WHILE politics is mostly about short-sightedness and immediate gains, often it is also the driver of new paradigms of understanding and strengthening the prerequisites of democratization. Thus, steps taken for addressing immediate concerns (and for many, immediate gains), might well provide the necessary impetus for a more complex policy frame-work to emerge in the course of time. Besides, such political moves can also give rise to new paradigms within which the policy framework is thought out. When the decision to implement ‘Mandal’ was taken, few would have predicted the rise of the language of social justice, and even less the subsequent acceptance of that concern as central to policy-making. Something similar may be happening at the present moment: a new idiom of diversity could emerge despite the short-sighted nature of contemporary political initiatives.

Following the defeat of the BJP and its allies in the 2004 elections, the UPA government appointed a high level committee to look into the situation of the Muslim community. The government took a wrong step in the right direction: the direction was right in the sense that this was a serious attempt to investigate the material condition of a minority community in order to arrive at a better policy approach. It was a wrong step in that it isolated the Muslim issue rather than take the bold step of looking at something larger – the social lopsidedness of our public life and conscience. The UPA government made a mistake both in its reading of the pathology of inter-communal relations as also the pathology of backwardness.

 

In the backdrop of the mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat and the alleged complicity of state machinery in that carnage, it is somewhat understandable that the government could not think boldly enough to grasp the real essence of the issues involved. Unsurprisingly, it chose to remain blinkered and singled out the Muslim community for special attention. Yet, there are some signs of an attempt to move beyond the Muslim question – the ministry for ‘Minority Affairs’ is now busy visualizing an Equal Opportunity Commission. This is a sign of hope as not only is the approach becoming broader but the language is also changing, i.e., rather than focus exclusively on the concerns of the Muslim community, the ministry for minority affairs is crafting a wider mandate.

True, that the term minority has in general become a euphemism for discussing the Muslim question. Nevertheless, reference to the term minority may just enable space for including many other concerns. Similarly, the proposed commission on equal opportunity permits the government to comprehend the complex networks of diversity, disadvantage and discrimination instead of remaining entangled in the avoidable path of attending to only one community or focusing on only one axis of this complex phenomenon.

But it is difficult to be confident – over the last few years, the buzz around giving ‘reservations’ to the Muslims has strengthened. State after progressive state is finding out ways to give reservation to Muslims as Muslims rather than within the Mandal framework; the UPA government accorded minority status to the AMU, despite protest that this move altered its character as a central university. All these measures either target the Muslim community or adopt the language of ‘minority’ protection. For instance, the HRD ministry, while announcing the commencement of a new Urdu DD channel, stated that ‘this will play an important role in the development of the Muslim community in the country’ (PTI, 13 August 2006).

Once again we appear to be at a crossroads: do we try and translate the Muslim predicament into a broader question of the relationship between diversity, disadvantage and democracy or do we resort to the stagnant practice of reducing everything to the infamous ‘Muslim question’? It is, of course, difficult to run away from the Muslim question, undeniably the greatest and continuing blot on our claim as a democratic nation.

But what does the ‘Muslim question’ represent? In my view it represents the complexity of building a democratic nation, the difficulty of practicing secularism. It reminds us of the need to evolve a policy framework for understanding and handling social diversity, the complex inter-linkages between diversity and disadvantage. Thus while the government may still stick to the game of winning over the Muslim community, it is simultaneously necessary to conceptually link the ‘Muslim’ question to the larger issue of handling diversity in a democratic nation.

 

This may be the moment for us as a nation to take the diversity issue seriously. While no society is absolutely homogenous, it is no exaggeration that India has a much more diverse and rich range of social diversities than most societies. More importantly, the calculus of diversity in India is different from many other societies in that rather than segregated diversities we witness overlap in the diversity in India. Third, diversity in India, unlike many parts of the global North, is rooted in the past rather than being the outcome of contemporary migrations of ‘outsiders’. Also, for much of the global North, religion (read non-Christian religions) represents cultural difference. This is not so in India. And yet, religion is one of the bases of diversity of social identities and political aspirations. This means that many of the routes to handle diversity tried elsewhere may just not be available or advisable for India. The question is, do we have the capacity and the will to innovate?

 

Historically, many have argued that a nation has to be one homogenous unit. This approach denies the validity of diverse identities within a nation. This would either mean that every self-conscious social entity will and has to be a nation. Alternatively, it could mean that for a nation to be a successful political enterprise, it is necessary to overcome the diversities and mould them into one nation. This could be done through force or validated through the ideology of the melting pot. The thesis of ‘Indianization’ of this or that community, or its subsequent variant called samarasata, represents this strand of thinking in the Indian context.

Another approach, quite prominent in India, is to divide society into majority and minority segments and then to ensure that the ‘minority’ is accorded a certain political guarantee. This approach is particularly attractive to those who are in search of a liberal democratic solution to the issue of diversity. A liberal democratic approach to diversity is the minimalist approach. It minimally ensures that the minority/minorities would be protected constitutionally from the onslaught of the majority.

 

Ever since the colonial period, our policy approach to this question has remained prisoner to the ‘minority-majority’ framework. Partly in response to the colonial state’s refusal to recognize India as one nation, the national movement too adopted a majority-minority framework and, to carry everyone along, guaranteed ‘protection to minorities’ in free India. Admittedly, such an approach does have some advantage as a part of the legal framework for purposes of formal administrative practices. Nevertheless, while certain rights for the protection of the minority are indeed necessary in a liberal democratic set up, it would be wrong to imagine a society divided permanently between majority and minority.

Savarkar and Jinnah, both of whom bought into this thinking came up with diametrically opposite solutions to the minority question – a militant homogenizing strategy in the case of Savarkar and carving out of a separate nation for the ‘minority’ community for Jinnah. Both, however, agreed implicitly on one point – the inherent inability of democratic societies to tolerate (at least some kind of) diversity. In contrast, though the Nehruvian imagination too chose to recognize the minority-majority division, it foregrounded the possibility and desirability of coexistence and tolerance. It is this imagination that over time became the more dominant vision of democratic India.

What is, however, less appreciated is that this imagination too feeds on, and has in turn fed, its ‘other’ – the Savarkar-Jinnah imagination. In the crossfire between these two, the popular perception has vacillated between occasional majoritarian assertions and stereotyping of communities and identities. An overemphasis on the language of minority renders legitimacy to the language and politics of majority. Besides, the strategy to label one community as ‘majority’ and other/s as ‘minority’, is neither helpful in consolidating diversity, nor does it help in effectively intervening in the issue of disadvantage emanating from the social location of various groups.

 

It is thus advisable that we should confine the language of majority and minority to limited contexts and purposes of legal-administrative practices and turn to a more robust and fruitful frame of diversity. Incidentally, this approach is supported by ground level reality. Not only do many people not understand the language of minority-majority, even of those who do understand it, a large segment identifies itself as a minority rather than the majority. In a society that has a ‘Hindu’ majority, it is intriguing to note that as many as 38 per cent Hindus see themselves as a minority and overall, less than 40 per cent people perceive themselves as ‘majority’. For most people, the idea of being majority or minority is simply contextual and somewhat tentative. The boundaries of these two categories are often fuzzy and porous. Many Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis see themselves as minority; some Muslims don’t see themselves as minority – these are some of the findings of a study that should alert us to the futility and inadequacy of employing the majority-minority framework (State of Democracy in South Asia, OUP, 2008).

It is also important to appreciate the implications of adopting a diversity-based approach. After all, to talk of diversity is not to talk of societies and groups merely as showpieces in an anthropological museum. So, the question is not how many languages are spoken and how many religions are recorded in the Census and how many groups are covered by the provisions of minority rights. Instead, we should be asking questions about the opportunities for enriching material as well as cultural existence of various communities. In this fundamental sense, the diversity approach tests the tenacity and maturity of democracy. When we talk of diversity in the political sense, we are able to ask two questions: first, does the political process in our country adequately incorporate and reflect the diversity in society? And second, is diversity associated with disadvantage? Therefore, an examination of the diversity record becomes essential.

 

In the last six decades, India has witnessed many policy initiatives that did not take into account the comprehensiveness of diversity and instead focused on piecemeal treatment of singled-out aspects of diversity and/or disadvantage. Thus, there have been commissions, committees, and policies, for individual groups. This led to two developments. First, this strategy of treating groups as the separate basis for policy initiative bypassed the issue of how to deal with diversity in its totality, how it can be used for a more robust democracy and above all, how diversity can also at times be the marker of disadvantage. Instead, this strategy led to the hardening of group identity, made identities competitive and simultaneously inward-looking. As groups became conscious of their ‘group rights’, they also became more intolerant of internal democracy and individual rights of their members. Groups also began to assert the right to group representation without taking a holistic view of either the society or its diversity.

Second, most demands or complaints were aimed at state institutions. The social universe, the status of diversity in the social and political – or public – life in general, were issues that never drew the attention of the society, the policy-makers or those demanding separate treatment from the state. The state domain too was willing to isolate the diversity issue from the larger public domain and restrict it to the formal state institutions. Consequently, diversity and disadvantage could find place in the formal discourse of the state without gaining a similar status in the domain of public discourse.

 

It is time this distortion be rectified and we institutionalize a policy framework squarely based on the idea of diversity. For this to happen, the following six concerns will have to be addressed:

a) How do we ensure that diversity will not be physically threatened or that groups will not be exterminated in order to make way for a homogenous society? Is there any threat to the existing social architecture? On the face of it, India can boast of a satisfactory record on this count, save perhaps the initial trauma of Partition. But the collective frenzy created against the Sikh community after Indira Gandhi’s assassination came very close to extermination. Equally, it is impossible to ignore the killings of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

It could perhaps be argued that these incidents did not qualify for being described as extermination as they were regionally limited. Nevertheless, the atmosphere generated by these two incidents certainly generated the effect of deliberately attempted extermination. Besides, in both cases, there have been complaints about the role of the state machinery; apart from the alleged complicity of the political establishment both were marked by the capitulation by the administrative machinery.

The narrowness of the base on which diversity is situated can be measured by the ease with which the machinery of the state is employed for anti-diversity purposes. In both instances, the planners and perpetrators have neither been punished legally nor politically. What makes matters worse is that both these excesses were sought to be defended within the framework of nationalist language.

b) A variant of the threat of extermination is exclusion and marginalization. Exclusion is in effect a means to exterminate, if not physically, then in terms of claims over resources, pride and identity. Intolerance of or apathy towards diversity is often reflected in processes of exclusion. This is the way in which diversity gets connected to disadvantage. The forcible eviction of Pandits from the Kashmir valley or the reported exodus of Muslim labourers from Mumbai in the aftermath of the 1993 riots, are some instances of exclusion.

 

But there are other ways of effecting exclusion from symbolic resources – such as the violence against Dalits for using a horse to carry the bridegroom, or for wearing decent clothes. Thus, Muslims, Dalits, or Adivasis are often targets of the strategies of exclusion. It is equally important to examine to what extent poverty is concentrated among certain social sections. A robust respect for diversity should mean that all groups get adequate opportunity to prosper. To the extent some groups or communities are disproportionately represented among the poor, our diversity record would be that much weaker since it would mean that there is an inbuilt adversity that some groups face.

c) Any reality check about diversity must ensure that the character of public power is adequately diverse. The pressures of democratic politics have made us sensitive to this issue and various groups do keep claiming a share in power. However, more often, this awareness is limited to structures such as legislatures, cabinets, and so on. We rarely carry out a similar scrutiny of the bureaucracy, particularly the top echelons, the armed forces, the judiciary, and various expert bodies and so on. Besides, whenever such discussions of diversity in these bodies do take place, they are restricted only to the issue of ‘reservation’. There has been little effort to make the discourse of affirmative action more nuanced and diverse.

 

Moreover, substantial power resides outside the scope of formal state institutions – the industry, media and the voluntary sector are strong repositories of power in any modern society, but their social character is seldom examined. Nobody expects them to be diverse in their ownership or employment profile. So, any diversity audit must also involve examination of such non-state public institutions which often escape public scrutiny. However, such a scrutiny should not be exclusively linked to the caste question (or to religion). A more balanced understanding of diverse social character of public power would demand that we be sensitive to issues of urban-rural divide, gender, regional composition of the workforce, and so on. Only when public power passes these two tests – diversity in non-state institutions and diversity beyond caste and religion – would it become truly diverse in character. Incidentally, these are some of the issues that the Equal Opportunity Commission should be asked to address.

d) The idea of diversity is accepted – at least partially – in its application to power. But it is very rarely accepted in the context of public policy. In fact, the idea of public policy is employed to counter diversity claims. It is argued that ‘public’ interest can supersede diversity claims. Often, policy-making pays homage to diversity only in a symbolic and token manner. For instance, formally, our policy encourages various Indian languages; there are bodies like the Sahitya Akademy that support/encourage various Indian languages. But the educational policy is singularly unimaginative and non-supportive of the linguistic diversity. There is, for instance, no incentive for a student to learn an Indian language other than his or her mother tongue (and often not even that). A similar region-specificity is evidenced in the study of history. Each region emphasizes its own history in the curriculum; thus, study of history means regional history and national history, without any knowledge of the history of other regions. Our public policy allows or tolerates but does not actively encourage diversity.

e) No wonder then that diversity is not adequately reflected in public life. Public expressions of diversity are mostly celebratory, formalistic and token in nature, merely cosmetic gestures. However, in the conduct of our collective public life, we do not integrate diversity as much as we could. This can happen only by adopting a syncretic approach to sects, languages, rituals and customs. In contrast, we are happy imposing ‘shudh’ Hindi over Hindustani and remain unmoved when symbols and customs of one community become public symbols by pushing aside the customs and symbols of other communities. In this context, one cannot but recall the value of Gandhi’s all-religion prayers. Many self-certified secularists routinely ridiculed the prayer on grounds that it emphasized religiosity in public affairs, little realizing that underneath this practice lay the principle that no one community should have a monopoly over symbols, ideas and practices.

f) Finally, any examination of diversity has to turn to the question: Does our society allow diversity of lifestyles? Of course, democracy guarantees autonomy of the private domain. However, nationalism can be an impediment in evolving autonomous lifestyles if nationalist forces insist on homogenization. But more than nationalism, advanced capitalism operates as a great steamroller and brings frightening uniformity to lifestyles and lifestyle options. There is no recourse to the state for protection against this encroachment on plurality and lifestyle choices.

While in the statist conception of democracy, this issue would occupy only a marginal space, any serious diversity audit would need to take this into account. In its constant effort to reduce all things and beings into consumables or consumers, advanced market capitalism robs us of all diversity, intervenes in social practices, redefines them, and changes the entire cultural environment within which we live. Alternatively, market economy turns customs and practices into consumer goods and plurality is transformed into an exhibition. From Valentine’s day to garba to Jagannath yatra, everything is made media-friendly so that it can be ‘packaged’ rather than enjoyed by the believers and participants. The pursuit of diversity would mean protecting spaces for lifestyle choices that are unencumbered by such concerns of commercialization.

 

Such an audit of our diversity record would help us achieve three things. In the first place, an examination of diversity would alert us to the multifaceted phenomenon of disadvantage. It is not enough to ‘celebrate’ diversity; it is much more pertinent to locate the intersections of diversity and disadvantage. We need to answer the question as to why certain groups are in a position of disadvantage and how some forms of diversity lead to disadvantage in material and political realms. It is possible that this exercise may lead to the paradigm shift mentioned at the beginning of this essay – the awareness that disadvantage based on one diversity marker may also add to the disadvantage flowing from some other marker of diversity. Therefore, a comprehensive policy for addressing disadvantage might be necessary.

 

Second, the diversity audit would enhance the quality of democracy in multiple ways. If one adopts the diversity framework elaborated here, democracy would become both wider and deeper. That is, the sections of population covered by the democratic endeavour would expand and the newer meanings of democracy would make the idea more entrenched and deep-rooted. The democratic norm would become the measure for assessing a vast range of our public activities and institutions. In other words, the diversity debate could add to the maturity of both the idea and practice of democracy.

Finally, this may also help us intervene in the global discourse over diversity and multiculturalism in a more meaningful way. Currently, our participation in that discourse is of a secondary and derivative nature. Equally, the global discourse on this issue is inadequate, myopic and ethnocentric. If, however, societies like India adopt a consciously pro-diversity perspective, the global discourse on questions of diversity, multiculturalism and democracy would be significantly enriched.