Opinion Manoj Jha writes: My surname does not frame my politics. I am a teacher and citizen, too

Our public life contains a persistent expectation. People believe political positions must follow from surnames. They treat citizenship as secondary and assume political judgment can be inherited through family identity: A name functions as a predetermined script. When someone departs from it, people don’t see independent thought; they see betrayal. This reflects a deeper discomfort with constitutional autonomy. People become anxious when others claim the Constitution as their primary political reference point rather than their ancestry. What unsettles many is the refusal to be governed solely through identity, not so much the dissent.

India’s constitutional imagination was forged precisely to disrupt this logic as the Constitution does not recognise citizens through surnames, clans, or inherited loyalties. It speaks instead in the language of equal moral agency. It assumes that individuals are capable of ethical reflection and political judgement independent of the social identities into which they are born. To deny this autonomy is to hollow out the very idea of constitutional citizenship. Yet, in contemporary discourse, identity is increasingly weaponised as a disciplinary tool, with political disagreement recast as a deviation from communal duty. This is a profoundly anti-constitutional move because it reduces citizens to delegates of imagined majorities and transforms politics into a census of loyalties rather than a contest of ideas.

Constitutional democracy depends on an overlapping consensus: A convergence of citizens from diverse social locations around shared principles of justice, liberty, and equality. This is possible only when constitutional values are placed above inherited allegiances of caste, clan, or community. When political judgement is expected to flow obediently from surnames, citizenship itself is reduced to an accident, and moral autonomy is quietly surrendered. The danger of such parochialism is not merely social fragmentation but constitutional erosion. As Martha Nussbaum has observed, loyalties that remain confined to the near and familiar often become “ethically inert”, even morally damaging, when they prevent recognition of the equal worth of distant others. The Constitution’s transformative promise lies precisely in its insistence that we enlarge our circle of obligation. The narrower our allegiances, the weaker our constitutional imagination. A robust republic therefore demands the cultivation of the largest possible “we”— bound not by blood or birth, but by a shared commitment to justice, dignity, and freedom.

There is a larger danger at work. When identity becomes the primary arbiter of political legitimacy, constitutional reason is displaced. Rights are defended not because they are just, but because they align with group interest. Injustice is tolerated so long as it benefits “one’s own”. This is how constitutional morality erodes, not through dramatic ruptures, but through everyday accommodations with majoritarian convenience. In a constitutional democracy, ethics cannot be provincialised; the moral horizon must extend to all citizens. Emancipatory politics, if it is to mean anything beyond rhetorical flourish, must resist this slide. Emancipation begins with the freedom to dissent from power, from tradition, and from one’s own community if it is against the constitutional morality.

Identity is irreducibly plural. As Amartya Sen argues in Identity and Violence, we simultaneously inhabit multiple affiliations – professional, linguistic, regional, ideological, ethical – and their salience shifts with context.

I am a teacher in the classroom, a researcher in academic forums, a citizen in political debate, and yes, someone born into a particular community. But no single identity exhausts who I am or dictates what I must think. The insistence that inherited group identity should be the default lens everywhere represents what Sen calls “singular affiliation”— a dangerous reduction that denies human complexity. It assumes my caste or religious background predetermines my stance on reservation, secularism, or economic policy. This is not just intellectually impoverished; it is ethically coercive. Constitutional citizenship precisely requires that we refuse this flattening, allowing reason and context to guide our political judgements.

In a republic as diverse and unequal as ours, the temptation to retreat into identity certainties is understandable. But yielding to that temptation comes at a steep cost. It diminishes citizenship, flattens political imagination, and forecloses principled disagreement. If we are serious about safeguarding the republic, we must defend not only the right to speak, but the right to think, freely, autonomously, and constitutionally. Anything less reduces democracy to lineage, and that is precisely the future the Constitution was written to prevent.

The writer is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal