Democratic Accommodations

Minorities in Contemporary India

Peter Ronald deSouza, Hilal Ahmed, Mohd. Sanjeer Alam

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789388414562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti civili in politica

Democratic Accommodations: The Minority Question in India analyses the complex story of the accommodation of claims, interests and rights of minorities in India. It aims at what India-being one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse nations of the world-can offer to other nations, particularly to the countries of Europe that are confronted with ethnocultural and ethno-religious assertion. The authors have endorsed the argument that all plural democracies-and all democracies can only be plural in the present historical conjuncture despite the attempts by regimes to make them majoritarian-must work out their own strategies of accommodation by evolving a policy matrix that is suited to the dynamics of their own societies. The book is organised along four rubrics-laws, institutions, policies and political discourse-to understand Indian democracy's distinct response to diversity. The rich and nuanced exploration of the Indian approach to the minority question presented in this book will advance the international debate on diversity and multiculturalism and help policymakers in pluralistic democracies to develop their own particular strategies to deal with minority claims.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Pluralism and Democracy

Assertive Pluralism

Most nation-states in the contemporary world are characterised by multi-ethnic and multicultural populations. Even the so-called monocultural nations have now to accept the social fact that they are characterised by a multi-ethnic and multicultural present that produces social dynamics they cannot ignore. There are communities within them that have either disagreed with the majority culture and have hence seceded from it,¹ or find it at variance from the one with which they have grown up, and hence consider it as a culture to be resisted. This social and demographic plurality has evolved because of many factors—long histories of changing or shifting territorial boundaries, occupation by foreign powers, growing economies especially after the Second World War where immigration was encouraged to meet labour needs, violent conflicts across the world from which people have fled, and most significantly, the legacies of colonial and imperial pasts. This last factor has given the erstwhile colonised people ‘some claims’² against their colonial masters. It is a history that has produced new facts on the ground that is often neither recognised nor accepted³ by the erstwhile colonisers (Osborn, 2002). The emergence of national populations with varying ethnocultural characteristics has, as a result of these various historical processes, exposed today’s nations to a variety of issues.⁴

As this plurality unfolds across the world we see ethnic and cultural conflicts emerging that are a consequence of the politics among different groups of ‘imagining the nation’ and of integrating minority groups within the wider society. This produces contests between individual and group rights. There are demands for recognition of these differences and for according group rights due to such differences. There is the acknowledgement that the growing inequality between majority and minority groups, over time, has a cumulative character.

Nations have responded to this growing plurality in a variety of ways. The popular models adopted are of ‘assimilation’, ‘integration’ and ‘multiculturalism’. Each model, wherever applied, has been marked by little success particularly since the last 20 years during which the children of immigrants, the third generation, are now making claims on citizenship. In this context of demands to recognise the differences the Indian model of ‘accommodation’ assumes significance. This book is aimed at what India (being one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse nations of the world) can offer to those nations, particularly to the countries of Europe, that are confronted with ethno-cultural and ethno-religious assertion and whose sociopolitical order is built on the principle of equality of citizens rather on granting them group-specific rights to minorities and on formulating policies to enable them to access resources and opportunities that are available to the wider society. Europe’s settled order, it appears, is coming unstuck.

This study shows how history, context, law and politics have produced a certain institutional and policy discourse on the question of minorities within Indian democracy. It shows how the dominant narrative, concerning the state’s response to minorities, has, in contrast to the European experience, been a policy of ‘accommodation’. This response has oscillated between a strong and active commitment to ‘accommodation’ and a weak and passive one. Here we have endorsed the argument that all plural democracies—and all democracies can only be plural in the present historical conjuncture despite the attempts by regimes to make them majoritarian—must work out their own strategies of accommodation by evolving a policy matrix that is suited to the dynamics of their own societies. We have organised our discussion along four rubrics to help us understand Indian democracy’s distinct response to diversity. These concern laws, institutions, policies and political discourse.

Innocuous But Not So Innocuous

Our starting observation here is that all nations, however small—think Fiji, or Sri Lanka or Sweden⁵—have to respond to an assertive plurality. They have to acknowledge the claims coming from their different citizen groups (migrant as well as native citizens) and from other minorities, who wish to see themselves as equal citizens in the public life of their country. For this to happen, assuming it is not yet the case, it would require that these claims—cultural, ethical and political—be accommodated. These are not straightforward claims. They pose ethical and political challenges. They extend from demands for the group to be given special treatment, to protection of minority rights, to steps to assuage insecurity, to initiatives to improve minority participation in politics and finally to recognise diversity as a part of the natural political order.

Making all these accommodations requires policy responses that aim to both integrate the groups within the larger political community while also simultaneously accepting their special claims and distinct status.⁶ Such accommodation should not be the result of enlightened benevolence but the result of a genuine acceptance of the validity—which has to be established politically, legally and normatively—of these minority claims. It would require reworking the political and cultural coordinates of the new polity. Even in settled times—which the present times are not—this is not an easy exercise especially in competitive democracies where the political calculus is to create stable constituencies of support for partisan ends and where, therefore, denigrating minorities is an easier option.

Today’s Europe is at an interesting intellectual and historical conjuncture. It has a great deal of learning to undertake on what accommodations to make and why, on the social dynamics produced by these accommodations, and on the gains and costs that follow from them. To make our case of this growing assertiveness of groups and of the responses to them, we shall briefly look at the cultural and political landscape of Europe. It shows many contestations currently underway which may appear innocuous but are not really so for beneath the surface lie world views and cosmologies that are contested and that do not align easily with each other. The innocuous is not so innocuous.

The declining of a handshake offered in a school in Switzerland, an unremarkable episode by most standards, surprisingly produced a national controversy (deSouza, 2016). The place of Zwarte Pieten (Black Pete), who accompanies Sinterklaas in the Dutch celebration of Christmas, has generated an intense debate in Holland (Pleasance, 2014). The question of what should be the permitted swimwear, if any, for women on a French beach has divided French public opinion. These disputes have produced a language of public discussion with terms such as ‘our culture’ versus ‘their culture’, ‘progressive’ versus ‘regressive’ and ‘women’s freedom’ versus ‘women’s subjugation’ being bandied about (Dearden, 2016). In the United States, a soul searching debate is underway on how to respond to its slave-owning past. From Confederate statues to be retained or pulled down as memorials, to flags to be kept or discarded, to college crests to be abandoned (Ryan, 2018), a demand has arisen to change those symbols that apparently celebrate slavery.⁷ At Yale University students started a movement to change the name of Calhoun College on the grounds that Calhoun was a slave owner. The present, they held, requires the university to take a position vis-à-vis a dark and oppressive past especially since students from minority African-American or coloured backgrounds felt humiliated by the name (Schuessler, 2016). After initial resistance, the name was changed and a policy which sets out the procedures to be adopted when faced with similar demands in the future was adopted. In Iceland, on the practice of circumcision, a public debate has grown on whether it should be seen purely from a health perspective, and therefore proscribed, or be regarded as a religious practice at the heart of a community’s self-definition, and should therefore be permitted? The argument gets further complicated when seen in gender terms. Is it all right for men to be circumcised because of religious practice but not for women where it is seen as gender unjust (Sherwood, 2018). The debate on circumcision in Iceland finally resulted in a court verdict banning the practice which in turn produced a global controversy (Hofverberg, 2018). Minority assertiveness on issues that were not part of the mainstream political discourse, that were perhaps even lying dormant and regarded as insignificant, have now, as a result, entered the public sphere. Are these just expressions of cultural difference or of incommensurable comprehensive doctrines?

This brief survey shows that each issue has the potential to become a site for political struggle. Each requires that the ethical, political, religious and cultural aspects of the case be examined. It is clear from these contestations that what is at stake are citizen’s rights in a democracy. To help us navigate this turbulence we feel it necessary to draw on the resources of political theory, where concepts such as ‘overlapping consensus’, ‘comprehensive doctrines’, ‘public reason’, ‘minority rights’, ‘deliberative processes’ and ‘cultural pluralism’ are offered (Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 2006; Kymlicka, 1992; Rawls, 1987; Zerilli, 2012). We have flagged these concepts here to gesture to a literature that must be examined as we try to craft rules for co-living in plural democracies. Parallel processes must take place simultaneously, arguments on what should be the normative principles for a plural society and the pragmatics of accommodation and coalition building.

We can also draw on the experience of countries outside Europe where innovative responses to the emerging and assertive plurality are tried. South Africa, for example, pioneered the institution of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it sought to rebuild its rainbow nation from the trauma of apartheid.⁸ This had implications for the judicial system and for the social process of attending to the pain of the victims in post-conflict contexts. Kenya, in 2017, gave tribal status to Asians, as the 44th tribe of the country to deepen their sense of belonging as equal citizens (Mwere, 2017). Giving Asian Kenyans a tribal status is an interesting innovation of acknowledging diversity and granting citizenship rights in plural societies. Canada continues to struggle with what seems to be a simple issue, the question of giving an official name to a group, which it appears is not so simple as it shifts from calling its indigenous people ‘Indians’, as it did earlier but the term today is considered offensive. Now it refers to them as the peoples of the First Nations (Parrott, 2007). This can be seen as a change of name which is reflective of a changed public discourse that is more accommodative of the demands of these minority groups demanding greater dignity and equality of rights. These national gestures can all be seen as moving plural societies in the direction of a decent society.⁹

Fortunately, for this study, India is available as a valuable case for deeper study. It has responded to its own assertive plurality by enacting laws, creating institutions, formulating policies and nurturing a political discourse that constitutes a rich archival lode of material for examination. In the discussion that follows we shall look at the efforts of the postcolonial democratic state in India as it negotiates this plurality. Our focus will be primarily on language and religion. The building of a modern Indian state required inspired leadership and inspired thinking. In the early years, India had both in abundance which was deployed with considerable creative energy. What follows is a record of this effort.

This study is organised into five chapters. The first and introductory chapter looks through a political theory lens at some contestations in both India and Europe. We expect to flag issues that must be considered by policy communities across democracies and, by doing so, alert them to the many layers from the ethical to the political that are involved in the dispute. The second and third chapters take us on a detailed journey through the politics of independent India as it sets up the architecture of the modern state and as it negotiates its way through laws, institutions, policies and discourses. The fourth focuses specifically on the policy responses—cultural, educational, social justice and affirmative—that the Indian state adopts to meet the aspiration for equal citizenship among its minorities. The fifth and final chapter draws together all the issues that have been signposted to offer some suggestions for more detailed discussion. It also briefly looks at the recent accommodations that have been made towards sexual minorities.

Some Conceptual Issues

We would like to begin this discussion by referring to the reflections on the minority question by the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. His is a legacy that, unfortunately, is being undermined by the regime that has been in power in the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Nehru saw the task of building the architecture of a modern state as one of the main tasks of his premiership. He was obsessed with the protection and enabling features that had to be established to give a reality to the Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles spelt out in the Constitution. One can discern this obsession in his fortnightly letters to the Chief Ministers (deSouza, 2015). Here, he expressed himself on the different issues confronting the new India. They could be of a minor nature, such as the question of posting a married couple in the foreign services to the same location, or a more philosophical question on the need to develop a scientific temper in India to address the problem of poverty, ignorance and superstition. As a child of the enlightenment, he invested in the liberal promise of equal rights for all citizens. He believed that societal progress would take place through science and technology and through the commitment to reason.

On the issue of minorities he wrote in a letter on 16 January 1956, less than six years after India became a Republic:

Minorities may be, and sometimes have been, troublesome and have made exaggerated claims. In a democracy, however, it is the will of the majority that ultimately prevails. The responsibility, therefore, rests on the majority to not just do justice to the minority but, what is more important, to win over the goodwill and confidence of the minority group, whether it is linguistic, religious or other. (Nehru, 1992, p. 336)

Reading this passage 63 plus years after it was written and at a time in global politics when the minority is indeed under stress, we find several issues that are of concern to us and that, irrespective of whether Nehru intended the meanings that we wish to draw from them or not, speak to our contemporary concerns. Let us, therefore, try and examine them through a political theory lens so that we can flag some themes for the subsequent elaboration of India’s story of accommodation.

The first is the idea of a ‘troublesome’ group that makes ‘exaggerated claims’. ‘Troublesome’ here could refer to the unsettling nature of the claim made by the minority. This is a claim that needs to be addressed by the democratic state both on pragmatic grounds because it shares a common political space with the majority, a space which must be kept peaceful, and on ethical grounds because of the common obligation to nurture and sustain a constitutional morality. It is troublesome because accommodating the claim would require engaging with its ethical premises and in doing so working towards a decision on whether to accept or reject, wholly or partially, the claim being made. Reasons for the decision would have to be given. This is ordinarily a cumbersome process.¹⁰

‘Troublesome’ could also refer to the fact that accommodation would mean changing the normative and political coordinates of the polity which serve as beacons to guide the polity. These have been achieved through long historical struggles by groups within the polity. There is, therefore, resistance to change. For example, a call has to be taken on whether accommodating the new minority claim diminishes the gains of the earlier historical struggle—such as, the Hijab and women’s dress—or in fact strengthens them. While the observation of ‘exaggerated claims’ can be read as being a statement of fact it also refers to epistemic differences between the majority and the minority. From the viewpoint of the majority the minority claim is exaggerated for example, carrying a kirpan (a small knife with a cover which Sikhs are required to carry as a symbol of their faith) on a flight, whereas from the perspective of the minority it is perfectly reasonable (BBC, 2017). The two groups see the world differently and, therefore, reconciling their core concerns is not easy.¹¹

The feeling that the minority makes exaggerated claims is growing in both Europe and India as minorities make their demands for recognition not just of their claims (which are often in the nature of religious or cultural claims) but also for the acceptance of these claims. These may be at variance with majority practices or may be offensive to them or even worse they might be in opposition to them. The minority uses the liberal promise of protection of rights (both individual and group) and on the defence of a plural democracy.¹² These claims, they argue, are not just in the interests of the minority but are also in the interests of the majority since they concern the constitutional promise of equal citizenship.¹³

The second idea that can be extracted from Nehru’s statement is that ‘in a democracy the will of the majority shall ultimately prevail’, and that this will carries a ‘responsibility’ not to impose its own perspective, or to neglect the standpoint of the minority but to act in such a manner that it does ‘justice’ to minority concerns (Walzer, 1990). What is entaile...