The freedom struggle in India was largely an elitist participation in the beginning. The ‘Constitutionalists’ as they were called relied on Constitutional methods of pleadings and petitions for registering demands that largely reflected the sentiments of the elite and intellectual class. They realized the importance of public support quite late in the course of freedom struggle. But public support needed highlighting public demands. Demands that could have directly impacted poor and common people. But even while raising public demands, it was only weakly realized that the problems faced by the common people of India also depended on the strata of society to which they belonged. Here becomes the theory of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar both important and significant. According to him, the Hindu society is inherently casteist. Since India has an overwhelming Hindu majority in its demography, people identify themselves and are identified by their castes more than by any other parameter of identi
In western countries, the notion of democracy evolved out of recognizing the individual rights of liberty. This form of democracy is called ‘liberal democracy’. India has a different past – one which has led to the realization of a ‘collective identity’ which is more prominent than the ‘individual identity’ of its citizens. This has resulted from our collective efforts to gain freedom from the Colonial administration which discriminated against Indians. The demand of equal treatment was always there. Indians resisted the British government by a variety of methods – Constitutional methods as used by the ‘Moderates’, Extremism and Violence as used by the ‘Extremists’ and Non-Violent methods of Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience as used by the ‘masses’. The most successful was the non-violent methods as they were mass movements. It was realized back then that the masses are the strongest force of opposition and the voice of the poor is not inferior or weaker than the rich and t