Modern Indian thinkers: Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo and Ambedkar

In short

Modern Indian philosophy is the body of thought produced between roughly 1850 and 1956 in which Indian thinkers reinterpreted classical traditions while answering colonial rule, caste, poverty and nationalism. Its five central figures — Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948), Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) and B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) — turned metaphysics towards practice: service, education, non-violent resistance, spiritual evolution and social justice. It matters because the Preamble's justice-liberty-equality-fraternity, Indian secularism, Panchayati Raj, reservation policy and modern Indian educational ideals all descend from their arguments. It is examined in BA/MA Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology papers, and in UPSC Ethics (GS-IV), Indian Society (GS-I) and Polity (GS-II). In interviews for teaching, civil services, NGO, CSR, policy-research and journalism roles, candidates are asked to compare Gandhi and Ambedkar, or to apply trusteeship and sarvodaya to present business and governance questions.

Explained

The setting: the Indian Renaissance and its problem

• Context: British rule, the 1857 revolt, Christian missionary critique, Orientalist scholarship, printing and English education forced a reappraisal of Hindu tradition.
• Earlier reformers (background, not the topic's core): Raja Ram Mohan Roy (Brahmo Sabha 1828, monotheism, against sati; the practice was banned in 1829), Dayananda Saraswati (Arya Samaj 1875, "back to the Vedas"), Jyotirao Phule (Satyashodhak Samaj 1873, caste critique), Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Vivekananda's guru, direct mystical experience, unity of religions).
• The common problem: how can a tradition claiming the self is already divine coexist with untouchability, poverty, illiteracy and political subjection?
• Three broad answers: (1) reinterpret Vedanta so it demands social service (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo in part); (2) replace religion with a humanist-aesthetic universalism (Tagore); (3) reject the tradition as structurally unjust and build on rationality, rights and Buddhism (Ambedkar).
• Shared features: synthesis of East and West, action-orientation (karma over renunciation), religious pluralism, nationalism without (mostly) chauvinism, and belief in human perfectibility.

Swami Vivekananda — practical Vedanta

• Core move: takes Advaita Vedanta's non-dual Brahman and draws a *social* conclusion — if there is one Self, serving a human being is worship. Hence daridra narayana: God in the poor.
• Practical Vedanta: religion must be "man-making"; a philosophy that cannot feed a hungry person or educate a village has no right to be called religion.
• Potential divinity of the soul: "Each soul is potentially divine"; religion's goal is to manifest that divinity by controlling nature, external and internal.
• Four yogas as equally valid paths suited to temperament: jnana (knowledge), bhakti (devotion), karma (selfless action), raja (psychological discipline) — his *Karma Yoga*, *Bhakti Yoga*, *Jnana Yoga*, *Raja Yoga* are the standard texts.
• Karma yoga without attachment: work is for the worker's own purification; the beneficiary does us the favour of letting us serve. Rejects the idea of patronising charity.
• Universal religion: religions are different paths up the same mountain; his Chicago address to the World's Parliament of Religions (11 September 1893) argued acceptance, not mere tolerance.
• Education: "man-making and character-building education" — Western science and technology plus Indian spirituality; mass education and women's education as prerequisites of national regeneration.
• Nationalism: awakening the masses ("the Shudra will rule"), criticism of priestcraft, caste rigidity and "don't-touchism"; Ramakrishna Mission founded 1897, motto *atmano mokshartham jagad hitaya cha* — for one's own liberation and the good of the world.
• Limitations (as examined): little institutional analysis of caste's economic base; critics call his Neo-Vedanta a selective, Advaita-centric reading presented as "Hinduism" as such.

Rabindranath Tagore — religion of man and the universal

• Religion of Man (Hibbert Lectures, Oxford, 1930): the divine is realised in and through humanity; "jivan devata" (the lord of my life) is the indwelling personal deity of one's own life.
• The surplus in man: humans have energy and imagination beyond biological need; art, love and worship are this surplus expressing itself — the ground of culture and of the spiritual.
• Finite and infinite: reality is not illusory; the finite world is the infinite's self-expression (closer to Upanishadic affirmation than to world-denial). Joy (ananda) is the key category, not suffering.
• Freedom: not absence of restraint but harmony — freedom *in* relation, realised through creative self-expression and love, not through isolation.
• Education: Santiniketan (school 1901) and Visva-Bharati (1921, a central university by Act of Parliament since 1951) — teaching in the open air, in the mother tongue, with art, music and craft central; *yatra visvam bhavatyekanidam*, "where the world makes its home in a single nest". Opposed rote learning and the "factory" school; his essay *The Parrot's Training* is the standard critique.
• Nationalism: *Nationalism* (1917) calls organised nationalism "the organised self-interest of a whole people", a mechanical, aggressive principle; he preferred a cooperative, cultural internationalism. Hence his public disagreements with Gandhi.
• Humanism and critique of the machine: rejects both blind Westernisation and insular revivalism; argues for *samanvaya*, synthesis. Renounced his knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh (1919).
• Tagore–Gandhi debates: on the charkha (Tagore: mechanical repetition is not thought), on non-cooperation and the boycott of schools (Tagore: negation cannot educate), and on the 1934 Bihar earthquake (Gandhi called it divine punishment for untouchability; Tagore rejected moralising about natural causes as unscientific).

Mahatma Gandhi — truth, non-violence and sarvodaya

• Satya (truth) as God: moves from "God is Truth" to "Truth is God"; truth is the only absolute, and everyone has partial access to it — hence his autobiography is *The Story of My Experiments with Truth*.
• Ahimsa: not merely not-killing but the active refusal to harm in thought, word and deed; it is the *means*, truth is the *end*, and means and ends are inseparable — an impure means cannot reach a pure end.
• Satyagraha: "truth-force" or "soul-force": civil resistance that accepts suffering on oneself to convert the opponent, never to defeat or humiliate. Distinct from passive resistance (which is a weapon of the weak) and from coercion.
• Techniques: non-cooperation, civil disobedience (breaking an unjust law openly, accepting the penalty), fasting, hartal, picketing, constructive programme; preconditions are self-purification, discipline, openness about plans, and willingness to negotiate.
• The eleven vows of ashram life, usually listed as: truth, non-violence, chastity (brahmacharya), non-stealing, non-possession (aparigraha), bread-labour, control of the palate, fearlessness, equal respect for all religions, swadeshi, and removal of untouchability.
• Swaraj: self-rule in two senses — political independence *and* self-mastery; *Hind Swaraj* (1909) argues that modern civilisation's machinery, urbanism and multiplying wants are themselves the disease.
• Sarvodaya (welfare of all, coined for his Gujarati rendering of Ruskin's *Unto This Last*): the good of all, not the greatest good of the greatest number; later developed by Vinoba Bhave into Bhoodan and Gramdan.
• Trusteeship: the wealthy hold property in trust for society and may keep only what they need; voluntary, but Gandhi accepted legal regulation if voluntarism failed. Cited today in CSR and business-ethics discussion.
• Economics: village self-sufficiency, swadeshi, bread-labour, decentralised khadi and village industries, "production by the masses, not mass production", machinery acceptable only where it does not displace labour or concentrate power.
• Ends-means and the state: suspicion of the centralised state as "violence in a concentrated form"; the ideal is enlightened anarchy with village republics (an influence on Panchayati Raj and the 73rd Amendment, 1992).
• Religion: sarva dharma samabhava — equal respect for all religions; Ramanama, Gita read allegorically as a text on anasakti (non-attachment) rather than war.
• Limitations (as examined): caste — he defended varna as division of labour long before repudiating it; his trusteeship has no enforcement mechanism; his critique of modern medicine and machinery is often called impractical for a developing economy.

Sri Aurobindo — integral yoga and the evolution of consciousness

• Integral (purna) Advaita: rejects world-denial. The world is real — the descent of Sachchidananda (existence-consciousness-bliss) into matter — and spiritual life must transform it, not escape it.
• Involution and evolution: Spirit "involves" itself in matter; evolution is Spirit's return journey, matter → life → mind → supermind (vijnana, the truth-consciousness) → the gnostic or divine life.
• The seven-fold ladder often examined as: matter, life, psyche, mind, supermind, and the higher terms of Sachchidananda (existence, consciousness-force, bliss); the pivot is supermind, the level at which knowledge is identity, not inference.
• Integral yoga: synthesis of knowledge, works and love, with two movements — aspiration/ascent of the seeker and descent of the supramental force; its instrument is *surrender* (samarpana) and its aim is the gnostic being, not individual escape.
• Psychic being (antaratman): the evolving soul behind mind, life and body; its emergence ("psychic transformation") precedes spiritual and supramental transformation. Three transformations: psychic, spiritual, supramental.
• Life Divine, Synthesis of Yoga, Savitri, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity are the standard texts; Sri Aurobindo Ashram (Puducherry, 1926) and Auroville (founded 1968 by the Mother, endorsed by UNESCO) are the institutions.
• Supramental transformation of society: the goal is divine life on earth, collective not merely individual — a "spiritual age" succeeding the individualist and subjective ages (*The Human Cycle*).
• Politics: early radical nationalist (*Bande Mataram*, Alipore Bomb Case 1908–09), swaraj as national dharma; after 1910 withdrew to Puducherry, treating India's freedom as an already-assured step in a larger spiritual evolution.
• Limitations (as examined): supermind is not empirically verifiable; critics find the terminology obscure and the evolutionary scheme a metaphysical postulate rather than a conclusion.

B. R. Ambedkar — rationality, rights and Navayana Buddhism

• Caste as a system, not a prejudice: *Annihilation of Caste* (1936, an undelivered address) argues caste is sustained by religious sanction and endogamy; it is "not a division of labour but a division of labourers", a graded hierarchy that makes collective resistance impossible — "an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt".
• Remedies: inter-caste marriage and inter-dining as solvents of endogamy; destroying the *shastric* authority (not merely reforming practice); legal equality; political power and representation.
• Critique of Hindu social order: *The Buddha and His Dhamma*, *Riddles in Hinduism*, *Who Were the Shudras?*, *The Untouchables*; attacked the chaturvarna ideal, the Manusmriti (publicly burnt at Mahad, 25 December 1927, during the Mahad Satyagraha of that year) and the Vedas' infallibility.
• Social democracy: political democracy without social and economic democracy is a "top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic" — his Constituent Assembly speech of 25 November 1949. Democracy is "a way of life", requiring liberty, equality and fraternity together; fraternity is the hardest and is what caste destroys.
• Method: Deweyan pragmatism and empiricism (he studied under John Dewey at Columbia), constitutional means, rejection of both revolutionary violence and Gandhian moral persuasion as sufficient.
• Economics: *The Problem of the Rupee* (1923), *States and Minorities* (1947) proposing state socialism in key industries and agriculture; "state socialism established by the law of the Constitution"; architect of labour-welfare measures and of the Damodar and Hirakud river-valley and power-policy design as Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council (1942–46).
• Constitutional work: Chairman of the Drafting Committee, 1947–49; the Preamble's justice, liberty, equality, fraternity; Articles 14–18 (equality, abolition of untouchability under Article 17), Article 32 ("the heart and soul of the Constitution"), Articles 15(4), 16(4) and 46 on reservation and advancement; the Hindu Code Bill he piloted and over whose failure he resigned in September 1951 (its parts became the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956).
• Navayana Buddhism: conversion at Nagpur, 14 October 1956, with the 22 vows; Buddhism chosen as rational, moral and casteless. His reading is rationalist and social — dukkha read as social suffering, the Four Noble Truths reinterpreted, rebirth and karma as fatalism rejected; prajna (reason), karuna (compassion) and samata (equality) as its pillars.
• Gandhi–Ambedkar dispute: the Poona Pact, 24 September 1932 — Ambedkar accepted reserved seats within a joint electorate (raised from 71 to 148) instead of the separate electorates granted by the Communal Award, after Gandhi's fast unto death at Yeravda. For Ambedkar, Gandhi's "harijan" uplift left the varna structure intact; for Gandhi, separate electorates would have split Hindu society permanently.
• Limitations (as examined): critics argue the legal-constitutional route underestimated how caste survives outside law; his assessment of village India as a "den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism" is contested by Gandhian decentralists.

Comparing them: the four live debates

1. Means and ends: Gandhi — inseparable; Ambedkar — constitutional means judged by outcomes; Aurobindo — both subordinate to spiritual evolution.
2. Nation and world: Gandhi's swadeshi nationalism, Tagore's critique of nationalism, Aurobindo's spiritual nationalism and "ideal of human unity", Vivekananda's cultural nationalism, Ambedkar's constitutional patriotism over cultural nationhood.
3. Religion's role: indispensable and reformable (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo); replaceable by humanism and art (Tagore); to be rejected and replaced if it sanctions injustice (Ambedkar).
4. Village or city: Gandhi's village republic against Ambedkar's view that the village is the fortress of caste and that urbanisation, industry and education emancipate.

Key points

• Practical Vedanta - Vivekananda's turn of Advaita into social service; one Self implies service of all.
• Daridra Narayana - God in the poor; worship through service of the deprived.
• Four yogas - jnana, bhakti, karma, raja; equally valid paths matched to temperament.
• Man-making education - Vivekananda's aim: character, strength and self-confidence, not information.
• Religion of Man - Tagore's doctrine that the divine is realised in and through humanity.
• Surplus in man - Tagore's name for the energy beyond need from which art, love and religion arise.
• Jivan devata - the indwelling deity of one's own life; the personal face of the infinite in Tagore.
• Visva-Bharati - Tagore's 1921 university at Santiniketan; "the world in one nest", mother-tongue and arts-centred learning.
• Truth is God - Gandhi's final formulation; truth is the end, ahimsa the only means to it.
• Satyagraha - truth-force; non-violent resistance that converts the opponent by self-suffering.
• Sarvodaya - welfare of all, opposed to utilitarianism's greatest good of the greatest number.
• Trusteeship - the rich hold wealth in trust for society, keeping only what they need.
• Hind Swaraj (1909) - Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation and statement of swaraj as self-rule plus self-mastery.
• Integral yoga - Aurobindo's synthesis of yogas aiming at transformation of life, by aspiration and supramental descent.
• Supermind - the truth-consciousness between mind and Sachchidananda; knowledge by identity.
• Psychic being - the evolving soul whose emergence begins Aurobindo's three transformations.
• Annihilation of Caste (1936) - Ambedkar's argument that endogamy and shastric sanction, not labour division, sustain caste.
• Social democracy - Ambedkar's claim that political democracy fails without social and economic equality and fraternity.
• Navayana Buddhism - Ambedkar's rationalist, social reading of Buddhism; conversion at Nagpur, 14 October 1956.
• Poona Pact (1932) - reserved seats in joint electorates replacing separate electorates for the Depressed Classes.

Examples

Case 1 — Apply satyagraha to an unjust municipal rule. A city bans street vending in an area where 300 licensed vendors have traded for years.

1. Establish the facts and the injustice: is the rule itself unjust, or only its application? Satyagraha needs truth first.
2. Exhaust petition and negotiation: representation to the commissioner, open publication of the grievance.
3. Self-purification and discipline: vendors pledge non-violence, no abuse of officials, no concealment of plans.
4. Civil disobedience: vend openly in defiance of the rule and accept arrest and penalty — this is what distinguishes satyagraha from evasion.
5. Keep the door open: suspend the action if the authority negotiates; the aim is to convert, not to defeat.

Contrast — Ambedkar's route: writ petition under Article 32/226 citing Article 19(1)(g), and use of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 — rights enforced by law, not by suffering.

Case 2 — Trusteeship versus statutory CSR. A company earns ₹120 crore net profit (average of three years) and its promoter family draws ₹40 crore a year.

• Statutory position: under the Companies Act, 2013, section 135, a company crossing the thresholds (net worth ₹500 crore, or turnover ₹1,000 crore, or net profit ₹5 crore) must spend 2% of average net profits of the three preceding financial years on CSR — here 2% of ₹120 crore = ₹2.4 crore. Since 2021 unspent amounts must be transferred to a specified fund or an Unspent CSR Account, so CSR is now mandatory with consequences, not merely "comply or explain".
• Gandhian trusteeship: the promoter keeps only what the family genuinely needs — say ₹2 crore — and the remaining ₹38 crore is held in trust and deployed for the workers and the locality. The whole estate, not 2%, is under a moral claim.
• The examinable point: trusteeship is a *moral maximum* with no enforcement; section 135 is a *legal minimum* with enforcement. Gandhi preferred voluntary trusteeship but conceded legislation if voluntarism failed.

Case 3 — Why caste did not die with legal abolition (Ambedkar's diagnosis applied). Untouchability is abolished by Article 17 and penalised under the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, yet inter-caste marriage remains a small fraction of all marriages in India (large-sample surveys have long put it at roughly 5–6%; the exact current figure depends on the survey, so quote the source).

• Ambedkar's reasoning: caste reproduces itself through endogamy; law can remove disabilities but cannot by itself dissolve marriage circles.
• Hence his remedies were inter-caste marriage, inter-dining, destruction of scriptural sanction and, separately, political representation — a four-part programme, of which only the legal-political part was implemented.
• Contrast with Gandhi, who sought a change of heart within varna; Ambedkar held that a structure sanctioned by religion cannot be reformed by conscience alone.

Case 4 — Tagore and Gandhi on the charkha (a classic comparison question).

• Gandhi: universal spinning is bread-labour, a bond with the poorest, a swadeshi economic act and a discipline of the self; thirty minutes a day from every Indian.
• Tagore: the charkha is mechanical repetition; "the mind is not a machine", and a nation is not built by the suppression of thought. He supported rural reconstruction (Sriniketan, cooperative credit, the Santiniketan experiment) but resisted a single compulsory ritual.
• Resolution usually expected: both sought rural regeneration; they differed on *uniformity versus creativity* as the method, and on whether non-cooperation's negations (boycott of schools and courts) could be constructive.

Comparison table — the five thinkers at a glance

Comparison table — Gandhi and Ambedkar on four questions

Where it is used

• Civil services and state PSC examinations: UPSC GS-IV Ethics (Gandhian ethics, trusteeship, Ambedkar on fraternity), GS-I (social reformers), GS-II (constitutional morality, the Preamble, reservation policy) and the Philosophy optional's Paper-II.
• Teaching and research: assistant professorships via UGC-NET Philosophy (Unit on contemporary Indian philosophy), Political Science and Social Work; ICPR, ICSSR and ICHR fellowships; Gandhian Studies centres and Ambedkar Chairs in central universities.
• Policy, development and NGO work: sarvodaya and Gram Swaraj in Panchayati Raj (73rd Amendment) and rural livelihood programmes; the VB-G RAM G Act, in force from 1 July 2026 with a 125-day guarantee, carries the decentralised rural-employment idea; Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) and cooperative enterprise.
• Corporate social responsibility and business ethics: trusteeship is the standard Indian frame in CSR training and in section 135 Companies Act, 2013 compliance work; ethics modules in IIM, XLRI and company codes of conduct cite it.
• Law, judiciary and rights practice: constitutional morality, Article 17 and anti-atrocity litigation, affirmative-action jurisprudence; judgments regularly quote Ambedkar's Constituent Assembly speeches.
• Education and institutions: Visva-Bharati, Ramakrishna Mission and Vivekananda Kendra schools, Sri Aurobindo Ashram schools and Auroville; NEP 2020's language on holistic, mother-tongue, arts-integrated education draws on Tagore and Gandhi's Nai Talim.
• Media, publishing and communication roles: editorial and content work on Indian thought; Gandhi Jayanti (2 October, also International Day of Non-Violence), Ambedkar Jayanti (14 April) and Constitution Day (26 November) programming.

Interview questions

• Q: What does Vivekananda mean by practical Vedanta? A: That Advaita's non-duality must be lived socially — since one Self exists in all, serving the poor and the ignorant is itself worship, and a religion that cannot relieve hunger is not religion.
• Q: Why does Gandhi say means and ends are inseparable? A: Because the end is the means in their cumulative effect: "they say means are after all means; I would say means are after all everything" — a violent means produces a violent order, so ahimsa is not a tactic but the end's own form.
• Q: How does satyagraha differ from passive resistance? A: Passive resistance is a weapon of the weak that may permit hatred and even coercion; satyagraha presupposes strength, excludes ill-will, accepts suffering on oneself and seeks to convert rather than defeat.
• Q: What is Ambedkar's central objection to caste? A: That it is not a division of labour but a division of labourers in a graded hierarchy sanctioned by scripture and locked by endogamy, which destroys fraternity and prevents collective action.
• Q: What did Ambedkar mean by calling political democracy a "top dressing"? A: That one person–one vote is unstable without social and economic democracy; equality at the ballot box alongside inequality in society makes the political form hollow.
• Q: What is the supermind in Aurobindo? A: The truth-consciousness between mind and Sachchidananda, where knowledge is by identity rather than inference; its descent into the human is what integral yoga aims at.
• Q: How does Aurobindo differ from Shankara? A: Shankara treats the world as finally unreal to the liberated knower; Aurobindo holds the world to be a real self-expression of Spirit that must be transformed, so liberation is collective and this-worldly, not escape.
• Q: What is Tagore's "surplus in man"? A: The energy and imagination in human beings beyond biological necessity, which expresses itself as art, love and worship, and makes culture and the religion of man possible.
• Q: Why did Tagore criticise nationalism? A: He judged organised nationalism to be the organised self-interest of a people — mechanical, aggressive and a substitute for genuine human relations — and argued for a cooperative internationalism instead.
• Q: What was decided in the Poona Pact? A: On 24 September 1932 Ambedkar gave up separate electorates for the Depressed Classes in exchange for reserved seats within joint electorates, raised from 71 to 148, ending Gandhi's fast at Yeravda.
• Q: Is Gandhian trusteeship the same as CSR? A: No. Trusteeship is a voluntary moral claim on a person's whole wealth beyond genuine need; CSR under section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013 is a legal minimum of 2% of average net profits, now with mandatory transfer of unspent amounts.
• Q: Which of these thinkers would you call the most modern, and why? A: A defensible answer is Ambedkar — his method is empirical and pragmatist, his categories are rights, representation and law rather than scripture, and his test of an institution is its effect on the least advantaged. Tagore is a strong alternative for his critique of nationalism and of mechanical education.
• Q: How is Vivekananda's karma yoga different from ordinary philanthropy? A: Karma yoga is detached work done for one's own purification and in recognition of the divine in the recipient; the giver is the beneficiary, which removes condescension from the act.

Common mistakes

• Treating Vivekananda, Gandhi and Aurobindo as holding one "Hindu" position — their metaphysics differ: Advaita reinterpreted, truth-centred pluralist theism, and integral Advaita respectively.
• Writing that Aurobindo continues Shankara's Advaita; he explicitly rejects world-negation and makes evolution and the supermind central.
• Equating satyagraha with any protest, strike or hunger strike — without truth, discipline, non-violence, openness and acceptance of penalty it is not satyagraha.
• Saying Ambedkar "opposed the Constitution" or "opposed Hinduism's rituals only"; he drafted the Constitution and criticised its social soil, and his target was the religious sanction behind caste, not ritual detail.
• Confusing the Communal Award (1932, separate electorates granted) with the Poona Pact (1932, reserved seats in joint electorates) — and dating either to the wrong year.
• Attributing "greatest good of the greatest number" to sarvodaya; Gandhi explicitly rejected that utilitarian formula for the good of *all*.
• Calling Tagore an anti-Western traditionalist or a Gandhian; he rejected both revivalism and uncritical Westernisation and publicly differed from Gandhi on nationalism, the charkha and the Bihar earthquake.
• Quoting the 1956 conversion as a mass "Hindu reform"; Navayana Buddhism is a separate religious position with 22 vows that explicitly renounce Hindu deities and caste.

Related topics

Vedic and Upanishadic thought · Orthodox schools: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta · Heterodox schools: Charvaka, Buddhism and Jainism · Social and political philosophy: justice, rights and democracy · Ethics: theories of right action · Indian Constitution: Preamble, Fundamental Rights and constitutional morality.