Revisiting the Republic’s relations with minorities

This distinctively Indian notion of republican democracy has produced a debate on the presence and role of minorities in a democratic setup. For the sake of analysis, we may talk about three unwritten theses, which have emerged in post-1950s India to deal with the question of minority: One, the protection of minority cultures and religions is a precondition for the success of democracy; two, the minority-majority framework is completely irrelevant in the Indian context; hence it must be abandoned to achieve the equality of all citizens; three, a minority community is not a monolith, they are internal divisions within. Hence, there is a need to recognise the minorities within a minority.

Under Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, the Indian State and the Congress party introduced the first thesis, that the active involvement of minority communities in the nation-building project would create a conducive environment for economic development and political stability. This line of reasoning helped the Nehru government to underline its secular commitment. The partition of India on a religious basis and the formation of Pakistan as a Muslim nation had effectively justified the old colonial argument that India’s religious and cultural diversity did not allow it to become a nation in the modern sense of the term. The presence of a large Muslim minority in post-1947 India was not seen as a problem by the Nehruvian State. Instead, the markers of Muslim culture and identity — monuments built by Muslim rulers, Indian classical music, shrines of Sufi saints and most importantly Urdu language — were projected as symbols of the composite Indian culture and to legitimise India’s unity in diversity. The official stance was that the Republic of India could not be treated as a mirror image of majoritarian Pakistan.

This Nehruvian era thesis had two intrinsic problems.

First, it assumed that the accommodation of the minority elite in public institutions would help the government to emphasise its policy of secular inclusiveness. The elites, in this framework, had to function as a bridge between the government and their (minority) community. This informal form of representation strengthened the bargaining capacity of minority-elites. Eventually, they became powerful beneficiaries of political patronage.

Second, it failed to establish that the constitutional meaning of the term minority is fluid. As a result, the protection of minority rights was perceived as the protection of religious communities.

Hindu nationalist political parties such as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha were critical of this minority-majority framework. The Principles and Policies of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) published in 1973 notes: “It is wrong to classify Indian people into majority and minority sections on the basis of their religion and to formulate political, social or economic policies on that basis.” It further suggests that the government “will have to make conscious efforts to change the historical thought processes which have given birth to the Pakistani mentality” and that “Christian and other missionaries… will have to be freed from foreign influence”. This thesis draws inspiration from the conventional understanding of the nation-state.

A nation, in this sense, can only realise its true self when able to establish one unified culture, one source language and one belief system. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), importantly, does not fully subscribe to this view of the BJS. The BJP has a minority wing that claims to protect the interests of the most vulnerable sections of minority groups. However, the party has been also uneasy with the minority-majority framework.

The one-nation one-people thesis does not sit well with the constitutional schema. The Constitution recognises equality as a principle of public policy, of course, but also considers socio-economic backwardness as the basis for devising affirmative action policies. The Constitution also celebrates India’s religious and cultural diversity and directs the State to create an environment in which all minority groups can express themselves freely.

Moving to the question of minorities within a minority, the imagination that minority groups are homogeneous entities and hence, they need to be protected under the category of group rights, started getting questioned in the 1990s. The significant presence of Dalits among Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs destabilised the conventional politics of minority rights. The feminist movement expanded the scope of this debate by highlighting gender discrimination. Other kinds of minorities also started asserting their claims: The struggles of sexual minorities and disabled rights groups, for example. These movements have introduced us to a nuanced and heterogeneous notion of minority.

The three positions emphasised in the Constitution — protection of minority rights for democratic success, rejection of a majority/minority framework for achieving oneness of a people, and the acceptance of minorities within the minority community — underline the ever-evolving meanings of republican democracy in the Indian context. This distinctiveness of the Constitution calls for celebration.

Hilal Ahmed is associate professor, Centre for Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS).The views expressed are personal