Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 83. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xii, 222 pp. (Illustrations, map.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-74775-2.
While the advent of the idea of majority/minority in Europe was essentially an outcome of the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution, in South Asia it is principally traced to the late nineteenth-century conjuncture of colonial modernity and the projects and practices of rule. Conventionally it is understood that the enumerative and classificatory exercises undertaken by a colonial state imposed new uniformity to community identities, amended conceptions about their collective self-image, and reconfigured representational tropes. According to this view, majorities and minorities as constructed entities were outcomes of these processes. An awareness of the intellectual history of nationalism in South Asia reveals how self-representations derived through identification with these categories shaped fraught national identities and ambivalent political subjectivities in the region.
Tanweer Fazal’s book historicizes this complex sociology of nationalism and the nation-state from the vantage point of minorities and the discourse of minority rights. It focuses on the Muslim and Sikh minorities in India, where, according to him, “the issue of minority rights … has far-reaching implications” and is not merely a “ceaseless academic exercise” (15). Given the acrimony over the “minority problematique” in contemporary India, this seems a reasonable justification for such a study.
Given its methodological inflection, the book juxtaposes historical moments, state practices, and discourses to expose, in the Foucaultian frame, the epistemic alteration of community identities. Fazal in the opening chapter advances the thesis that in addition to the disciplinary regimes of the colonial state, a significant rupture in the self-consciousness of communities was the inauguration of the idea of the “nation-state” and its organizing principles. By implication he considers the idea of the “nation” as the central “discontinuity” in the traditional self-perception and identity of communities and illustrates how the transit from being communities to becoming nations in due course shaped the framework for competitive “national” mobilizations. Following Lord Acton’s assessment (1), Fazal avers that as the nation-state necessitates a single “national” community, in poly-ethnic contexts “national minorities” became an inevitable consequence. He fittingly problematizes the “givenness” of the “nation” idea in India and goes on to critique the homogenization and exclusions that flow from an apparent unitary construction of “national” identities; exclusions both between and within national groups. His broad inference is that the project of nation building in India implied submergence of the distinctiveness of minority groups (29).
In order to argue his case, Fazal maps three projected “constructs of Indian nationhood” (9) that he describes as essentialist, nationalist, and modernist. He claims that though “seemingly in opposition” (9) to one another these constructions instinctively rendered majoritarian symbols and impulses a default primacy. The cultural metaphors, the political symbols, and later even the constitutional clauses, were all reflective of a “deep-seated majoritarianism” (10). He attributes this predisposition to their existence “in a shared discursive sphere” (9) where the logic of “power differentials” (29) between communities perceptibly foregrounded majoritarian interests to the “exclusion of peripheral voices” (29).
Fazal’s engagement with the discursive/public sphere (28) makes chapter 2 analytically pivotal to his understanding and account of the definitive trajectory and nature of minority rights in postcolonial India. The need of the “national” state to defend its privileged relationship with a “skewed public domain” (189), he claims, obliges it to adopt a blinkered conception of minorities and their rights. Tracking the nuances of its development and the governing discourses that shaped this “shared space,” Fazal suggests that the constitutive features of the national “public” were expressively coded and dominated by majoritarian sentiments and standpoints. It resulted in a “deep-seated nationalist prejudice against the concept of minority per se” (48). Such an ethnically circumscribed “public” gave definitive shape to the public discourse on minorities and the later constitutional conception and legal interpretations regarding the rights of minorities. Fazal argues that the shared collective understanding, or “national commonsense,” being morally majoritarian, treats minority rights merely as a compensation for the subjugated (162).
In conclusion, Fazal critiques the language of minority rights in India for legally institutionalizing an essentialist conception of community identities. This, he claims, instrumentalizes community identities and triggers a politics of “minorityism” (195) that places immoderate power in the hands of minority elites. Against a picture of essentialist cohesion Fazal emphasizes the internal plurality of minority subjectivities and suggests the need for privileging the politics of redistribution to redress issues of minority group disadvantage.
As a historically conscious and comparative account of minority rights in India, this book is a remarkably valuable intervention in the field. But it has crucial limitations. Fazal is right in tracing the modernity of the minority condition and explaining the invention of majorities/minorities to the introduction of the nation-form. Yet a historical survey of the “trajectory of the discourse” is too reductionist a perspective. It fails to capture the contingent role and effect of electoral politics, political parties, and democratic institutions in shaping the nature of majority-minority relations, especially in post-independence India. Fazal refers to the “elective principle” but does not fully unpack the dynamics of this principle or their implications for the discourse of minority rights at different moments of India’s postcolonial political history.
As for insights into the idea of the public sphere, other than Habermas, Fazal could have examined works of Eisenstadt and Schluchter and the relevance of their conceptualization to his case study. More crucially, Fazal forsakes engagement with the work of scholars like Amir Ali on the nature and evolution of the public sphere in India. Amir Ali’s work not only antedates but is also analogous to that of Fazal. Regrettably, Ali finds no mention even in Fazal’s bibliography. These comments notwithstanding, Fazal’s book is an important analysis of the problematic discourse of minority rights in India. The book straddles a range of disciplines and methods and marks a notable interdisciplinary attempt to capture the dialectic between nation, nationalism, minority identities and rights in India.
Rajesh Dev
University of Delhi, Delhi, India
pp. 170-172