Introduction

A Nation Born from the Refusal to be Used

India's freedom struggle was, at its deepest level, a prolonged moral argument against instrumentalisation. For nearly two centuries, the British Empire extracted from this land its cotton, its indigo, its salt, its soldiers — and above all, its people. The peasant of Champaran, the weaver of Dacca, the sepoy of the East India Company — each was valued not as a human being with an inner life and inalienable dignity, but as a unit of economic or military output. When Mahatma Gandhi stood at the gates of Champaran's indigo fields in 1917 and said that the cultivators' suffering could not continue, he was making a Kantian argument before he had ever read Kant: a human being is an end, not an instrument. It is this argument — tested in our history, enshrined in our Constitution, and challenged afresh in every generation — that this essay seeks to examine.

The question of whether people may be used as means to an end is among the most enduring in moral philosophy. It pits the utilitarian calculus of collective benefit against the deontological insistence on individual dignity. But in India, it is not merely an academic exercise. It is a question that our Preamble answers, that our courts enforce, and that our public servants must live by — yet one that our history and present reality reveal we have not yet fully resolved.

The Philosophical Framework

Three Schools of Thought — And India's Own Answer

Moral philosophy offers three distinct responses to the question of instrumentalisation. The utilitarian tradition, associated with Bentham and Mill, argues that an action is moral if it maximises aggregate happiness — and if using one person serves the many, the arithmetic justifies the act. The consequentialist school agrees: good ends redeem imperfect means. Theft is justified to prevent starvation; deception is permissible when it protects the innocent.

It is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative that offers the most powerful rebuttal. Kant held that every rational being possesses an inherent dignity that cannot be traded against outcomes. To use a person merely as a means — regardless of the benefit derived — is to violate the very essence of what makes them human. This principle, he argued, is not contingent on culture, circumstance, or consequence: it is universal and absolute.

But India had its own philosophical tradition that arrived at similar conclusions through a different path. The Upanishads speak of the divine spark — the Atman — residing in every being, making each person sacred and irreducible. Kautilya's Arthashastra, though often read as a manual of statecraft, contains a striking assertion: the happiness of the people is the happiness of the king — not the other way around. The ruler is an instrument of people's welfare, not the reverse. And the Buddha, who renounced a throne to address the suffering of ordinary men and women, embodied the principle that no spiritual or political end justifies the instrumentalisation of living beings.

— Philosophy becomes urgency when it meets India's history — India's Historical Evidence

When Indians Were Made Instruments — And How They Resisted

The most systematic instrumentalisation of Indians under colonial rule was the indigo plantation system in Bengal and Bihar. The British planting companies compelled peasants to grow indigo on at least 3/20th of their land — the hated tinkathia system — at prices fixed below the cost of cultivation. The peasant was not a partner in commerce; he was a coerced input in someone else's profit calculation. Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 dismantled this system — and in doing so, established the moral principle that would animate India's entire freedom movement: the dignity of the cultivator is not negotiable.

The pattern repeated in independent India's early decades. The tribal communities of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha saw their ancestral lands — their forests, their hills, their rivers — acquired for mining, dams, and industrial projects in the name of national development. Prime Minister Nehru himself acknowledged the cost with rare candour when he called displaced tribals "the victims of development." The great dams of modern India displaced millions who had no voice in the decision, no adequate compensation, and no share in the benefits. They were means for someone else's modernity.

This is not an argument against development. It is an argument about how development is pursued. The Supreme Court's landmark judgment in Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997) held that tribal land cannot be transferred to non-tribals or corporations for mining without the free, prior, and informed consent of the community. The Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, which protects tribal areas, exists precisely to prevent the state from treating Adivasi communities as obstacles to be cleared rather than citizens to be consulted. The Constitution recognises that development which reduces people to means is not development at all.

Contemporary India

The Modern Face of Instrumentalisation in India

The challenge has not receded with modernity — it has changed its form. In democratic India, the most visible site of instrumentalisation is electoral politics. Citizens are assiduously cultivated before elections through freebies, caste arithmetic, and communal appeals — and systematically ignored once the votes are tallied. The voter becomes a means to power, not the purpose of governance. Gandhi's warning rings with fresh urgency: "Politics without ethics is a death trap." Hannah Arendt's insight is equally applicable to India: when the reduction of citizens to vote banks becomes so routine that no one finds it remarkable, evil has indeed become banal.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of the poor in a society that instrumentalises poverty. Reports emerged of marginalised communities being enrolled in vaccine clinical trials with inadequate information and coercive financial incentives. When a daily-wage labourer accepts ₹5,000 to participate in a trial he does not understand, his formal consent conceals a structural coercion. The Indian Biomedical Research Act and the ICMR's ethical guidelines specifically prohibit the exploitation of economically vulnerable participants — a recognition that the autonomy of the poor must be protected with particular vigilance precisely because it is most easily violated.

The plight of millions of migrant workers — rendered suddenly invisible during the COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020 — is perhaps the starkest contemporary illustration. For decades, their labour had built India's cities, highways, and factories. The moment the economy paused, they were left to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages with no support, no information, and no acknowledgment that they were citizens rather than units of labour. The migrant worker crisis revealed that India's growth story had a moral deficit at its core: the workers who built prosperity were not its intended beneficiaries.

The Way Forward

Building a Republic that Treats People as Ends

The Indian Constitution is, in its deepest aspiration, a document about this exact question. The Preamble's promise of justice — social, economic and political — is a commitment that no person shall be valued only by what she produces or whom she votes for. The Directive Principles of State Policy direct the state to minimise inequality, ensure living wages, and provide education and healthcare — not as charity, but because people are ends and a life of dignity is their due. Fundamental Duties under Article 51A remind citizens that treating fellow citizens with dignity is not merely a legal requirement but a civic obligation.

Conclusion

The Enduring Test of Every Generation

It would be intellectually dishonest to claim that human beings are never, under any circumstance, used as means. The soldier who volunteers for a dangerous mission, the researcher who subjects himself to experimental medicine, the civil servant who sacrifices personal comfort for public duty — all serve purposes larger than themselves. The critical distinction, as Kant recognised, lies in the word merely: people must not be treated merely as means. Where agency, consent, and dignity are preserved — where the person retains their full humanity even while contributing to a collective purpose — the moral imperative is not violated in its spirit.

The Republic of India was founded on a moral wager: that a diverse, unequal, and historically exploited people could build a society in which every person is valued as a citizen rather than exploited as a resource. That wager has not yet been fully won. The Dalit who still faces humiliation, the Adivasi whose land is still taken without consent, the migrant worker who is still invisible in prosperity and abandoned in crisis — each is a reminder that the promise of the Constitution remains, in significant part, unredeemed.

But the direction is clear. Every time a court upholds the right to privacy, every time a panchayat insists on gram sabha consent before a mine is approved, every time a civil servant refuses to treat a welfare beneficiary as a passive recipient rather than a rights-bearing citizen — the Kantian imperative is being lived. The test of a nation is not the monuments it builds, but whether the people who build them are seen, heard, and treated as ends in themselves.