India’s privileged can truly honour Gandhi by taking on the duty of dismantling injustice

In today’s India, it is possible to live an entire life in comfort and security without once thinking of the millions whose daily labour sustains that comfort.

Those of us in the privileged top 5% – by income, education, housing, or opportunity – can move through life almost insulated, if we choose, from the hunger, precarity, and powerlessness that mark the existence of so many of our fellow citizens.

This inequality is easy to accept as given, even natural. Many treat it as destiny: that some are meant to serve and others to benefit. But this is neither natural nor inevitable.

It is the result of social and economic structures into which we are born. And because it is created, it can also be changed.

This challenge, to consciously dismantle structures of exploitation and replace them with a just society, remains one of the most urgent and enduring legacies of our freedom struggle, a principle embodied by Mahatma Gandhi, whose birthday we mark today.

I write this not as an outsider looking in, but as one who has lived his entire life within privilege. However, from childhood, I was made aware of those who had less than I did. That awareness deepened when I chose to work with small-scale fishing communities. Living alongside them, learning about their struggles and working with them to secure better returns for their hard and dangerous labour at sea, I was confronted daily with the sharp inequities of our society.

What stayed with me most was not their poverty, but their resilience and dignity. Despite uncertainty, hardship and exploitation, they showed a solidarity and moral courage that forced me to unlearn many assumptions that privilege had built into me.

It was a practical lesson in a simple, powerful truth: the well-being of any society is best measured by the well-being of its most vulnerable members.

Later, my involvement in international networks of fishworkers taught me that these inequalities were not unique to India, but part of a global structure.

These experiences did not make me less privileged. But they made me more aware of the invisible scaffolding that supports privilege and of the quiet heroism of those who live without it.

This awareness has shaped my life and my prayers. When I pray, I think of the millions whose hard work clothes me, feeds me, and shelters me. I pray that I may be shown how to use my privilege to improve their welfare in some small way.

I have come to see this not merely as charity, but as a form of duty, a personal understanding of the idea that our advantages are best used when held in trust for the wider good.

In the highly polarised and hierarchical society of India, such thoughts are rare among the privileged. Too often, the gulf between “us” and “them” is seen as unchangeable.

Politicians, meanwhile, feed off the vulnerabilities of the poor, promising much while leaving structures of inequality intact.

Seventy-eight years after Independence, we must admit that these rigid hierarchies continue to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the mosaic of socio-economic inequalities is only increasing rapidly.

Yet, change is both necessary and possible. Here lies an often-overlooked truth: greater equality is not only in the interest of the poor; it is also in the self-interest of the privileged.

Societies built on deep injustice are unstable. Inequality corrodes trust, fuels resentment, and hollows out democracy. A more just, participatory, and sustainable India would serve all its citizens – including the wealthy and powerful.

Fostering change

The question, then, is: how do we foster this change?

I believe it begins with education: not only in schools, but also in families, faith communities, and workplaces. From a young age, children must be helped to see liberty, justice, equality, and fraternity not as lofty abstractions, but as the everyday values on which their own futures depend.

For adults, the starting point is awareness. It is about embracing the call to “be the change we wish to see”, starting within our own spheres of influence. To pause and reflect on how our comfort is linked to the labour of others.

To recognise that each act – however small – can either reinforce inequality or chip away at it. It might be the way we treat domestic workers and the vast numbers of people who serve us with genuine respect, the political choices we make, or the willingness to speak up when we see exclusion.

Change does not only arrive through revolutions or policies. It is built, patiently, through countless small commitments multiplied across society.

The Preamble of our Constitution gives us the compass: justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. These are not ideals to be admired on a few celebratory days of the year, but principles to be lived daily.

The task before those of us with privilege is not to feel guilty, but to feel responsible. To use our opportunities not just for personal gain, but for the common good. To live, in short, as if We the People means all of us – not just the few who were born lucky.

This may be the most meaningful way to honour the man who taught us that true swaraj, true self-rule, begins with the rule of the self – over its own prejudices, its own comforts, and its own indifference.

John Kurien is reflective practitioner who lives in Kozhikode