Why did India choose pluralism? Lessons from a post-colonial state

India, a highly diverse society, is an endangered pluralist polity. An early adopter of a constitutional framework that recognized group-differentiated rights, India is now challenged by forces that threaten its fragile political consensus. This paper is divided into four sections. The first section offers an overview of India’s diversity, state forms and nationalisms in broad brushstrokes. The second focuses on a particular change experience: constitution-making in India (1946–49). The Indian Constitution’s adoption of group-differentiated rights in 1950 presaged multiculturalism in some respects. However, despite a range of group rights, including quotas for Untouchable and tribal groups, and self-government rights for linguistic groups, a normative deficit remained in India’s constitutional framework with respect to the protection of minority cultures. Shifting to the present, the third section discusses sources of inclusion and exclusion in the Indian polity. Focusing on reservations, discrimination against Muslims, Hindu nationalism and violence, it outlines key dimensions of exclusion in India today. The final section summarizes key lessons from the Indian experience with pluralism

Pluralizing Pluralism: Lessons from, and for, India

Embracing religious belief and societal norms, in addition to state laws and policies, covenantal pluralism has the potential to address key limitations of existing approaches to dealing with religious diversity. Nevertheless, it also shares some of the problems of other ideals. Notably, the demands of covenantal pluralism seem too onerous for most of the world, relying as they do on most of the population recognizing the value of religious pluralism. This article explores the possibilities and limits of covenantal pluralism in India, once heralded as a pluralist democracy, currently under the grip of Hindu supremacist authoritarianism. India’s historical record challenges key assumptions of theories of pluralist co-existence, illuminating problems and prospects for covenantal pluralism across the globe

Liberalisms in India

Liberal ideas in India are relatively understudied as liberalism, although these have been examined as part of other ideologies, such as nationalism, socialism, and secularism.This chapter offers an exploratory sketch of strands of liberalism in India in theory and practice. Arguing that liberal ideas have historically had a significant presence in the Indian polity, I distinguish three strands of liberalism that have been influential in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India: colonial, nationalist, and radical. Whereas politically, these traditions have been antagonistic, in terms of ideology, all share a strong belief in the state as the principal agent of liberal reform and an acceptance of group-differentiated rights. This in turn has meant that strong liberalism remains weakly articulated in India: the need for protecting individuals from state power has rarely been elaborated. Its Indian itineraries, however, serve also as a reminder of the limits of liberalism and the significance of other moral horizons for the pursuit of individual freedom

Winning big: The political logic of winning elections with large margins in India

Politicians winning elections with large margins of victory, beyond what is necessary to win electoral contests,what we term “winning big”, is a common, yet under-studied phenomenon across the world. Political economy models suggest that winning big is not an optimal allocation of scarce campaign resources in a SMP/FPTP electoral system. Inductive inquiry shows that incumbent politicians likely to win nevertheless campaign hard, often devoting considerable effort and resources, for reasons that remain unexamined. Focusing on India, this article explores a range of reasons that can help explain this phenomenon through an innovative research design that combines quantitative analysis with in-depth elite interviews with incumbent MPs from 10 states. We distinguish the phenomenon of “winning big” from that of “safe” seats,identify and probe factors that can contribute to large margins, including candidate strategy, party popularity, mobilizers, electoral uncertainty, and party control . Our findings suggest that while political parties in India, as elsewhere, do not spend more money on electoral contests that they likely to win comfortably, winning big can be the result, among other factors, of a party strategy to establish a reputation for invincibility, and/or individual efforts, stemming from a sense of political vulnerability felt by politicians, underestimated in the literature on safe seats

Non-extremist Outbidding: Muslim Leadership in Majoritarian India

How do parties representing minorities survive and expand at a time of majoritarian nationalism? Influential accounts suggest that the rise of majoritarianism should give rise to corresponding extremism (outbidding) in minority parties. Through a detailed case study of an Indian Muslim party in an era of Hindu majoritarianism, this article elaborates a new notion of non-extremist outbidding. It argues that outbidding need not imply appeals that are extremist in the sense that they are exclusionary, or religious, or intransigent. The agency of leaders, relatively neglected, plays a key role in determining the behaviour of ethnic parties

What do descriptive representatives describe? Minority representative claims and the limits of Shape-shifting

In contemporary debates on diversity, minorities are characterized mostly in terms of their cultural difference from the majority. Scholars have tended to focus on the role of minority representatives as advocates of their group interests in legislative assemblies. Focussing on election campaigns, this article examines how minority representatives reach out to a mixed electorate, comprising voters of both minority and non-minority backgrounds. Bringing together two distinct strands of the recent representative turn in political theory, theories of descriptive representation and constructivist theories of representation, I argue the following. First the influential contrast between the politics of presence and the politics of ideas underestimates the multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of minority identities as well as the respects in which minority representation is conditioned and constrained by the politics of ideas associated with party competition. Second, while Saward’s notion of shape-shifting representation is promising for illuminating the multiple positionalities of minority representatives and the dynamic character of descriptive representation, its current formulation does not offer adequate criteria for operationalizing shape-shifting and evaluating its democratic character. Third, ethnographic approaches have an important role to play in countering the tendency in normative debates for the reification of minority identities and the idealization of the democratic role of political parties. These arguments are established through a comparative case study of the representative claims of BJP MPs of Dalit (Scheduled Caste) and Muslim backgrounds during the 2014 Indian national election campaign

Religious pluralism and the state in India: Towards a typology

This chapter delineates and disaggregates a relatively neglected category, that of political pluralism. I argue, first, that historically, India has offered an important example of plurality in policy, with a multiplicity of state approaches and dispositions toward the accommodation of religious diversity. Unpacking political plurality, I distinguish in a provisional and schematic fashion between hierarchical pluralism, integrationist exclusion, integrationist inclusion, and weak multicultural, strong multicultural, and assimilationist approaches toward religious diversity. Second, if pluralism is understood as a normative category that denotes approaches that respect religious diversity, state approaches in India have differed widely in the extent to which these are pluralist. Political pluralism encompasses a range of dispositions toward socio-religious plurality, ranging from hostility to the celebration of religious difference. Pluralism both institutional and normative is threatened by the hegemony of Hindu nationalism in Indian politics today