Essay · Section B25 September 2026

A privilege that outlives its purpose becomes an injustice.

Seventy-year-old Kashmir Singh worked for decades on construction sites and as a driver in Delhi before he moved, in 2021, into a 225-square-foot flat in the Economically Weaker Section block of a Gurugram housing society. The flats in the main towers sell for upwards of ₹2.5 crore. The resident welfare association told him he could not use the central park. Its notice, citing two clauses of the conveyance deeds, said that EWS occupants had no right to use the common areas and that some had been “violating” this by entering the park. On 31 August he wrote to the administration by hand: “Should we just die locked inside our room?” On 15 September the District Registrar of Firms and Societies ordered the association to lift the restrictions, holding that private conveyance agreements cannot override basic mobility and access to open spaces. The association says it will appeal.

This week, far from Gurugram, the United Nations General Assembly was discussing the most famous privilege in international politics: the veto held by five permanent members of the Security Council. France and Mexico announced that 128 states now support their proposal that the five voluntarily refrain from using the veto in cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and large-scale war crimes, and for the first time a second permanent member, the United Kingdom, has joined France. Japan’s Prime Minister asked the Assembly to delete the Charter’s references to “enemy states”, clauses written against the Axis powers of 1945 that still sit in Articles 53 and 107.

A park in Gurugram and a council chamber in New York have something in common. Each privilege was created for a reason. The question is what happens when the reason fades and the privilege remains. This essay argues that a privilege is a means, not an end; that once its purpose is gone, keeping it turns a reasonable arrangement into a wrong done to those it excludes; but that the honest test is harder than the slogan, because some privileges still serve part of their purpose, and those should be narrowed, not simply abolished.

Begin with why privileges are granted. The veto was the price of the United Nations. The League of Nations had failed partly because great powers stayed out or walked away: the United States never joined, Japan and Germany left in 1933, Italy in 1937, and the Soviet Union was expelled in 1939. At San Francisco in 1945 the smaller states accepted the veto so that the great powers would stay inside the system and never be outvoted into war with one another. The “enemy state” clauses had an even narrower purpose: to let the victors act against a revival of Axis aggression without waiting for the Council. India made its own such bargain. To bring more than five hundred princely states into the Union, the new republic guaranteed their rulers privy purses and privileges, and wrote the guarantee into Articles 291 and 362 of the Constitution.

Now look at what time did to each. The “enemy states” of 1945 are today among the UN’s largest contributors and closest partners of the powers that defeated them. The General Assembly called the clauses obsolete in 1995, and the 2005 World Summit resolved to delete them, but because deletion needs a Charter amendment ratified by the permanent five, they remain. Privy purses went the same way. By the late 1960s the princely states had long been integrated, and the purses had become an income without a function. A constitutional amendment to end them fell short by a single vote in the Rajya Sabha in 1970; a presidential order derecognising the rulers was struck down by the Supreme Court in Madhav Rao Scindia v. Union of India; and the Twenty-sixth Amendment finally abolished them in 1971.

The Gurugram case shows the same drift inside a single compound. The State mandate under which such flats are set aside for the economically weaker sections exists to mix classes, not to divide them, and to let a construction worker and a company director share a neighbourhood. A conveyance clause meant to stop EWS owners from claiming a share of club facilities they do not pay for is a reasonable distinction. Stretched into a ban on walking in a park, it becomes something else: a line that turns a policy of inclusion into a new form of exclusion within the same gates. The Registrar drew exactly this line in his order, distinguishing club and facility rights, which the deeds could restrict, from “basic human mobility”, which they could not.

The counter-position is serious and must be stated fully. First, the Gurugram association has a real grievance: owners in the main towers pay about ₹11,000 a month for maintenance and EWS households ₹705, and the association says the EWS block owes nearly ₹7 lakh. Second, “outlived its purpose” is a charge easily made by those who want someone else’s privilege removed. G.K. Chesterton’s famous parable of the fence warns reformers not to tear down a fence across a road until they understand why it was put there. The veto is the hardest case. It still does part of its original work: a Council that tried to outvote a nuclear-armed great power on a matter it considered vital would not produce peace, only a walk-out. And India, which criticises the veto, has also sought a permanent seat, while the G4 proposals have offered that new permanent members would not exercise a veto until a review. Abolition is not a principle India can preach with clean hands.

These objections do not defeat the argument; they sharpen it into a test. Ask three questions of any privilege. What was its purpose? Does that purpose still exist? And can it be served by something narrower? Where the purpose has vanished, as with the “enemy state” clauses and the privy purses, the privilege should go. Where the purpose partly survives, as with the veto, the privilege should be cut back to that purpose. The French-Mexican restraint and the Liechtenstein initiative, adopted by the General Assembly in 2022, which requires the Assembly to meet within ten working days whenever a veto is cast and give the vetoing member a chance to explain itself, do exactly that: they keep the veto as a guard against war between great powers while denying it as a shield for mass atrocity. Where the purpose is fair but the means too broad, as in Gurugram, the answer is to charge for the pool and open the path.

Our own Constitution offers a model of a privilege designed to watch itself. When the Supreme Court upheld reservations for backward classes in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), it required that the “creamy layer” be excluded, so that a benefit meant to lift the disadvantaged would not become an inheritance for those who had already risen. Whatever one thinks of how that rule is applied, the principle is sound. A privilege should be tied to its reason, reviewed when circumstances change, and ended when the reason is gone.

Privileges rarely end because their holders give them up. They end when those left outside the gate insist on asking why, as 128 states are now asking in New York and one old man in Gurugram asked in a handwritten letter. The fair answer is not always to tear down the gate. It is to be able to give a reason for it that still holds today. When no such reason can be given, the gate is no longer a privilege. It is simply a wall.