Revisiting the Republic's relations with minorities

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

- Hilal Ahmed

There is a unique feature of our republican democracy, which is mostly ignored in our public debates. The Constitution, which recognises the cultural rights of minority groups and protects the freedom of religion of its citizens as a fundamental right, does not define the term minority. This open-ended approach is based on the premise that the state should evolve a context-specific definition of the category called minority. Accordingly, the political class is expected to defend the dignity, culture, and religious distinctiveness of the many numerically inferior social groups in different contexts. In this sense, the makers of the Indian Constitution (particularly B.R. Ambedkar) tried to conceptualise a multifaceted idea of republicanism to get rid of the popular conception that the majority-minority distinction is only about Hindus and Muslims.

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.