Dr B.R. Ambedkar, while addressing the Constituent Assembly for the final time, warned in a cautious tone that India was about to enter a life of contradictions. It was about to adopt a constitution that promised political democracy in the form of universal adult franchise – one person, one vote and equal citizenship before the law. But the contradiction lay in the fact that political democracy was about to be grafted onto a society where social and economic equality were entirely absent. India’s social order was built on graded inequality, fixed occupation, accumulation of resources in the hands of a few and the moral prohibition of fellow feeling across castes.However, Ambedkar had already identified the one force that could hold these tensions together as a bridge – the one condition without which liberty and equality would remain legal fictions. The bridge between these two worlds was fraternity. Without fraternity, Ambedkar said, liberty and equality would destroy each other. Fraternity was not a natural addition to the Preamble. It was neither mentioned in the Objective Resolution nor in any of the alternative constitutions proposed by others in the Assembly.However, due to Ambedkar’s staunch belief in the power of fraternity, a notion he drew from the French Revolution and later grounded in the Buddhist philosophy of metta, he inserted it in the Preamble with a note that said “the need for fraternal concord and goodwill in India was never greater than now”.Seventy-five years later, the idea of fraternity remains the most underdeveloped and structurally absent value in Indian democracy, while the need for it has never been greater, amidst the divisive Hindu Right regime. Understanding why fraternity has not been cultivated and what might be done about it is the central political question of our time.In Ambedkar’s framework, fraternity is reverence towards fellow humans. It is another name for democracy that can shape a diverse society such as India into an ideal society where many interests can be consciously communicated and shared. He argued that Indian society lacked social democracy and, without it, political democracy could not be effective. By social democracy, he meant a life guided by the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.Liberty and equality, when taken alone, exist in permanent structural tension. The standard liberal resolution for this tension is legal frameworks with stronger courts, better laws and more robust rights. Ambedkar’s resolution, operating through fraternity as the root of democracy, allows liberty and equality to coexist without destroying each other.Without fraternity, liberty and equality are mere “coats of paint”. Fraternity operates at the institutional level as constitutional morality, that is, the cultivated commitment of citizens and public servants to democratic principles. At the social level, fraternity operates as public conscience. It agitates people at every instance of wrong, regardless of who suffers, and compels them to join the struggle to remove it.Also read: The Illusion and Reality of Sanatan and Social HierarchyConstitutional morality is a top dressing on Indian soil. It sits on a “dung heap” in a society where inequality is a dominant practice. Public conscience is what actually organises people and makes solidarity possible. Laws can punish discrimination but public conscience makes it unthinkable.Consider the ongoing violence in Manipur, where ethnic cleansing has unfolded since 2023, where women were stripped and forced to appear naked in public and where the national public conscience remained silent. That is the cost of the absence of fraternity. Fraternity internalised as public conscience acts as a form of prevention. Neither constitutional morality nor public conscience is natural. Both must be cultivated and this is where we have been a failure so far.The failure to cultivate fraternity in India is structural. Ambedkar identified its source in the theology of the dominant Brahminical interpretations of the Hindu social order, historically organised around graded hierarchy. A social order that assigns human worth by birth, fixes occupation by community and maintains it through purity rules and social exclusion cannot produce the fellow feeling that fraternity requires.Where fraternity demands that we regard another as equal to ourselves, the Brahminical social order demands the opposite – that we regard the so-called lower caste as polluting, unapproachable, born to serve. It renders the suffering of most as natural and ordained by its organising grammar. The caste order produces the social psychology that makes inequality appear unremarkable.Ambedkar concluded that the theological foundations of the dominant social order structurally prohibited the fellow feeling that democracy requires. His turn to Buddhism was the political expression of that conclusion in the form of love and kindness extending to all living beings – metta – that the existing order could not extend. The social inheritance that India carried into the formation of the constitution was one without deep roots, cultural mainstream or institutional expression for fraternity.Constitutional morality was being asked to do the work of a social transformation that had not occurred. While political democracy promised equality, social practices delivered graded inequality. While political democracy promised liberty, social practice delivered fixed occupation and inherited status. Fraternity was the only force that could bear the weight of this contradiction: as constitutional morality at the institutional level and as public conscience at the social level. However, fraternity was expected to bear that weight alone, without cultivation and without a political class that took it seriously as anything beyond a formality in the Preamble.If fraternity is democracy’s precondition and if India’s social order structurally resisted its cultivation, then the political formation that successfully fills the vacuum automatically acquires a structural advantage. This is what the Hindu Right has achieved.Also read: Hindu Nationalists Were Not More Favourable to Ambedkar Than Congress, History ShowsHindutva’s success is often explained through coercion, institutional capture, electoral manipulation and the systematic dismantling of democratic norms. These explanations are accurate at the political level. However, they are insufficient when it comes to the question of legitimacy at the social level. The Hindutva project draws on fraternity for its capacity to build solidarity and to make people feel bound to one another in the common purpose of being Hindu.Hindutva has succeeded because it built fellow feeling. It captured the public conscience and redirected it by organising agitations at every turn around the figure of Muslims as permanent outsiders and the left and the liberals as the enemies within. Hindutva organised agitations at every instance around the utopia of Hindu Rashtra and gave millions the experience of shared purpose, of being bound to one another by a common cause.But this is counterfeit fraternity. It replicates the structure of fraternity while removing its democratic content. The repeated mob violence against Muslims and Dalits generates communal solidarity among perpetrators. The bulldozing of houses of Muslims is cheered by the mob and its supporters. In each case, public conscience is replaced with a sectarian solidarity that feels like fraternity but operates through its negation.Ambedkar had argued that the constitution was strong enough to be workable and that if things went wrong, the reason would be vile men and not a bad constitution. The vile men were a possibility he had anticipated. They have arrived. But reducing the present crisis to their vileness would be lazy analysis. The undemocratic and authoritarian project of the Hindu Right is an exploitation of the fraternal deficit that Ambedkar identified decades ago. Now more than ever, his vision of agitation at every wrong, whoever suffers is a political task. It is also something that threatens the foundation of the Hindu Right.The opposition has struggled to develop a response to the Hindu Right because it has no theory of fraternity. The consistent failure of leftists and liberals to pose an alternative is not merely organisational. It also is a consequence of attempting to achieve political solidarity without cultivating a fraternal foundation. Ambedkar knew what India lacked. The question his birth anniversary poses is whether the politics that claims his legacy has begun to know it too and whether it is prepared to do what knowing it demands.Akshay is a master’s student in Political Science at the University of Delhi, interested in state institutions and populism in India.