Towards Isocracy? The Indian Constitution as a Site of Complex Equality

The Constitution, through Articles 15 and 16, seeks to crystallise the idea of “complex equality” and the trilogy of Pavitra v Karnataka illustrates this. The apex court has thus emerged as the moral pedagogue of social justice.

- Prof Upendra Baxi

THE Indian Constitution is seen from multiple perspectives, but perhaps the best way is to look at it is from the vantage point of Isocracy, a term introduced recently by Nicolò Bellanca, an Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Florence, to signify a real or concrete Utopia which is a “good place to live”. Isocracy is a “kind of society where people do not rule or obey, a place where there is order without power, and a non-hierarchical cooperation” and its “main conscious aim is to level out relationships of power in whatever realm they might appear”. Certainly, isocracy is a state of affairs in which “shared freedom” is made possible by endeavours to “rejectand dismantle any unequal distribution of power” 1.

This is what the Constitution seeks to do via Articles 15 and 16. They crystallise the idea of “complex equality” which comprises the progressive absence of domination. The right to various freedoms is the “additive freedom” which consists of “rights within [social] settings”, and the “absence of a specific inequality” has to be achieved in context (whether that of family, school, market or state power). Complex equality is the elimination of specific inequalities of outcomes or results fostered by simple numerical equality. According to Michael Walzer, American political theorist and public intellectual, justice is nothing but “the sum of the absences”, which make possible an “egalitarian society”2 . It is the progressive elimination of inequalities and injustices of the power to dominate that Articles 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, and 24 affirm and celebrate, and this eventually makes the Supreme Court of India both a custodian and a connoisseur of complex inequality. II