Fragile, and often unstable, India in the best of times needs to reduce politics around communities and focus on welfare
Students wearing Khadi and Gandhi caps at Darul Uloom Deoband campus in 1946
Democracies are governed by a majority vote, but perhaps no better indicator of the health of a democracy can be found than how the rights of minorities are upheld within its structure. It is within this conflict that India has fulfilled the legal and moral imperatives of the Rainbow Society.
Girls wearing hijabs at a computer lab in Malegaon, 2008
Political history has been volatile, not least because modern India was born with a bloody division on religious lines. Pakistan, to its east and west, was clearly sculpted as a Muslim nation—since split into two. But this has still left India with the second largest group of Muslims in the world. Currently, they make up 14.2 per cent of its population, the largest of the six large minority groups, but dwarfed by 80 per cent majority Hindus and a disproportionately small share of national wealth, institutional spaces and power structures. Majority-minority relations, which have often been conflicting in recent decades, exert a disproportionate force on electoral politics.
Meanwhile, the social sector, which receives less attention, is beset by another set of challenges. Economically, the six groups—Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists, apart from Muslims—display considerable diversity. Muslims lag behind in all socio-economic indicators. Among them, as well as among Christians and Sikhs, caste plays another role in internal stratification and immersion. The ideal way forward: reducing politics, focusing on initiatives targeted towards a uniform model of development.
