Blog

Freedom is one of those ideals we claim to cherish universally, but whose meaning has shifted across centuries. For the Stoics, freedom meant inner mastery—rising above passions. For Rousseau, it meant the “general will” binding people together. For the American revolutionaries, it was freedom from tyranny. And yet, freedom, when left unchecked, has often collapsed into chaos.
Take the Athenian democracy: hailed as the cradle of liberty, it oscillated between mob rule and oligarchic coups, its freedoms eroded by factionalism. Or consider the French Revolution, whose cry of liberté devolved into the Terror. History suggests that freedom without structure is fragile, and structure without freedom, intolerable.
Hobbes recognised this tension. In his Leviathan, he warned that unbridled liberty leads to a “war of all against all,” and only a strong sovereign can ensure peace. His solution, though, verged on absolutism. Locke countered with the idea that government’s role was not domination, but the safeguarding of natural rights. Kant, once again the cautious mediator, argued that freedom is not doing whatever one wishes, but acting according to laws one prescribes for oneself—freedom through rational order.
In modern society, this paradox plays out daily. Technology gives us unprecedented liberty: to speak, create, connect. Yet, the same freedom births misinformation, cybercrime, and surveillance. Democracies, too, wrestle with balancing civil liberty and security—how much privacy must we surrender to feel safe?
Perhaps, then, freedom is less a destination and more a balancing act. Too much order suffocates; too much liberty disintegrates. The art of governance lies in sustaining that tension, ensuring freedom does not destroy itself, and order does not become tyranny.
But the questions linger: Should freedom ever be curtailed for safety? Can we trust order not to grow oppressive? And above all, is true freedom possible without a shared sense of responsibility? Our answers remain incomplete—but our pursuit of them is the price of being human.

Freedom and the Indian Republic

If freedom has always required the discipline of order to endure, India offers a striking contemporary stage on which this age-old paradox unfolds. At its founding, the country attempted something few political theorists would have advised: to graft universal adult franchise onto a population marked by vast inequalities and profound social cleavages. Freedom arrived not at the end of a long struggle for cohesion, but at its very beginning.

The Constitution reflected this delicate balancing act. It guaranteed liberties—speech, movement, conscience—while also carving out restrictions “reasonable” and “necessary.” The framers understood that freedom in a society of such scale and diversity needed both protection and restraint. Nehru spoke of democracy as a “process,” and Ambedkar warned that political equality without social harmony could prove brittle.

But India today faces a new terrain, one earlier generations could not fully anticipate.

The digital realm, for instance, has widened the space for individual expression. Voices once confined to drawing rooms now circulate nationally within minutes. Yet the same space enables distortion: misinformation spreads faster than correction, and anonymity often erodes accountability. Freedom of expression remains essential—but it increasingly contends with the question of how to preserve coherence in a public sphere that has grown both louder and more fragmented.

This tension appears in physical spaces as well. The right to assembly is preserved, yet cities of tens of millions require uninterrupted movement to function. Environmental safeguards protect collective futures, but they meet resistance from those who view them as impediments to growth. Even electoral politics reflects competing conceptions of freedom—one prioritising authority that promises stability, another insisting that dissent is the truest guardrail of democracy.

These are not contradictions unique to India, but India magnifies them. Its sheer plurality ensures that freedom is never a uniform experience and that order is never a simple imposition. Policies that one group perceives as ensuring security are seen by another as constraining autonomy. The balance shifts continually, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes dramatically.

Perhaps the deeper challenge is not merely institutional but ethical. A democracy of this scale requires a shared understanding of responsibility—an acceptance that freedom is sustained not only by rights but by restraint. Tagore imagined a freedom enriched by empathy; Gandhi spoke of self-rule as first a mastery over one’s impulses. Both recognised that liberty without a moral foundation grows unstable, and order without consent grows brittle.

So India, like the societies before it, navigates this unresolved tension. How much structure is necessary to preserve harmony in a nation of many worlds? How much liberty can be exercised before social trust begins to fray? And can a society maintain unity without sacrificing the very freedoms that define it?

These questions do not admit final answers. But India’s ongoing attempt to reconcile freedom with order is not a failure of the republic—it is the very essence of its democratic experiment.