Pursuit of Equality

The freedom struggle can be seen as a social process involving the pursuit of several different ideals or values. ¹ The Indian subcontinent was much too vast a geographical territory and much too varied a cultural territory for a single dominant construct of ideals to be sustained for any length of time. Such a development was also prevented by the fact that political leadership never took the form of a unified elite. Cultural, ideological and personality-related factors kept the leadership a loosely strung group at the national level. Elites — in the proper sense of the term — emerged and held sway only in local spheres, and that too only in certain parts of the country. Between the local and national spaces lay the substantial distances of cultural aspiration and perception of the desirable. These distances invariably diluted the tenacity and passion with which local or regional spokesmen could hold on to their value-premises when they engaged in national-level deliberations. When the deliberations led to a resolution, it was hardly ever a crystallization; rather, it was a map of the uncontroversial space available between the assertions of different value-premises. ² What lay in this space were temporally useful clusters of values. Politics meant finding room in this space, and the contest was hard. Significant voices were often left out, and as the freedom struggle advanced, some of these voices formed a cluster outside the political space.