Is India Really Independent?
Every year, on the fifteenth of August, a flag is unfurled at the Red Fort. The tricolour climbs its rope slowly, catches the morning wind and opens like a declaration. Millions watch. Schoolchildren in pressed uniforms hold small paper flags that will be abandoned on the ground by afternoon. Politicians deliver speeches in which the word azaadi — freedom, is invoked with the solemnity of a prayer. And somewhere in that same city and in every city across this vast contradictory subcontinent, a Dalit man descends into a sewer without gloves, without oxygen, without any protection whatsoever, to clean out the waste of a civilization that has not yet decided whether he belongs to it. He may not come back up. Between 2020 and 2024, two hundred and ninety-four people died in manholes and septic tanks across India, their deaths recorded in parliamentary papers and then filed away. Since 1993, when manual scavenging was first legally prohibited, more than twelve hundred people have died performing it. Not one conviction has followed any of those deaths.
This is the republic at seventy-nine. Not the republic of speeches and statistics about GDP growth and digital payments and lunar missions, though that republic exists too and its achievements are real. This is the republic of the gap between what was promised on the 15th of August 1947 and what most of its citizens actually live. That gap is the true subject of this essay. And it is not a small gap, nor an accidental one. It is the predictable consequence of a freedom that was won from foreign rulers but never fully extended to the majority of people whom those rulers had, in a different grammar of exploitation, already dispossessed. The British left. The architecture of dispossession, retooled and redistributed among a new domestic elite, remained.
The question this essay asks is not whether India has made progress. It has. The question is whether the kind of freedom that was dreamed of in jail cells and articulated in constitutional chambers has been honoured and if not, why not, and at whose expense the failure has occurred.
I. The Vocabulary of Betrayal
To understand the nature of the failure, one must first understand the nature of the promise. The Indian Constitution, adopted on the 26th of November 1949, is among the most ambitious documents in the history of political thought. It guaranteed not merely political rights: the right to vote, to assembly, to speech but social and economic ones: the abolition of untouchability under Article 17, the right to equality before the law under Article 14, the directive principles that called upon the state to ensure adequate means of livelihood, equal pay for equal work, and the protection of workers from conditions of labour incompatible with human dignity. B.R. Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee, knew that political democracy was hollow without social democracy. “We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well,” he said on the eve of the Constitution’s adoption. “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of its social democracy.”
He also issued a warning that has proven almost unbearably prophetic. He spoke of the contradictions India was entering with; a life of contradictions, he called it, in which political equality would coexist with social and economic inequality. He gave that contradiction a deadline of sorts: if it was not resolved, those who suffered under it would blow up the structure of political democracy.
Seventy-nine years later, the structure has not been blown up but it has been hollowed out from within not by the dispossessed but by the privileged, who have used the machinery of democratic governance to concentrate wealth, capture institutions and insulate themselves from the accountability that democracy is supposed to guarantee.
This is what makes the Indian story so specifically painful. It is not the story of a country that never tried. It is the story of a country that tried and was systematically undermined from inside by those entrusted with its care.
II. The British Left. The Drain Did Not.
Shashi Tharoor, in An Era of Darkness, documented how British rule reduced India’s share of global GDP from roughly 25% in 1750 to under 4% by 1947, a process he called the drain of wealth, the extraction of value from colonized people to enrich a distant metropolis. The architecture of that drain: monopolies, skewed trade laws, taxation of the poor to subsidise the powerful is a matter of historical record.
What is less often said, but no less true, is that a version of that drain continues. It has simply changed its beneficiaries.
The richest 10 per cent of the Indian population lay claim to approximately 77% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% holds over 50%. The World Inequality Report of 2026 confirms the picture: The top 10% of earners receive about 58% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive only 15%. The income gap between the top 10 and the bottom 50 did not improve either, it has been a decade during which India became the world’s fifth largest economy and its government spoke of little else but development.
The most revealing figure in the Oxfam India analysis is not the wealth share of the top 1%. It is the tax structure. Approximately 64% of the total GST collected came from the bottom 50% of the population, while only 3% came from the top 10%. The bottom 50% of the population pays six times more in indirect taxes as a percentage of income compared to the top 10%. India has managed to construct a tax system in which those with the least pay the largest share of their income to the state and those with the most pay the smallest. This is not an accident. It is a political choice, made repeatedly, in a democracy where the poor are the majority and therefore, in theory, hold all the power.
That they do not hold that power, that the theory diverges so completely from the practice is the central paradox of Indian democracy. A nation in which the poor are the majority ought to produce governments that serve the poor. Instead, it has produced governments that are funded by and beholden to capital, that deliver enough in the way of subsidised food and symbolic welfare to retain electoral loyalty, while the structural conditions that produce poverty; the concentration of land, capital, credit and institutional access in the hands of a narrow elite go largely untouched. This is not a failure of democracy in the conventional sense.
It is democracy working precisely as it was designed to work when the social conditions that make democratic equality meaningful; widespread education, access to information, economic independence are themselves unequally distributed.
III. The Hierarchy That Outlasted the Empire
If wealth inequality is the wound inflicted on India by its new domestic rulers, caste is the older wound that those rulers have used, exploited and perpetuated with the same shamelessness that the British brought to the management of religious division.
As of 2024, 97% of manual scavengers in India belong to Scheduled Castes. The practice has been illegal since 1993, under a law that was strengthened in 2013. Across all the legal preventions of the past seventy years, not a single conviction has occurred. That figure — zero convictions in seven decades of supposed prohibition is perhaps the single most damning data point in the entire catalogue of independent India’s failures. It says, more clearly than any polemical argument could, that when the law and caste hierarchy come into conflict in India, caste wins. Not because the law is weak in principle. Because those who enforce the law, those who prosecute violations of it, those who sit in judgement over it, belong overwhelmingly to the castes that benefit from the hierarchy the law is supposed to dismantle.
Around 294 deaths were reported in Parliament between 2020 and 2024, with more than 1,200 deaths recorded since 1993. In March 2025, three men were sent into a manhole in New Friends Colony, Delhi. One died. Two were hospitalised. In Delhi alone, an RTI response revealed 94 deaths over fifteen years, with a single conviction to show for it. A man descended into a hole in the ground, in the capital of the world’s largest democracy, and did not come back up and the law shrugged.
Ambedkar understood that caste was not merely a social prejudice but an economic system; a means of ensuring that certain forms of labor remained hereditary, that certain communities could not accumulate capital or dignity, that the surplus value produced by Dalit labour could be appropriated by those higher in the hierarchy without resistance or recourse. He called it “a system which appoints for each its function in life, not according to its choice, but according to the accident of birth.” That description remains operative. A Dalit physicist at Delhi University, Dr Ashok Kumar, contributed to CERN experiments and shared in the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He was denied promotion under the “Not Found Suitable” category. His h-index was 120. The category offered no explanation.
The caste system has proven more resilient than any colonial administrator. It survived the Raj, survived Partition, survived the Green Revolution, survived liberalisation, survived the smartphone and survived the UPI payment system. It survived because it is not a relic of the past that modernity is slowly eroding. It is a living structure, actively maintained by those who profit from it, deployed when needed as a weapon of violence and when convenient as a social sorting mechanism too ingrained to challenge.
IV. The Fourth Pillar, Horizontal
The press is called the fourth pillar of democracy because the first three: legislature, executive and judiciary require an independent information environment to function. Without journalists who can investigate, report and criticise without fear, accountability becomes theoretical. The powerful govern in the dark and the governed cannot make informed choices.
India stands at 151 among 180 nations in the World Press Freedom Index of 2025, in the “very serious” category for press freedom. In 2024, it was 159th, ranked below Qatar and Rwanda. India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for media workers, with an average of three or four journalists killed in connection with their work every year. The sedition law, though partially curtailed by the Supreme Court, has been used to silence critics of government policy. Internet shutdowns, India leads the world in their frequency are deployed as a first response to civil unrest rather than a last resort.
What has replaced journalism, in much of India’s media landscape, is something more insidious than state censorship: voluntary surrender. Large media houses are owned by conglomerates with interests in industries regulated by the government. The editorial calculus in those newsrooms does not require a government phone call. It operates through the logic of self-preservation, the instinct of an institution that understands which stories carry risk to its commercial relationships and which do not. The result is a press that covers elections obsessively but investigates economic policy rarely; that reports on individual corruption cases but almost never examines structural corruption; that discusses communal violence with the framing preferred by the political establishment and that treats the concerns of two hundred million people living below the poverty line as a sidebar to the main story, which is always about the cities, the middle class and the aspirational consumer.
India ranked 96th in the Corruption Perception Index for 2024, with a score of 38 out of 100. Transparency International classifies India among countries that are dangerous for journalists reporting on corruption, citing specific risks from local mining and sand mafia operations.
The journalism that is most urgently needed, investigations into the relationship between political power and extractive industry, into how public contracts are awarded, into how regulatory bodies are captured is precisely the journalism that carries the greatest personal risk for those who attempt it and the least institutional support from the outlets that employ them.
V. A Civilization That Cannot Feed Itself
In the 2025 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 102nd out of 123 countries with sufficient data, with a score of 25.8, classified as a level of hunger that is serious. The prevalence of undernourishment stands at 12% of the population. This is a country that has conducted missions to the Moon. It is a country that hosted the world’s most expensive wedding in 2023, a private celebration whose cost was estimated at $600 million. The coexistence of these two facts does not represent the dynamism of a developing nation navigating complexity. It represents the moral failure of a society that has normalised its own indifference to suffering.
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The condition of public healthcare deserves more than the ritualised lament it typically receives. India spends approximately 1.8% of GDP on public health — one of the lowest rates in the world for an economy of its size. The consequence is visible in every government hospital in every district of every state: overcrowded wards, absent doctors, unavailable medicines, patients lying on the floor in corridors, families selling land to pay for private treatment when the government facility fails them. A common Indian, confronting a serious illness, faces a binary that no citizen of a seventy-nine-year-old democracy should face: submit to a public system that is chronically under-resourced, or submit to a private system that has no obligation of transparency and no effective price regulation. Either way, the illness takes a financial toll that can erase the savings of decades.
The privatisation of healthcare, like the privatisation of education, has been allowed to proceed without the regulatory architecture that makes private provision serve public ends in countries that have successfully navigated this transition. What has emerged instead is a market in which pharmaceutical companies rebrand generic medicines and sell them at multiples of the original price to patients who cannot read the package insert. A market in which hospital billing is opaque, insurance claims are routinely denied and the infrastructure for patient redress is so overburdened as to be functionally useless.
This is not a market failure in the technical sense. It is a regulatory failure, the failure of a state to perform its most basic obligation to its citizens.
VI. The Soil and the Classroom: Two Kinds of Slow Death
There is a particular cruelty in dying for something as elemental as rain. In a country that calls the farmer its backbone, that has made its kissan the centrepiece of every budget speech, every election manifesto, every agricultural policy document since Independence; the most honest measure of how seriously that reverence is meant is not what politicians say but what the NCRB records. In 2024, 10,546 people in the farm sector died by suicide, roughly one every hour, twenty-eight every day. That figure has not dropped below ten thousand in any single year since 2019. It has been, with grim regularity, a number the republic has learned to absorb without alarm. Since 1995, when the NCRB began tracking these deaths consistently, well over three hundred thousand people connected to agriculture have taken their own lives. This is not a crisis. A crisis implies urgency, a sense that something must be done before it worsens. This is a condition — chronic, structural and deliberately unaddressed that the political class has made its peace with.
The causes are not mysterious. Indian agriculture operates at the intersection of three converging brutalities: the debt trap, the weather and the market. A smallholder farmer borrows to buy seeds and fertiliser, often at extortionate rates from moneylenders when institutional credit is unavailable or inaccessible. He plants. He waits. The monsoon fails, or arrives in destructive excess, or arrives on time but the market price collapses because a glut has arrived from elsewhere. Of the 10,546 agricultural suicides in 2024, approximately 56% were landless agricultural labourers, the second-highest proportion in five years — people who own nothing, insure nothing and receive none of the farm loan waivers that are periodically announced as gestures of political goodwill toward the agricultural sector. The waivers, when they come, go primarily to those with formal land titles and bank loans, not to the daily wage labourer who has neither. The subsidy, as has been documented in parliamentary records, flows most generously not to farmers but to the dealers of seeds and fertilisers, the middlemen, the urban institutions. In 2017, according to government data, ₹35,000 crore of agricultural loans and subsidies were disbursed in New Delhi and Chandigarh — cities that contain no farms.
Maharashtra accounts for more than a third of every agricultural suicide in the country, a figure that has been consistent across years, governments and policy regimes. In 2024, extreme weather destroyed more than two million hectares of crops in that state alone. The state government announces compensation. The compensation arrives late, or is calculated at rates that bear no relationship to actual losses, or requires documentation that a farmer who has just watched his standing crop drown does not possess. He borrows again to survive the season. The cycle continues. And when the weight of it becomes unbearable when the shame of debt, the fear of losing land that has been in a family for generations, the daily humiliation of being unable to feed one’s children converge in a single, suffocating moment, he is alone in a field with a bottle of pesticide and rope in his hands and no one to call.
That the state has allowed this to persist is not ignorance. It is indifference dressed in the language of helplessness. And what makes that indifference so specifically scandalous is that it coexists, within the same national budget, with policies that have made Indian billionaires significantly wealthier every year that farmers have been dying.
If the farmer’s death is the failure of a country that never made good on its promises to those who feed it, the student’s death is the failure of a country that made its most cynical bargain with the young. In 2024, 14,488 students died by suicide across India — 8.5% of the country’s total suicides, rising at a rate of 4.3% annually, nearly double the national average growth rate of overall suicides. Between 2014 and 2024, more than 1.23 lakh students took their own lives. This is not a mental health crisis, though it presents as one. It is an educational philosophy crisis, a crisis of what India has decided education is for and at what cost to the young it will extract the answer.
The coaching industry of Kota, Rajasthan, is the most visible emblem of this philosophy. Tens of thousands of teenagers, some as young as fifteen are dispatched by their families from every corner of the country to live in hostel rooms in an unfamiliar city, under the supervision of institutes that make extraordinary revenue from the anxiety of parents and the ambition of children, preparing them for entrance examinations whose seat ratios are so catastrophically narrow that failure is, by mathematical definition, the guaranteed outcome for the vast majority of entrants. Kota recorded 26 student suicides in 2023 and 17 in 2024. When those deaths occurred, a Rajasthan minister attributed them, publicly, to love affairs. That response — the deflection of a systemic failure onto the emotional lives of the dead is itself a kind of diagnosis, revealing how completely the political class has abdicated any responsibility for a system it has built and from which it profits.
The deeper crisis, however, is not in Kota but in the government school on the edge of every town and village in India. It is here, at the grassroots of the educational system, that the true texture of the republic’s failure is most apparent. Classrooms without teachers because sanctioned posts sit vacant for years while appointment processes are mired in bureaucratic inertia and, often, corruption. Textbooks that arrive mid-year or not at all. Infrastructure that would shame a colonial-era building-crumbling walls, absent toilets, no drinking water, no proper electricity. Children sitting on the floor because there are no benches. A child in that classroom is not receiving an education. She is receiving a message — the same message that the manual scavenger and the indebted farmer receive through different means that the state does not consider her fully worthy of its investment. That message is pedagogically devastating because it is received at the age when a child is forming her sense of what she is entitled to expect from the world.
The result of decades of this under-investment is not merely illiteracy. It is a population that has been denied the cognitive tools to interrogate the world it inhabits and that has therefore remained, in substantial measure, susceptible to the oldest instruments of social control: superstition, communal identity and manufactured fear. India is a civilization of extraordinary antiquity and intellectual depth, the origin of mathematical concepts, astronomical observations, linguistic theories and philosophical systems that shaped human knowledge across millennia. And yet, in the twenty-first century, astrology guides investment decisions and marriage alliances among the educated middle class. Mob violence is organised around rumours spread on smartphones. Political elections are fought and won on the basis of religious identity rather than governance record. Witch-hunting, the accusation and murder of women, predominantly Dalit and tribal, on grounds of supposed sorcery continues in states across the country, with hundreds of cases reported annually.
This is not the backwardness of poverty, though poverty is its enabling condition. It is the backwardness of a society that has been denied the capacity for critical thought at every level of its educational system and in which the political class has found that the maintenance of that backwardness is electorally convenient. A population that thinks in terms of caste solidarity rather than class interest, that channels its grievances into religious antagonism rather than economic demand, that defers to authority rather than questioning it, is a population that can be governed cheaply and divided cheaply.
The government school with no teacher is not merely a failure of administration. It is, in its predictable consequence, a tool of political management.
VII. Nationalism as the Last Refuge of the Unaccountable
There is a particular form of nationalism that fills the space that accountability should occupy. In India, it has become the dominant idiom of public discourse. To question the condition of public hospitals is to be anti-national. To point to the hunger index is to be a pawn of Western interests. To raise the matter of journalist killings is to have misread the data. The architecture of this deflection is not spontaneous. It is constructed, deliberately, by those whose interests it serves — the governing class and its media adjacencies, for whom national pride is a more comfortable subject than national failure.
But consider the arithmetic of what the pride papers over. A country in which, as Adam Gondvi wrote, seventy of every hundred people are miserable. A country in which, by the World Inequality Lab’s own numbers, the bottom 50% of the population; some 700 million people share 15% of national income. A country in which a man who reaches the highest peak of his profession is denied promotion, not for any failure of merit, but for the accident of his birth. A country in which another man descends into a sewer, as his father descended before him and as his son may be expected to descend after him, because the social contract that was supposed to liberate him from inherited occupation has been signed but never honoured.
The brain drain is a particularly eloquent symptom. India produces, at considerable public expense through subsidised institutions, some of the best-trained engineers, doctors, scientists and economists in the world. A substantial proportion of them leave. They leave not because they do not love the country but because the country has not built the conditions in which their talents can be exercised without being ground down by the friction of broken systems, institutional dysfunction, casteism in professional environments and the exhaustion of fighting every day for resources that ought to be basic. They leave, and the country mourns their absence while doing nothing systematic about the conditions that produced it.
This is a particular kind of tragedy; the tragedy of a country that invests in its brightest minds and then exports them to the countries that will actually use them.
VIII. Everything That Was Chosen
The philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment: design a society from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which position in that society you would occupy.
If you did not know whether you would be born Dalit or Brahmin, billionaire or manual scavenger, woman in a city or woman in a village, majority or minority, what kind of society would you design? Almost certainly, you would design one with strong public institutions, redistributive taxation, genuine rule of law and social protections that did not depend on the accident of birth. You would design something very close to what the Indian Constitution actually promises.
The distance between the constitutional promise and the lived reality is not a mystery. It is the product of political choices, made over decades by people who had the power to honour the promise and chose instead to honour their class interests. Land reform that was promised and then diluted. Labour laws that existed on paper and were unenforced in practice. Public institutions that were designed to be independent and were quietly colonized by political appointees. Judicial processes that are available in principle and inaccessible in practice to those who cannot afford lawyers, cannot take time from wage labour to attend hearings and cannot navigate a system whose proceedings are conducted in a language many of them do not speak.
None of this is inevitable. It is all chosen. Countries far poorer than India, at comparable stages of development, made different choices and produced different outcomes. Kerala, within India itself, made different choices on health and education and produced measurably different results for its citizens.
The capacity for reform exists. What has been absent, repeatedly, is the political will to perform it against the resistance of those who benefit from the status quo.
IX: Coda: On the Stars and Who May Walk Beneath Them
There is a passage in the writing on freedom that has stayed with me. It observes that freedom, like the sky, simply is omnipresent, available in principle to all and yet in practice accessible only to those who may move through it unchallenged. The stars exist equally above the man in prison and the man walking freely at midnight. The distinction is not in the stars. It is in who holds the key to the door.
India declared itself free in 1947. The key was changed. The door looks different. But for the seventy who were miserable in Adam Gondvi’s poem, for the Dalit man at the bottom of the sewer shaft who will not be convicted for, for the woman who cannot walk at midnight in the name of her own security, for the child whose government school has no teacher today and perhaps no textbook tomorrow, the door remains substantially closed. Not because freedom has gone from the world. Because access to it has been cut off — deliberately, systematically and with the full cooperation of a democratic machinery that was designed to prevent exactly this outcome and has instead presided over it.
Bhagat Singh was twenty-three years old when he was hanged. He had written, from his cell, that the revolution he sought was not merely the transfer of power from white hands to brown ones. It was the abolition of exploitation, the ending of the conditions under which man could profit from man’s degradation. He was prescient enough to fear that independence would produce the former without the latter. His fear has been substantially vindicated.
The fifteenth of August will come again. The flag will be unfurled. The speeches will be made. And somewhere in this republic, which is seventy-nine years old and still, in the most meaningful sense, unfinished, a man will descend into a darkness that his constitution forbids but his country permits, and the stars, those cold, indifferent, aching stars will shine for everyone except him.
That is not independence. It is its postponement. And postponement, held long enough, becomes a different kind of theft.
