universal ethic. He was saying that for India to survive and thrive, its citizens must aspire to this highest moral principle. Justice and liberty provide the skeleton of our democracy, but Fraternity is its beating heart.

An aspirational project

This brings us to the most critical function of fraternity: it is the force that makes the opening words of our Preamble – “We the People of India” – a reality.

Without fraternity, “We the People” is a legal fiction, vulnerable to fracturing, as we see today, into “We the Majority” and “You the Minorities” or “We the Upper Castes” and “You the Lower Castes”.

In times of security crises, as happened in New Delhi, and heated political contests, as in Bihar, fraternity is tested most severely. During such times the unity and integrity of the nation, then, is maintained by force of law, not by the bond of shared belonging.

Fraternity is what transforms the “I” of individual rights into the “We” of collective destiny. It is what ensures that my liberty does not become a licence to dominate you, and that your justice is not just a verdict in a court, but a dignity honoured in my everyday conduct towards you. It is the social and emotional infrastructure that makes political equality a lived experience, not just a theoretical right.

As I had explored in a previous article on Gandhi Jayanti, the privileged have a role to play as “trustees” of this fraternity. But this trusteeship is not a paternalistic concept. It is an active, humble practice of dismantling walls of privilege and extending the hand of solidarity, recognising that our dignity is interwoven.

On this Constitution Day, let us re-read the preamble. Let us see fraternity for what it is: Ambedkar’s most profound gift to the nation. It is the call to move beyond the courtroom and the parliament into the human heart. It is the enduring challenge to build, through conscious compassion, the country we were always meant to be: a nation not just in law, but in spirit.

[John Kurien is a reflective development practitioner. He lives in Kozhikode. Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.]