79 Years Of Freedom: Who Truly Breathes Free In India?

As the largest democracy in the world turns 79, one must ask – does it still embody the promise of freedom, or remain bound by the very shackles that silence its citizens and stifles dissent? The institutionalisation of liberty does not ensure its presence in everyday life. It loses all meaning if citizens cannot exercise their rights freely, especially when identity, stigma, or social structures dictate who gets to speak and who must stay silent. Is this truly freedom, or merely its shadow, hiding the slow suffocation of its spirit? 

For a country that boasts of unity in diversity, the promise, it seems, gets lost in translation. 

In Outlook Magazine’s August 21, 2024, special Independence Day issue, we highlighted how, after so many years of independence, we strive for the ideal of equity; however, we remain the Dreamers of Equality. Chinki Sinha shares that she was born after independence. She believed she was free until she had to choose words carefully to weave stories of those who had fallen through the cracks because they had been trapped within the confines of caste, or they were the others, who believed in different gods or didn’t believe at all, which they were free to do, or so she believed. Many things happened in her lifetime. Wars, demolitions, arrests, caste battles, rapes, murders and many such things are driven by the labelling of those on the receiving end as “others” or “anti-nationals.”

We are free as a nation. But for many people, political freedom remains elusive. This freedom, which we take for granted, is systematically curtailed through the state apparatus. The political rights of India’s Muslims continue to be threatened, and more so, with the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) of 2019, which grants special access to Indian citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants and refugees from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries.

Apeksha Priyadarshini explored What Freedom Means For India’s Political Prisoners. Maryam was six—the youngest of three siblings—when her father, Khalid Saifi, was arrested following the sectarian violence in northeast Delhi in February 2020. The violence took place against the backdrop of months of protests led by Muslim women at several sites across the national capital and in the country, against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the proposed updates to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR). Maryam’s mother, Nargis, recalls the day as the beginning of “a dark, endless night” that has been written into their fates. “Memories of her father have begun to blur in Maryam’s mind,” Nargis says. The child can only remember how he looks through photographs and videos. When Nargis asks her husband, now 45, in Delhi’s Tihar jail, to tell her what “freedom” means to him, he says: “The liberty to watch my children grow up.” 

Khalid’s story is not unique. From young fathers to ageing professors, political prisoners across India experience a version of freedom that exists only in the mind. G.N. Saiba, an Indian scholar who died in October 2024, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Sessions court in 2019 for having ties with outlawed Maoist organisations. Saibaba pointed out how, during his imprisonment, only the freedom of his mind survived. He wrote for the Outlook Independence Day Special issue of 2024, recollecting his years in jail as a political prisoner. The notion that no person or circumstance can control my freedom of mind has remained a dearly liberating idea since my schooldays.

My 90 per cent disability due to polio in childhood was no obstruction to my free thinking. But for the first time, this very disability became a weighty tool in the hands of the rulers and their authorities to control my body and mind once I was imprisoned. They exercised their power over my free thinking by weaponising my disability. For the first time in my life, I began to feel that I was a disabled person. 

Human nature ordains that one cannot live without freedom. I wonder how other beings perceive unfreedom; we know that indeed animals loathe fenced enclosures, birds hate cages, and domesticated pets scorn the air-conditioned heavens. But, as always, the pertinent question still looms large in India: Can there be freedom where caste works as the basic principle of governing a society? And social fascism is the foundation of our social structure. Here, a thousand constitutions enshrining all the best rights in the known human society can never work.

Freedom, liberty and fraternity remain the ideals of Western democracy that never attracted the imagination of our caste-divided society. We have been accustomed to living in a prison-house of castes—oppressor and oppressed imprisoned in the same house for centuries. 

Yet, even as centuries have passed, these odious notions persist, deeply rooted and ever-present. Being born into a marginalised caste in India still carries the same stigma and condemnation. Shweta Desai shed light on how untouchability continues to plague India’s Dalits. She narrated an incident where Santosh Nagoji takes a deep breath and walks toward the hole-in-the-wall men’s salon on a Thursday evening. He needed a haircut but dared not enter the 10 x 10 square feet parlour, painted with pink walls, and take up the empty seat next to two customers. He knew what the barber’s response would be. Standing at a distance from the salon’s threshold, he still curtly asked, “Kesa kapnar ka (will you give me a haircut)?”

The hairdresser was about to nod when a customer getting a facial stopped him. Taking one look at Nagoji, he coldly said, “Dalit aahe toh (he is a Dalit).”

In most places, barber shops serve as a space for grooming, hygiene, occasional gossip, and social interaction. For Nagoji, a well-built 33-year-old from the Mahar caste, who works on contract as a delivery driver in Mumbai, it is an everyday place of exploitation, discrimination, and humiliation. A place to avoid, a no-go zone.

“No haircut for Dalits,” a strictly enforced caste-based prohibition, is a custom zealously practised in the villages of Nagansur, Tondlur, Navindagi and others in Solapur’s Akkalkot taluka on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border. The dominant caste of Lingayats—a politically strong community—maintains an upper hand over the scheduled castes of Mahars, Matangs, Dhor and Chambhar living in these villages. 

This practice is one of the 400-odd documented forms of untouchability followed in different parts of the country, as per Ghanshyam Shah’s 2006 book, Untouchability in Rural India.

“The country has got freedom, but not us. Our situation is still like being under gulaamgiri (slavery),” says Gadeppa Sharanappa Chikkali, sitting under the shade of a leafy Banyan tree, next to the memorial of Babasaheb Ambedkar. He was born in Nagansur in 1946, a year before independence. The village followed the stringent rules of segregation and untouchability even then.

Those on the lower rungs of society still bear the brunt of an unequal republic. How far have the fruits of independence reached the masses of the working population today? G Vijay explained that the history of unfreedom and bondage in employment in India is associated with the wretched institution of caste-based bondage. The rigidity and hereditary reproduction of caste-based bondage relations in employment have been codified in the Manusmriti and have been practised since ancient times. Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar fought throughout his life for the annihilation of caste-based segregation, unfreedom, humiliation and exploitation. While such traditional caste-based bondage has been abolished by law after independence, its practice has acquired new forms and continues to pose a challenge.

While in post-independent India a variety of State interventions, economic development as well as political resistance have certainly reduced the capacity of traditional caste-based institutions to enforce control and exploitation, these very sections of society, which find themselves at the bottom of the social as well as the economic hierarchy continue to experience what scholars like Jan Breman have called “neo-bondage”. 

This imposition does not restrict itself to religion or caste but seeps beyond. When it does, the voice of 63 per cent of the people of India is at stake. This becomes apparent in the contemporary socio-political climate, where any view or opinion contrary to those in power becomes superfluous and offensive. A fundamental question that often arises is whether we need an opposition at all. Apart from the fact that it is absolutely essential in a parliamentary democracy to have an active opposition, another apparent reason is that the majority of voters require their voice to be heard through the opposition. To de-complicate this quizzical statement, one needs to look at the results of the last two parliamentary elections. In 2019, the BJP managed to garner 37.3 per cent of the valid votes polled, while it mustered 36.6 per cent of the votes this year. This means that around 63 per cent of people of India—the vast majority—did not vote for Narendra Modi or his party. This majority is what the ruling party attempts to dominate. 

Their method? Ridicule and Lynch. Zaina Azhar Sayeda, in her piece, Living In The Age Of Lynching highlighted how lynchings have surged over the past decade. Those targeted have been predominantly Muslim, or other minorities and scheduled castes such as Dalits. While these acts are frequently described as spontaneous mob violence, some argue that such violence is not merely a spontaneous expression of anger but, instead, is the result of systematic incitement by Hindu extremists.

Between June 7 and July 5, 2024, across India, 12 people died after being lynched, according to the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR). Additionally, the Hate Crime Tracker (HCT) reported 72 confirmed incidents of hate crimes and hate speech during the first quarter of 2024 (January-March). HCT’s report defines a hate crime as a criminal act committed against an individual or victim due to their race, religion, colour, national origin, sexual orientation, or other personal traits, motivated by hostility and prejudice. This includes mob violence, attacks on property, intimidation, physical assault, provocation, threats, and incitement to violence. For 66 per cent of the 72 cases, the alleged primary driver behind these incidents was the victims’ religious identity.