India's Diversity

...Liberalism and Pluralism Independent India had three possible ways of dealing with its minorities...

...The concepts of majority and minority would thereby have had no more than numerical significance...

...Indeed, the national anthem and the national motto have a distinctly religious resonance, and the colors of the national flag are widely taken to represent religious ideas...

...None of these communities is cohesive...

...The third possibility was to combine liberalism and pluralism, superimposing a liberal state on self-governing re146 • DISSENT India's Diversity ligious communities...

...and although its leaders may have religious preferences, their decisions are guided in principle solely by the moral and material well-being of its citizens...

...New Delhi is facing an increasingly angry Hindu majority on the one hand and increasingly discontented minorities on the other...

...second, there must be an identity with a national reach...

...On the other hand, the state has felt free to reform Hindu personal law, partly with the hope that this would encourage corresponding reforms in the minority communities...

...Many Identities All this means that the concepts of majority and minority explain little in India...

...Hindus are also divided into castes along with all their regional variations...

...The Constitution also conferred a special status on the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, giving it powers denied to other states...

...An average Indian has multiple affections and loyalties: while Muslims in one part of India, for example, share their religion with their counterparts elsewhere, they share their language, customs, and even religious practices with local Hindus...

...In India languages and ethnicities are mostly regional and lack national reach...

...the minorities fear it is weak, timid, and likely to disintegrate under Hindu pressures...

...They form majorities in three states...

...Many Hindus think that it is mainly meant to regulate and restrain them...

...In so doing, however, it implicitly acted as the state of the Hindus (though not a Hindu state...

...The idea of national majorities and minorities does not arise unless two further conditions are met...

...at regional levels, language and ethnicity took its place...

...While a uniform civil code clearly has something to be said for it, it cannot be developed in the absence of a broad consensus, a shared culture, and mutual trust...

...India also has over sixty million tribal people who live in government-designated "reserved" areas scattered over most of India...

...Only religion provides the latter, and it is only when religion becomes the politically significant basis of selfidentification that the concepts of national majority and minority acquire currency...

...These bonds are often stronger than ties with Muslims elsewhere...

...The ethnic diversity is as broad as it is deep...

...What is clumsily called Hinduism is in fact a family of sects, each with its own deities, theology, scriptures, temple, and rituals...

...Since Indian secularism largely comes from the fear of politicized religion, it is essentially negative and lacks selfconfidence, consistency, and a clear sense of direction...

...The Indian state also follows a policy of preferential treatment for "untouchables" and lessdeveloped tribes in education, the civil service, and in publicly owned companies...

...the government alternately placates and resists them, depending on political expediency...

...First, the mere set-aside of places for the disadvantaged hardly begins to tackle the consequences of centuries-old inequalities...

...I am grateful to Ashutosh Varshney and Pratap Mehta for their helpful comments on this paper...

...As for the so-called Caste Hindus, they are further divided into subgroups, some of whom have little contact with each other...

...Islam in India is quite different from its counterparts elsewhere, and even in India it varies from one region to another...

...Gujarati merchants, mainly Muslim, financed Arab slave traders, with the result that some coastal areas of Gujarat contain descendants of black slaves and their racially mixed progeny...

...Respect for the personal laws of minority communities has gone a long way to reassure them that the state honors their cultural identities...

...Nor does it mean that religion is kept entirely out of the state...

...Hindus never developed the sharp and exclusive collective self-consciousness characteristic of such credal religions as Christianity and Islam, and do not have a single name for their religion: the term Hindu itself is a Muslim SUMMER • 1996 • 145 India's Diversity corruption of an original Greek word...

...India's founders believed affirmative action was justified to redress past wrongs and to integrate previously disadvantaged communities into the national mainstream, giving them a stake in the country and thereby broadening the state's legitimacy...

...Although broadly aware of sharing a religious heritage, they cherish their distinct histories and identities...

...This does not mean that religion is kept out of politics altogether...

...Although the religious minorities are spread throughout the country, most of them are concentrated in a small number of states and constitute powerful political presences...

...However, its weaknesses are increasingly coming to the fore...

...There is no ban on religious parties or the political use of religious idioms...

...in all secular matters its authority is final...

...More important, the state leaves the religious communities free to govern themselves in personal matters like marriage, divorce, succession, and inheritance...

...This became clear a few years ago when Ramkrishna Mission, a much admired reformist Hindu cultural organization, asked to be classified not as a "Hindu" but as a "minority" organization...

...Tribal people in the northeast are ethnically different from those in Gujarat, and both again from their counterparts in the south...

...First, the country as a whole must become the primary point of orientation...

...this encouraged the Hindus to use the state to promote their interests and compromised its secular character...

...Although the Constitution established a largely liberal list of fundamental rights, it remained ambiguous about whether minority personal laws were subject to their constraints...

...For their part, the Hindus have absorbed Muslim and Christian practices, and some of them see nothing wrong in worshiping at the shrines of all three religions...

...The partition had a traumatic effect on Indian self-understanding...

...The Hindu "Majority" Although the Hindus formally constitute the majority of the population, that number can be misleading...

...It stabilized the country after the birth-trauma of partition, reassured the minorities, and created a secure framework within which the different communities are able to form alliances, and fight for shared goals...

...Cultural beliefs and practices also cut across linguistic and religious boundaries...

...Second, because the state thought preferential treatment was sufficient, it did nothing to combat the widespread discrimination against the lower castes and tribes, not to mention Muslims, in the private sector, which has over twenty times more jobs than the state...

...It could have opted for a strictly liberal strategy, relying on the logic of democracy and industrialization and on judicious policies to integrate the minorities into a cohesive nation...

...At the national level, religion became an extremely sensitive issue and an easily mobilizable basis of political identity...

...In important respects, then, the Indian state resembles the asymmetrical federation that the Quebecois are pressing for in Canada...

...Thanks to the enthusiastic Hindu response to westernization, the rise of a westernized Hindu middle class, the decline of the Muslim aristocracy, and the consolidation of colonial rule, Muslims began to feel left out and to ask for special protection...

...It made the ideas of majority and minority the dominant currency of political discourse...

...Not surprisingly, secularism is today one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics...

...Supreme Court judgments later ruled that they were not...

...The combined liberal-pluralist strategy included a commitment by the Indian state to respect minority cultures and religions...

...The secular dimension of the liberal-pluralist strategy has served the country reasonably well...

...India has thirty-five languages spoken by more than a million people each, and more than twenty-two thousand dialects...

...As the struggle for independence, predominantly led by the Hindus, gained momentum from the 1920s onward, Muslim leaders began to fear Hindu domination and speak of the need for their own Muslim-majority state...

...The concepts of majority and minority become central to a community's self-understanding when, for some reason, one of its several identities is abstracted and privileged...

...The state funds minority schools and cultural institutions, and in some parts of the country it even pays the salaries of Muslim religious officials and subsidizes their pilgrimages to Mecca...

...By and large the Sikhs have stuck to their language wherever they have settled in India...

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...Brahmins are regarded as the highest caste in many parts of India, but they are looked down upon in several parts of the south, where some even avoid social contacts with them...

...The Indian state is secular in four ways: it does not favor any particular religion...

...With India made up of so many criss-crossing communities, every Indian is the bearer of several identities...

...Without some new thinking, the country is headed for dangerous times...

...Although Urdu is supposed to be the community language of many Muslims, large sections of them in many parts of the country have no knowledge of it...

...Speakers of local languages belong to different religious, ethnic, and cultural communities, and almost all the religious communities speak the local languages...

...In other domains—criminal law, laws relating to the economy, and so forth—the state makes all laws it deems necessary...

...It has generally stood India well for nearly half a century and helped to hold the country together...

...North India has been exposed to waves of foreigners since the time ofAlexander the Great, and especially from the eighth century, when Muslims came to India from Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia...

...As for affirmative action, government programs have realized many of its symbolic objectives, but it remains necessary...

...The "scheduled castes" (once called "untouchables") constitute nearly 16 percent of the population...

...Subsequently created "tribal states" also enjoy considerable autonomy, and Indians from elsewhere are not at liberty to settle and buy land in them...

...This is precisely what began to happen in India for the first time during the last three decades of the nineteenth century...

...The protective policy toward the religious and cultural minorities, however, has a negative side...

...This suited the British rulers, who granted them, and then other minorities, separate electorates, thereby making religion an integral part of the colonial state...

...It has more than six hundred eighty-seven million Hindus, more than one hundred million Muslims, more than nineteen million Christians, more than sixteen million Sikhs, more than nine million Buddhists and Jains, and just under half a million Zoroastrians...

...Although successive Indian governments have introduced variations in the liberal-pluralist strategy, the basic design has remained intact, a political compass in the murky waters of Indian politics...

...Finally, although the framers of the Constitution did not—it would seem deliberately— mention the word, they clearly wanted a secular state, and this is what, despite occasional aberrations, India has remained...

...India has some of the weakest anti-discrimination laws among the liberal democracies...

...Indeed, in several churches in south India recent converts enjoy lower status than their older counterparts, and the lower caste converts sit separately from the rest...

...This has sometimes come at the expense of desirable internal reforms...

...Indeed, one such effort, to reform the Hindu personal law in the 1950s, met with considerable resistance...

...NOTE: This article was written before the recent elections...

...Their relationship with the mainstream of Hindu society is deeply ambiguous, for they both are and are not a part of it...

...Because minority status secures certain privileges, it has provoked resentments among the majority Hindu community...

...Because individuals belong to several different communities, one might be in the majority of one community, in the minority of another...

...it respects all religions equally...

...Because many of the religious minorities are Hindu converts, they retain many Hindu beliefs and practices...

...It has made the state legitimate in the eyes of religious minorities, and enabled it to tackle evils perpetrated in the name of religion...

...The liberal-pluralist strategy has had complex consequences...

...The government needs to allocate greater resources to primary education, to provide much more start-up capital and to develop commercial skills among the target populations...

...q ED...

...For the first time non-Hindus began to see themselves as cohesive minorities and Hindus to see themselves as an actual or potential majority...

...The original hope was that all Indian citizens would one day be governed by a single personal law or civil code, but the Constitution didn't say how or when this would come about...

...Alternately, India could have pursued a corporatist strategy, in which different communities had autonomous status and ran the state as a partnership...

...Or one might be in the minority within a specific district but in the majority within one's state, while a minority again nationally...

...It has, however, SUMMER • 1996 • 147 India's Diversity several serious problems...

...The country's fragmented educational system has hindered the emergence of a sense of common citizenship...

...The Constitution of India institutionalized the third strategy, and its authors clearly hoped that in time minorities would have enough confidence in the Indian state to enable it to progress on liberal individualist principles alone...

...The ideas of majority and minority soon traveled to many other areas of life, giving rise to ideas of collective or group rights...

...Hindu castes or caste-like divisions are common among Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians...

...The result was much Hindu-Muslim violence, and the eventual partition of the country in 1947...

...This is equally true of the Christians, most of whom are far more at home in local languages than in English, which is generally regarded as their community language...

...That identity then becomes the basis for classifying and enumerating people...

...It would seem that everyone wants to be in a political majority and a cultural minority...

...Religious parties have found it easy to manipulate the Indian state...

...In such a situation individuals have neither the conceptual resources nor the need to identify themselves as belonging to majority and minority communities...