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Chapter 6: The Challenges of Cultural Diversity

When India became independent in 1947, many observers abroad did not expect it to last. A country of that size, they argued, could not hold together. Its people prayed in different ways, ate different food, wrote in different scripts, and spoke hundreds of languages. Most of the successful nations of the world at that time were built on a single language and a single dominant culture. A country made of so many communities, it was said, would soon pull apart into fragments.

The prediction was wrong, and the reason is worth thinking about. India did not try to melt its communities into one standard type. Its Constitution promised every group the right to keep its own language, script and culture. Within a decade of Independence, the map of the country was actually redrawn to give large language communities their own States — a step that many leaders at the time feared would break the nation, and which in fact helped to hold it together.

None of this means the challenge has disappeared. Communities still compete for jobs, water and recognition. Identities still harden, and sometimes turn violent. This chapter asks how a nation can live with its differences instead of erasing them.

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.1 – Cultural diversity in India.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. What exactly does ‘cultural diversity’ mean, and why is it treated as a challenge rather than simply a fact? Q2. Why do people feel so deeply attached to a community they did nothing to earn a place in — one they were simply born into? Q3. Did dividing India into States on the basis of language weaken the country, or strengthen it? Q4. What is the difference between being religious and being communal? Q5. If the state itself becomes unjust or unresponsive, who can hold it to account?

Keep these questions in mind as you read. Each one will be answered somewhere in this chapter.

6.1 Cultural Diversity as a Challenge

In the earlier chapters of this book you met social institutions of many kinds, from the family at one end to the market at the other. Such institutions bring people together. They give members a shared way of life, a common set of expectations, and a strong sense of collective identity. In doing so they strengthen social cohesion — the bonds of belonging and mutual obligation that hold a society together.

But the same institutions have another face. Chapters on the market and on patterns of inequality showed how institutions that unite some people can simultaneously rank, exclude and disadvantage others. An institution is rarely purely a source of unity or purely a source of division; usually it is both at once.

This chapter takes up the tensions that arise from difference itself. What exactly does ‘cultural diversity’ mean? And why should mere difference be described as a challenge at all?

What ‘Diversity’ Means

The word ‘diversity’ points to differences rather than to inequalities. Two communities may speak different languages, follow different faiths, or celebrate different festivals without either standing above the other in rank. Difference, by itself, says nothing about who is higher and who is lower.

When we say that India is a country of great cultural diversity, we are saying something quite specific: that a very large number of different social groups and communities live within its borders. These communities are marked off from one another by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste.

NoteDefinition

Cultural diversity refers to the presence, within a single society, of many different social groups and communities that are distinguished from one another by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste.

Notice that a cultural marker is simply a visible or claimed sign of belonging — the tongue you speak at home, the place you worship at, the community name that appears on a form. The same person usually carries several such markers at the same time. As shown in Fig. 6.2, they are best pictured as overlapping circles rather than as separate boxes.

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.2 – Overlapping cultural markers.

Difference vs Inequality Difference means that two groups are unlike each other; inequality means that one is ranked above the other in wealth, status or power. Diversity describes difference — but in real societies, differences and inequalities are often found tangled together.

Why Difference Becomes a Challenge

Difference in itself is not a problem. The difficulty appears when diverse communities are also parts of a larger entity — a nation — within which they must live together, compete and share. Competition or conflict between them can then create serious trouble for the whole.

The first reason is the sheer power of cultural identities. They are not casual preferences that people hold lightly. They can arouse intense passions, and they are often able to mobilise very large numbers of people very quickly — far more quickly than an appeal to economic interest usually can.

The second reason is that cultural differences do not always stand alone. Very often they come accompanied by economic and social inequalities, so that one community is not merely different from another but also poorer, less educated, or less well represented in positions of power. The two axes then reinforce each other, and the situation becomes much harder to disentangle.

The third reason follows from the second. When the state or society attempts to correct the injustices suffered by one community, the measures adopted may provoke opposition from other communities, who see in them an unfair advantage granted to a rival. What is offered as a remedy for exclusion is received by others as a loss.

Q. If diversity only means difference, why does it so often end in conflict?

A. Because differences rarely stay purely cultural. They get attached to unequal shares of wealth, status and power, and to competition over things that are in short supply. It is this attachment, not difference by itself, that makes diversity a challenge.

When resources are scarce

The situation is made worse when scarce resources have to be shared. River waters, jobs and government funds are finite; if one group gets more of them, another appears to get less. A dispute of this kind is really about resources, but it is very easily expressed in the language of community — as one people being cheated by another.

how a resource dispute turns into a community dispute Two neighbouring States draw irrigation water from the same river. In a year of poor rainfall, the upstream State releases less water, and farmers downstream find their standing crop failing. Local associations in both States hold meetings and processions. Very soon the arguments are no longer about cusecs of water and cropping seasons; they are about the pride and the honour of two language communities, and about which people are being wronged by the other. This shows how competition over scarce resources can attach itself to existing cultural identities and harden them.

Q1. What exactly does ‘cultural diversity’ mean, and why is it treated as a challenge rather than simply a fact?

A. Cultural diversity means that many different communities — marked off by language, religion, sect, race or caste — live within one society. It becomes a challenge only because these communities also belong to a single nation, because cultural identities can mobilise people powerfully, because cultural difference is often accompanied by economic and social inequality, and because scarce resources such as water, jobs and public funds must somehow be shared.

Over the course of one ordinary day — on the bus, in the market, at school — keep a rough note of how many different languages you hear spoken around you. You need not record who spoke them. Simply count how many distinct languages a single day in your neighbourhood contains, and compare your list with those of your classmates.

6.2 The Importance of Community Identity

Every human being needs a stable sense of who they are in order to function in the world. Questions such as — Who am I? How am I different from others? How do other people understand me? What should I want out of life? — begin to press on us from childhood onwards, and they never entirely go away.

We are able to answer most of these questions not by working them out alone, but because of the way we are brought up. Socialisation is the process by which we are taught how to live in society — first by our immediate family, and then by our community in its various senses.

Socialisation is not a one-way transmission. It is a continuous dialogue, a negotiation, and sometimes even a struggle with significant others — the people directly involved in our lives, such as parents, family, the wider kin group and the community. Our community hands us the language we think in, our mother tongue, and the cultural values through which we make sense of the world. It anchors our self-identity.

Identity by Birth: The Ascriptive Kind

Community identity is based on birth and ‘belonging’ rather than on any acquired qualification or ‘accomplishment’. It is a matter of what we are, not of what we have become.

You did nothing to be born into your family, your community or your country. No one is consulted beforehand, and no one chooses. Identities of this kind are called ascriptive identities: they are determined by birth and involve no choice on the part of the individual concerned.

NoteDefinition

An ascriptive identity is an identity determined by birth, in which the individual has no choice — such as being born into a particular family, caste, region, religion or nation.

Here is the odd thing about social life. People feel a deep sense of security and satisfaction in belonging to communities in which their membership is entirely accidental. We identify intensely with groups we have done nothing to deserve — we passed no examination for them, and demonstrated no skill or competence.

Compare this with membership of a profession or a team. A doctor or an architect must pass examinations and prove competence. Even a place in a school cricket team requires a certain level of skill and performance as a pre-condition. Membership of our family, our religious community or our regional community demands no such pre-condition — and yet it is total.

Most ascriptive identities are also extremely hard to shake off. Even when a person chooses to disown such an identity, others may go on identifying them by exactly those markers of belonging.

Q. If we did nothing to earn an ascriptive identity, why is it so hard to leave behind?

A. Because identity is not only a claim we make about ourselves; it is also a label others attach to us. A person may stop thinking of themselves in terms of caste or religion, but the surrounding society may continue to place them within it.

Q2. Why do people feel so deeply attached to a community they did nothing to earn a place in — one they were simply born into?

A. Precisely because that belonging is accidental, unconditional and almost inescapable. Community membership is not something a person must qualify for and can lose; it is given, total, and hard to shed. The expanding and overlapping circles of community ties — family, kinship, caste, ethnicity, language, region, religion — give meaning to the world and tell a person who they are. That is why any perceived threat to community identity provokes such strong emotional reactions.

Why Community Conflicts Are So Difficult

A second feature of ascriptive identities and community feeling is that they are, broadly speaking, universal. Everyone has a motherland, a mother tongue, a family, a faith. This is not strictly true of every single individual, but it holds in a general sense.

And we are all more or less equally committed and loyal to our own identities. Certainly one can find people who are not particularly attached to one or another aspect of their identity, but the possibility of that commitment is available to almost everyone.

This is what makes conflicts involving communities — of nation, language, religion, caste or region — so hard to handle. Each side comes to see the other as a hated enemy. Each side exaggerates the virtues of its own people and the vices of its opponents.

Think of what happens when two nations go to war. Patriots in each country see the other as the aggressor. Each side is confident that God and truth are on its side. In the heat of the moment it is very difficult for people on either side to notice that they are constructing matching but reversed mirror images of each other, as suggested in Fig. 6.3.

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.3 – Mirror images in community conflict.

6.2.1 Communities, Nations and Nation-States

At the simplest level, a nation is a kind of large-scale community — a community of communities. What its members share is the desire to belong to the same political collectivity. That desire for political unity usually takes a particular form: the aspiration to have a state of their own.

In its most general sense, the state is an abstract entity: a set of political-legal institutions that claim control over a particular geographical territory and over the people living in it. In Max Weber’s well-known definition, a state is a body that successfully claims “a monopoly of legitimate force in a particular territory”.

NoteDefinition

State (Weber): a body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force within a particular territory. The two conditions matter — the force must be recognised as legitimate, and the claim must be successfully sustained.

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.4 – The path to the nation-state.

A community that is easy to describe but hard to define

A nation is a peculiar sort of community: we can describe many particular nations quite easily, and yet we cannot say what a nation must have. Specific nations have been founded on common cultural, historical and political institutions — a shared religion, language, ethnicity, history or regional culture.

But no such feature works as a defining criterion, because for every criterion there are exceptions. Many nations do not share a single common language, religion or ethnicity. And many languages, religions and ethnicities are shared across several nations without producing a single unified nation of, say, all English speakers or all Buddhists.

So how do we distinguish a nation from other kinds of community — from an ethnic group (based on common descent, in addition to shared language or culture), from a religious community, or from a regionally defined community? Conceptually, there is no hard distinction. Any of these communities may one day become a nation, and no particular kind of community is guaranteed to become one.

The state as the deciding criterion

The criterion that comes closest to marking off a nation is the state. Unlike the other kinds of community, nations are communities that possess a state of their own. That is why the two words are joined with a hyphen into a single term: the nation-state.

In recent times there has been a broadly one-to-one bond between the two — one nation, one state; one state, one nation. But this is a new development, and it was not always the case.

The Soviet Union, when it existed, explicitly recognised that the peoples it governed belonged to different ‘nations’, and more than one hundred such internal nationalities were acknowledged within a single state. Conversely, the people who make up one nation may be citizens or residents of several different states. There are more Jamaicans living outside Jamaica than in it, so that the ‘non-resident’ population exceeds the ‘resident’ one.

‘Dual citizenship’ laws provide another example. They allow the citizens of one state to be, simultaneously, citizens of another. Jewish Americans, for instance, may be citizens of Israel as well as of the USA, and can serve in the armed forces of one country without losing their citizenship of the other.

Nation vs State | Feature | Nation | State | |—|—|—| | What it is | A large-scale community; a community of communities | An abstract set of political-legal institutions | | Basis | Shared desire to belong to one political collectivity, often built on language, religion, history or culture | Claimed control over a territory and its people | | Defining test | Cannot be defined by any single cultural feature; exceptions exist for every criterion | Weber’s test: a successful claim to a monopoly of legitimate force in a territory | | Relation to the other | Aspires to acquire a state of its own | Increasingly finds it necessary to claim that it represents a nation |

Nation-state vs State-nation A nation-state assumes one nation and one state, and tends to press its communities towards a single national identity. A state-nation allows several ‘nations’ — ethnic, religious, linguistic or indigenous — to coexist within one state polity, so that people can hold multiple, complementary identities at once.

Why states ‘need’ nations

In short, it is hard today to define a nation in any way other than this: a community that has succeeded in acquiring a state of its own. Interestingly, the reverse has also become increasingly true.

Just as aspiring nationalities work towards forming a state, existing states find it more and more necessary to claim that they represent a nation. One characteristic feature of the modern era is the establishment of democracy and nationalism as the dominant sources of political legitimacy.

This means that ‘the nation’ is today the most accepted justification for having a state at all, while ‘the people’ are the ultimate source of the nation’s legitimacy. Put bluntly, states ‘need’ the nation quite as much as — perhaps more than — nations need states.

How should a state treat its communities?

As we have seen, there is no historically fixed or logically necessary relationship between a nation-state and the varied forms of community it could be built on. It follows that there is no ready-made answer to a very practical question: how should the ‘state’ part of the nation-state treat the different kinds of community that make up the ‘nation’ part?

The historical record, summarised in the United Nations Development Programme’s report of 2004 on culture and democracy, is not encouraging. Most states have been suspicious of cultural diversity and have tried to reduce or eliminate it. Yet there are successful counter-examples — India among them — which show that a strong nation-state need not ‘homogenise’ its community identities into one standard type.

Threatened by community identities, states try to eliminate cultural diversity. Historically, states have tried to build and strengthen their political legitimacy through nation-building strategies, seeking the loyalty and obedience of their citizens through policies of assimilation or integration. This has never been easy in conditions of cultural diversity, where citizens identify with their country but also feel a strong sense of belonging to their own ethnic, religious or linguistic community. Most states feared that recognising such differences would lead to social fragmentation, and treated identity politics as a threat to state unity. Since accommodating differences is politically demanding, many states chose instead to suppress diverse identities or to ignore them in the political domain. Assimilationist and integrationist strategies have typically involved: centralising power in forums where the dominant group is in a majority, and removing the autonomy of local or minority groups; imposing a unified legal and judicial system based on the dominant group’s traditions, and abolishing the alternative systems used by other groups; adopting the dominant group’s language as the only official ‘national’ language and making its use compulsory in public institutions; promoting the dominant group’s language and culture through national institutions, including state-controlled media and educational institutions; adopting state symbols that celebrate the dominant group’s history, heroes and culture, visible in the choice of national holidays or the naming of streets; and seizing lands, forests and fisheries from minority groups and indigenous peoples, and declaring them ‘national resources’. (Adapted from the UNDP Human Development Report 2004.)

Policies promoting assimilation aim at persuading, encouraging or outright forcing all citizens to adopt a uniform set of cultural values and norms. Those values and norms are usually, entirely or largely, those of the dominant social group. Other, non-dominant groups are expected — or required — to give up their own culture and adopt the prescribed one.

Policies promoting integration differ in style but not in overall objective. They insist that the public culture must follow a single common national pattern, while all ‘non-national’ cultures are relegated to the private sphere. Here too there is a real danger: the dominant group’s culture quietly comes to be treated as the ‘national’ culture.

Assimilation vs Integration | Feature | Assimilation | Integration | |—|—|—| | Aim | All citizens adopt one uniform set of cultural values and norms | Public culture follows one common national pattern | | Method | Persuading, encouraging or forcing minority groups to give up their own culture; often outright suppression | Removing cultural difference from the public and political arena, while permitting it in private | | Private sphere | Cultural difference is to be eroded altogether | Cultural difference is tolerated, but only at home | | Shared assumption | A single national identity | A single national identity | | Common danger | The dominant group’s culture is treated as the national culture | The dominant group’s culture is treated as the national culture |

The cost of suppressing diversity

You can probably see the problem by now. There is no necessary relationship between any specific form of community and the modern form of the state. Any of the bases of community identity — language, religion, ethnicity and so on — may or may not lead to the formation of a nation. There are no guarantees.

But precisely because community identities can become the basis of nation-formation, existing states tend to view every form of community identity as a dangerous rival. This is why states so often favour a single, homogenous national identity: a uniform identity looks easier to control and manage.

The strategy carries heavy costs. Suppressing cultural diversity alienates the minority or subordinated communities whose culture is stamped as ‘non-national’. Worse, the act of suppression frequently produces the opposite of its intended effect, intensifying the very community identity it set out to erase. Encouraging cultural diversity — or at the very least allowing it — is therefore good policy on both practical and principled grounds.

Should a state promote one national identity, or recognise many? View 1: A single national identity is safer. Recognising many identities, on this view, invites fragmentation and gives rival loyalties a political platform; a common language, a common legal system and common symbols are what hold a large state together. View 2: Suppression is self-defeating. The evidence of many states is that communities whose culture is labelled ‘non-national’ feel alienated, and that identities grow sharper, not weaker, under pressure; recognition is what secures loyalty. What both agree on: cultural identities are politically powerful, and any state that ignores them does so at its own risk.

6.2.2 Cultural Diversity and India as a Nation-state

The Indian nation-state is socially and culturally one of the most diverse countries in the world. According to the Census of India 2011, it has a population of about 1.21 billion people — currently the second largest, and soon to become the largest, national population in the world.

These billion-plus people speak about 1,632 different languages and dialects. Twenty-two of these languages have been officially recognised and placed under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, which guarantees their legal status.

In terms of religion, about 80% of the population are Hindus — who are themselves regionally specific, plural in their beliefs and practices, and divided by caste and language. About 14.2% of the population are Muslims, which makes India the world’s second largest Muslim country after Indonesia and Pakistan. The other major religious communities are Christians (2.3%), Sikhs (1.7%), Buddhists (0.7%) and Jains (0.4%).

Table 6.1 – Major religious communities in India as a share of the total population, Census of India 2011 (per cent) | Religious community | Share of total population (%) | |—|—| | Hindus | about 80 | | Muslims | 14.2 | | Christians | 2.3 | | Sikhs | 1.7 | | Buddhists | 0.7 | | Jains | 0.4 |

Read Table 6.1 with India’s population size in mind. Because the base is so large, even a small percentage translates into a very large absolute number of people — a community that is 2% of India is still counted in the tens of millions.

Neither assimilationist nor integrationist

Where does India stand in relation to the two models just described? The Indian case fits neither of them. From its very beginning, the independent Indian state ruled out an assimilationist model — although the demand for such a model has been expressed by some sections of the dominant Hindu community.

‘National integration’ has certainly been a constant theme in state policy. But India has not been ‘integrationist’ in the sense described earlier. The Constitution declares the state to be secular, yet religion, language and similar factors are not banished from the public sphere. On the contrary, these communities have been explicitly recognised by the state, and by international standards the constitutional protection offered to minority religions is very strong.

India’s difficulties, in other words, have lain more in the sphere of implementation and practice than in its laws or principles. On the whole, India can be considered a good example of a state-nation — though it is not entirely free from the problems common to nation-states.

National unity with cultural diversity — building a democratic “state-nation”. An alternative to the nation-state is the state-nation, in which various “nations” — ethnic, religious, linguistic or indigenous — coexist peacefully and cooperatively within a single state polity. Comparative studies show that enduring democracies can be built in multicultural societies, but only through explicit efforts to end the cultural exclusion of diverse groups and to build multiple and complementary identities. Such responsive policies generate a “we” feeling: citizens find institutional and political space to identify both with their country and with their other cultural identities, to trust common institutions, and to support democratic politics. India’s Constitution incorporates this idea, and comparative surveys of long-standing democracies show that India has been remarkably cohesive despite its diversity — a performance that is impressive when set beside other long-standing and wealthier democracies. Its constitutional design recognised distinct group claims and enabled the polity to hold together in spite of enormous regional, linguistic and cultural diversity. The report also warns that this constitutional commitment to multiple and complementary identities faces a grave challenge from the rise of groups that seek to impose a singular Hindu identity on the country, and that communal violence undermines the sense of inclusion and the rights of minorities. The task, it argues, is to reinvigorate the practices of pluralism, institutional accommodation and democratic conflict resolution — since national cohesion does not require the imposition of a single identity or the denunciation of diversity. (Adapted from the UNDP Human Development Report 2004.)

Find the list of languages placed under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. How many of them can you already name without looking? Mark on an outline map of India the States where each of these languages is most widely spoken, and note which languages are spoken in more than one State.

6.3 Regionalism in the Indian Context

Regionalism in India grows out of the country’s diversity of languages, cultures, tribes and religions. But diversity by itself is not enough to produce it. Two further conditions matter.

The first is geographical concentration. When a language, a tribal identity or a religious tradition is not scattered evenly across the country but is clustered in a particular territory, that territory begins to look like a natural political unit to the people who live in it.

The second is a sense of regional deprivation — the feeling that one’s own region has been neglected, exploited, or denied its fair share of development and power. This is what turns a cultural identity into a political demand.

NoteDefinition

Regionalism is the assertion of a distinct regional identity, usually built on language, tribe, culture or religion concentrated in a particular territory, and typically fuelled by a sense that the region has been deprived or neglected.

Indian federalism — the constitutional division of power between a central government and the governments of the States — has been the principal means of accommodating these regional sentiments (Bhattacharyya 2005). It offers a region something short of a separate country but considerably more than nothing: a government of its own within a shared union.

From Presidencies to Linguistic States

After Independence, the Indian state at first simply continued with the British-Indian arrangement, which had divided the country into large provinces, also called ‘presidencies’. Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were the three major presidencies; all three cities after which they were named have since changed their names.

These provinces were large, multi-ethnic and multilingual. They formed the main political-administrative units of a semi-federal state called the Union of India — units drawn for the administrative convenience of a colonial power, not for the cultural coherence of the people inside them.

Soon after the Constitution was adopted, all these colonial-era units had to be reorganised into ethno-linguistic States within the Indian union. This did not happen because the leadership planned it that way. It happened in response to strong popular agitations. Fig. 6.5 sets out the sequence.

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.5 – The reorganisation of Indian States.

Linguistic States helped strengthen Indian unity. The report of the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), implemented on 1 November 1956, transformed the political and institutional life of the nation. The background runs as follows. In the 1920s the Indian National Congress reconstituted itself on linguistic lines, so that its provincial units followed the logic of language — one for Marathi speakers, another for Oriya speakers, and so on. Gandhi and other leaders promised that when freedom came, the new nation would be built on provinces based on the principle of language. But when India became free in 1947, it was also divided. When the supporters of linguistic states asked for that promise to be honoured, the Congress leadership hesitated. Partition, they reasoned, had been the consequence of an intense attachment to faith; how many further partitions might that other intense loyalty, language, produce? This was the thinking of senior Congress leaders including Nehru, Patel and Rajaji. The rank and file, however, wanted the map redrawn on the lines of language. Vigorous movements arose among Marathi and Kannada speakers, who were then spread across several different political regimes — the erstwhile Bombay and Madras presidencies, and former princely states such as Mysore and Hyderabad. The most militant protests came from the very large community of Telugu speakers. In October 1953 Potti Sriramulu, a former Gandhian, died seven weeks after beginning a fast unto death. His martyrdom provoked violent protests and led to the creation of the state of Andhra Pradesh, and then to the formation of the SRC, which in 1956 gave the principle of linguistic states its formal and final seal of approval. In the early 1950s many, including Prime Minister Nehru, feared that states based on language would hasten the further subdivision of India. Something close to the reverse occurred: far from undermining Indian unity, linguistic states have helped strengthen it, and it has proved perfectly possible to be Kannadiga and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Gujarati and Indian. These states do sometimes quarrel with one another, and such disputes are not pretty — but they could have been far worse. In the same year, 1956, that the SRC mandated the redrawing of India’s map, the Parliament of Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) declared Sinhala the country’s sole official language, despite the protests of the Tamils of the north; one left-wing Sinhala member of parliament warned that one language would produce two nations, while two languages would produce one. The civil war that has raged in Sri Lanka since 1983 is partly rooted in the denial by the majority linguistic group of the rights of the minority. Pakistan, another neighbour, was divided in 1971 because the Punjabi and Urdu speakers of its western wing would not respect the sentiments of the Bengalis in the east. It is the formation of linguistic states, the historian Ramachandra Guha argues, that allowed India to escape a similar fate — for had the aspirations of India’s language communities been ignored, one language might well have produced fourteen or fifteen nations. (Adapted from an article by Ramachandra Guha, Times of India, 1 November 2006.)

Q3. Did dividing India into States on the basis of language weaken the country, or strengthen it?

A. It strengthened it, contrary to what many leaders feared at the time. Once language communities had States of their own, being Tamil or Bengali or Kannadiga stopped competing with being Indian, and the two identities could be held together. The neighbouring cases are instructive: where a majority language was imposed on a linguistic minority, as with Sinhala in Sri Lanka or Urdu and Punjabi in undivided Pakistan, the result was prolonged conflict or the break-up of the country.

Has the linguistic reorganisation of States helped or harmed India? View 1 (it carried real risks): Nehru and other leaders feared that giving political shape to language loyalties, so soon after a Partition caused by another such loyalty, would invite fresh demands for subdivision; and linguistic States do quarrel — over river waters, borders and jobs. View 2 (it held the country together): the demands were already there and would not disappear by being refused; recognising them made it possible to be regional and Indian at once, and the comparative record of neighbouring states that refused recognition is a great deal worse. What both agree on: language loyalties in India are powerful enough that no state can simply ignore them; the argument is only about how they should be handled.

Not Language Alone

Language, coupled with regional and tribal identity — and not religion — has therefore been the most powerful instrument for the formation of ethno-national identity in India. That is a striking fact in a country where religion is otherwise so charged a marker.

But this does not mean that every linguistic community has obtained statehood, or that language explains every new State. Consider the three States created in 2000 — Chhatisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand. Language played no prominent role in any of them. What produced them was a combination of ethnicity based on tribal identity, language, regional deprivation and ecology, which together generated an intense regionalism that ended in statehood.

At present there are 28 States (federal units) and 8 Union territories (which are centrally administered) within the Indian nation-state.

State (capital S) vs state (small s) In this chapter, “State” with a capital S means a federal unit within the Indian nation-state — Kerala, Assam, Rajasthan. The lower-case ‘state’ means the broader conceptual category: the set of political-legal institutions that claim a monopoly of legitimate force over a territory.

Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.6 – Historical regional variation in dress.

Making Federalism Work

Respecting regional sentiment is not merely a matter of drawing new State boundaries. A State is of little use if it has no real powers. The new units had to be backed by an institutional structure that made them viable as relatively autonomous parts of a larger federal system.

In India this is done through constitutional provisions that define the powers of the States and of the Centre. There are lists of ‘subjects’, or areas of governance, that are the exclusive responsibility of either the State or the Centre, along with a Concurrent List of areas in which both are permitted to operate.

The States are also built into the structure of the Centre itself. The State legislatures determine the composition of the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, so that the States have a voice in national law-making.

Beyond this, periodic committees and commissions decide on Centre-State relations. The Finance Commission, for example, is set up every five years to decide how tax revenues are to be shared between the Centre and the States. Up to 2017, each Five Year Plan also involved detailed State Plans prepared by the State Planning Commissions of each State. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council includes State members.

the constitutional scaffolding of Indian federalism The Constitution divides the subjects of governance between the Centre and the States, with a Concurrent List where both may legislate; it gives the State legislatures the power to determine the composition of the Rajya Sabha; and it provides for a Finance Commission, appointed every five years, to decide the sharing of tax revenues between the Centre and the States. Later institutions such as the GST Council also include State members. Together these arrangements answer the problem that regional identity poses: they give a region genuine authority and resources of its own inside a single union, rather than asking it to choose between the region and the nation.

Find out about the origins of your own State. When was it formed, and what were the main criteria used to define it — language, ethnic or tribal identity, regional deprivation, ecological difference, or something else? How does this compare with other States of the Indian union? Try to classify all the States of India by the criteria on which they were formed. Then find out whether any social movement today is demanding the creation of a new State, and what criteria that movement is using. (This exercise, extended into a proper classification of all the States, would make a strong CBSE project.)

6.5 State and Civil Society

You may have noticed that much of this chapter has been concerned with the state. That is no accident. When it comes to the management of cultural diversity in a nation, the state is the crucial institution: it decides which communities are recognised, which languages are official, which rights are protected and which resources are shared.

But there is a difficulty built into this arrangement. Although the state claims to represent the nation, it can also become somewhat independent of the nation and of its people.

The state, remember, is not an abstraction. It is a structure of concrete institutions — the legislature, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the armed forces, the police and other arms of the state. To the extent that this structure becomes insulated from the people, it carries the potential of turning authoritarian.

When the State Fails Its People

An authoritarian state is the opposite of a democratic one. It is a state in which the people have no voice, and in which those who hold power are accountable to no one.

Authoritarian states typically limit or abolish civil liberties — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of political activity, the right to protection from the wrongful use of authority, the right to the due processes of law, and so on. These are precisely the liberties that allow ordinary people to question those in power, which is why they are the first to go.

NoteDefinition

An authoritarian state is a state in which the people have no voice and those in power are not accountable to anyone; it usually limits or abolishes civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of political activity, and the right to due process of law.

Authoritarianism is not the only way a state can fail. State institutions may also become unable or unwilling to respond to the needs of the people because of corruption, inefficiency, or simply a lack of resources. A ration shop that never opens, a police station that will not register a complaint, a school with no teachers — none of this requires a dictatorship.

In short, there are many reasons why a state may not be all that it should be. It is in this context that non-state actors and institutions become important. They can keep a watch on the state, protest against its injustices, or supplement its efforts where it falls short.

What Civil Society Is

Civil society is the name given to the broad arena that lies beyond the private domain of the family, but outside the domain of both the state and the market. It is the non-state and non-market part of the public domain, in which individuals come together voluntarily to create institutions and organisations.

It is, above all, the sphere of active citizenship. Here individuals take up social issues, try to influence the state or make demands on it, pursue their collective interests, or seek support for a cause they believe in.

NoteDefinition

Civil society is the non-state, non-market part of the public domain — the arena, beyond the private world of the family, in which citizens voluntarily come together to form institutions and organisations, take up social issues and make demands on the state.

Fig. 6.10

Fig. 6.10 – Civil society and other social domains.

Civil society consists of voluntary associations, organisations and institutions formed by groups of citizens. It includes political parties, media institutions, trade unions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), religious organisations and other kinds of collective entities.

Two criteria decide what belongs here. The organisation should not be state-controlled, and it should not be a purely commercial, profit-making entity. Anything that satisfies both conditions is part of civil society.

Q. A political party contests elections and wants state power. Is it really part of civil society?

A. Yes. What matters is not the goal but the two tests: a political party is neither controlled by the state nor a profit-making business. A government department fails the first test; a private company fails the second. A party, a trade union, a newspaper or an NGO passes both.

The State vs Civil Society | Feature | The State | Civil Society | |—|—|—| | What it is | A set of political-legal institutions — legislature, bureaucracy, judiciary, armed forces, police | Voluntary associations formed by citizens — parties, unions, media, NGOs, religious organisations | | Basis of membership | Compulsory: you are subject to the state of the territory you live in | Voluntary: citizens choose to join, form or leave | | Source of power | A successful claim to a monopoly of legitimate force | Persuasion, organisation, publicity, protest and pressure | | Relation to the market | Distinct from it, though it regulates it | Excluded from it: a purely profit-making body is not civil society | | Characteristic risk | Becoming insulated, unresponsive or authoritarian | Depends on the state’s tolerance of dissent to function at all |

What Civil Society Does

The activities of civil society organisations today have an even wider range than before. They include advocacy and lobbying with national and international agencies, as well as active participation in a variety of movements.

The issues taken up are strikingly diverse. They range from tribal struggles for land rights, devolution in urban governance and campaigns against rape and violence against women, to the rehabilitation of those displaced by dams and other developmental projects, fishermen’s struggles against mechanised fishing, the rehabilitation of hawkers and pavement dwellers, campaigns against slum demolitions and for housing rights, primary education reform, and the distribution of land to dalits.

Two kinds of actor deserve special mention. Civil liberties organisations have been particularly important in keeping a watch on the state and forcing it to obey its own laws. The media, too, has taken an increasingly active role — especially its emergent visual and electronic segments.

civil society at work in a city colony For two years, the piped water supply in a low-income colony arrives for barely twenty minutes a day, and the municipal office says the matter is under consideration. The residents form an association, keep a written record of the daily supply, and file an application asking the municipality to disclose how the ward’s water budget was spent. A local newspaper carries the record; a residents’ delegation meets the ward officer; supply improves within a month. This is civil society in operation: citizens who are neither state officials nor businessmen organising voluntarily to hold a public authority to account.

The Campaign for the Right to Information

Among the most significant recent initiatives of Indian civil society is the campaign for the Right to Information. It began modestly, with an agitation in rural Rajasthan demanding the release of information about government funds spent on village development — how much money had come, and where it had gone.

From that local demand the effort grew into a nation-wide campaign. Despite resistance from the bureaucracy, the government was eventually forced to respond and to pass a new law formally acknowledging the citizens’ right to information.

The Right to Information Act 2005 The Right to Information Act 2005 (Act No. 22/2005) is a law enacted by the Parliament of India that gives Indians access to government records. Under the Act, any person may request information from a “public authority” — a body of government, or an instrumentality of the state — which is expected to reply expeditiously, or within thirty days. The Act also requires every public authority to computerise its records for wide dissemination, and to publish certain categories of information proactively, so that citizens need to make as few formal requests as possible. It was passed by Parliament on 15 June 2005 and came into force on 13 October 2005. Information disclosure in India had hitherto been restricted by the Official Secrets Act 1923 and various special laws, which the RTI Act now overrides. The Act specifies that citizens have the right to request any information as defined in it, to take copies of documents, to inspect documents, works and records, to take certified samples of materials of work, and to obtain information as printouts, diskettes, floppies, tapes, video cassettes or in any other electronic mode.

Examples of this sort illustrate the crucial importance of civil society. It is through such organisation, pressure and publicity that the state can be held accountable to the nation and its people — which is, in the end, what a democracy claims to be.

Q5. If the state itself becomes unjust or unresponsive, who can hold it to account?

A. Civil society — the voluntary associations of citizens that are neither part of the state nor purely commercial: political parties, trade unions, the media, NGOs, civil liberties organisations and citizens’ campaigns. They watch the state, protest against its injustices, supplement its efforts, and sometimes compel it to change the law itself. The Right to Information campaign, which began as a local agitation in rural Rajasthan and ended in a national statute, is the clearest example in this chapter.

Find out about the civil society organisations or NGOs that are active in your neighbourhood. What sorts of issues do they take up? What kinds of people work in them? And how, and to what extent, are these organisations different from (a) government organisations and (b) commercial organisations? (A comparison of two or three such organisations in your own locality would make a workable CBSE project.)

6.6 Summary

Cultural diversity as a challenge (6.1)

  1. Social institutions both unite people and divide them; they build social cohesion, but they can also produce inequality and exclusion.
  2. Diversity means difference, not inequality. Cultural diversity refers to the presence, in one society, of many communities marked off by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste.
  3. Difference becomes a challenge because cultural identities are powerful and can mobilise large numbers; because cultural differences are often accompanied by economic and social inequalities; because measures to help one community can provoke opposition from others; and because scarce resources such as river waters, jobs and government funds must be shared.

Community identity (6.2)

  1. We acquire our sense of who we are through socialisation, in a continuous dialogue and negotiation with significant others — parents, family, kin group and community — who give us our mother tongue and our cultural values.
  2. Community identity is ascriptive: it rests on birth and belonging, not on accomplishment. It demands no qualification, yet it is total, and it is hard to shake off because others go on identifying us by it.
  3. Ascriptive identities are near-universal and command deep loyalty. This is why community conflicts are so intractable: each side treats the other as a hated enemy and builds a mirror image of it.
  4. A nation is a community of communities whose members wish to form a single political collectivity, usually by acquiring a state. Weber defined the state as a body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force in a territory.
  5. A nation is easy to describe but hard to define: for every criterion — language, religion, ethnicity, history — there are exceptions. The criterion that comes closest is possession of a state, which gives us the term nation-state.
  6. The nation–state bond is recent, not necessary. The Soviet Union recognised over a hundred nationalities; dual citizenship and large diasporas show that nation and state need not coincide.
  7. Today ‘the nation’ is the main source of political legitimacy, so states need nations as much as nations need states.
  8. Because community identities can become the basis of new nations, states tend to see them as rivals and try to impose a single identity — through assimilation (forcing all citizens to adopt one, usually dominant, culture) or integration (restricting public culture to one national pattern, allowing difference only in private). Both assume a singular national identity.
  9. Suppression is costly: it alienates minorities and often intensifies the very identities it targets. Allowing diversity is sound policy, practically and in principle.
  10. India is among the most diverse countries in the world — about 1.21 billion people (Census 2011), some 1,632 languages and dialects, 22 of them in the Eighth Schedule; about 80% Hindus, 14.2% Muslims, 2.3% Christians, 1.7% Sikhs, 0.7% Buddhists and 0.4% Jains.
  11. India is neither assimilationist nor integrationist. Its Constitution declares a secular state, yet recognises communities and protects minority religions. India is best described as a state-nation, in which several ‘nations’ coexist within one polity; its problems have lain more in implementation than in law or principle.

Regionalism (6.3)

  1. Regionalism grows from India’s diversity of languages, cultures, tribes and religions, is encouraged by the geographical concentration of these markers, and is fuelled by a sense of regional deprivation. Federalism has been India’s means of accommodating it.
  2. After Independence India continued with the colonial provinces or ‘presidencies’ — large, multilingual, drawn for administrative convenience. Strong popular agitations forced their reorganisation into ethno-linguistic States.
  3. The States Reorganisation Commission’s report was implemented on 1 November 1956, after the death of Potti Sriramulu in 1953 and the creation of Andhra Pradesh. Nehru and others feared linguistic States would break India up; instead they strengthened its unity, since one can be Kannadiga, Bengali, Tamil or Gujarati and Indian.
  4. The neighbouring cases point the other way: the imposition of Sinhala in Sri Lanka and the refusal of the Pakistani state to respect Bengali sentiment both ended in conflict and division.
  5. Language, joined to regional and tribal identity — not religion — has been the strongest basis of ethno-national identity in India. But not every State is linguistic: Chhatisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand (2000) rested on tribal identity, regional deprivation and ecology. There are now 28 States and 8 Union territories.
  6. Creating States is not enough; they must be viable. The Constitution divides subjects between Centre and State with a Concurrent List, the State legislatures determine the composition of the Rajya Sabha, the Finance Commission decides tax-sharing every five years, and the GST Council includes State members.

Religion-related issues (6.4)

  1. Religion-related issues fall into two sets: secularism–communalism (the state’s relation to religion) and minority–majority (how the state treats communities unequal in number or power).
  2. Indian nationalism was inclusive and democratic; Gandhi and Tagore criticised exclusive nationalism. To be effective, inclusiveness had to be written into the Constitution, because dominant groups tend to equate their own culture with the nation.
  3. In sociology, a minority is not merely a small number: it implies relative disadvantage and a collectivity with a sense of solidarity. Left-handed people are a statistical minority, not a sociological one. Some minorities, such as Parsis or Sikhs, may be economically well-off yet culturally disadvantaged.
  4. Articles 29 and 30 protect the right of any section of citizens to conserve its language, script or culture, and the right of religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
  5. Minorities exist in every nation-state; nowhere is there a state of a single homogenous cultural group.
  6. Communalism is an aggressive political ideology linked to religion — a chauvinism that treats one’s own religious community as the only legitimate one. It is about politics, not piety: a communalist need not be devout, and a devout person need not be communal.
  7. Communalism claims that religious identity overrides everything else, and so constructs large, internally divided communities as singular and homogenous.
  8. India has a long history of communal riots, aggravated by colonial divide-and-rule but neither invented by it nor confined to the colonial period. India also has a long tradition of religious pluralism and syncretism, visible in the Bhakti and Sufi traditions and in the poetry of Kabir.
  9. Secularism in the Western sense means the separation of church and state, linked to secularisation and modernity. In common Indian usage it means the opposite of communal: the state favours no religion and shows equal respect to all — which is why it marks the festivals of all religions.
  10. Protecting minorities while remaining secular creates tension: critics call it favouritism or ‘appeasement’; supporters reply that without it, secularism becomes a cover for imposing majority norms.

State and civil society (6.5)

  1. The state manages cultural diversity, but it can become insulated from the people and turn authoritarian — a state in which people have no voice, those in power are unaccountable, and civil liberties are curtailed. It may also simply fail through corruption, inefficiency or lack of resources.
  2. Civil society is the non-state, non-market part of the public domain, beyond the private world of the family: voluntary associations of citizens — political parties, media, trade unions, NGOs, religious organisations. The two tests are that a body is neither state-controlled nor purely profit-making.
  3. Civil society organisations take up land rights, urban governance, violence against women, displacement by dams, housing, education and land for dalits; civil liberties organisations and the media hold the state to its own laws.
  4. The Right to Information campaign — beginning with an agitation in rural Rajasthan over village development funds and ending in the Right to Information Act 2005 — shows how civil society can force the state to make itself accountable.

6.7 Key Terms

  1. Ascriptive identity — An identity determined by birth, in which the individual has no choice, such as family, caste, region, religion or nation.

  2. Assimilation — A state policy that persuades, encourages or forces all citizens to adopt one uniform set of cultural values and norms, usually those of the dominant group.

  3. Authoritarianism — A form of rule in which the people have no voice, those in power are accountable to no one, and civil liberties are limited or abolished.

  4. Chauvinism — An attitude that treats one’s own group as the only legitimate or worthy group, and all other groups as inferior, illegitimate and opposed.

  5. Civil society — The non-state, non-market part of the public domain, in which citizens voluntarily form associations, take up social issues and make demands on the state.

  6. Communalism — An aggressive political ideology linked to religion, which holds that religious identity overrides all else and treats other communities as hostile.

  7. Community identity — An identity based on birth and belonging to a community, rather than on any acquired qualification or accomplishment.

  8. Cultural diversity — The presence within one society of many communities distinguished from one another by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste.

  9. Ethnic group — A community based on common descent, in addition to shared features such as language or culture.

  10. Federalism — The constitutional division of powers between a central government and the governments of the States, allowing regions genuine authority within one union.

  11. Integration — A state policy that restricts public culture to a single common national pattern while permitting other cultures only in the private sphere.

  12. Minority — In the sociological sense, a group that is relatively small, generally disadvantaged, and forms a collectivity with a shared sense of solidarity.

  13. Nation — A large-scale community — a community of communities — whose members share the desire to belong to the same political collectivity.

  14. Nation-state — A state that claims to represent a single nation, on the assumption of one nation and one state.

  15. Regionalism — The assertion of a distinct regional identity built on language, tribe, culture or religion concentrated in a territory, usually fuelled by a sense of regional deprivation.

  16. Secularisation — The historical process by which religion progressively retreats from public life and becomes a voluntary personal practice rather than a mandatory obligation.

  17. Secularism — In the Western sense, the separation of religious and political authority; in common Indian usage, the principle that the state favours no religion and shows equal respect to all.

  18. Significant others — The people directly involved in our lives — parents, family, kin group, community — through whom socialisation takes place.

  19. Social cohesion — The bonds of belonging and mutual obligation that hold the members of a society together.

  20. Socialisation — The process by which a person is taught how to live in society, first by the family and then by the wider community.

  21. State — An abstract entity consisting of political-legal institutions that claim control over a territory and its people; in Weber’s definition, a body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force within a territory.

  22. State-nation — A polity in which several ‘nations’ — ethnic, religious, linguistic or indigenous — coexist peacefully within a single state, so that citizens hold multiple and complementary identities.

  23. Syncretism — The actual inter-mixing of religious traditions, as distinct from mere co-existence; seen in India in the Bhakti and Sufi traditions.

6.8 Points to Ponder

  1. We take pride in communities we did nothing to join and could not have chosen. Is there anything strange about feeling loyal to an identity that was given to us rather than earned — and would a society be better or worse off if such loyalties disappeared?

  2. Suppressing cultural diversity often sharpens the very identities it tries to erase. Why should pressure on a community make its members cling harder to what marks them out?

  3. Nehru feared that States drawn on the lines of language would pull India apart, and the opposite happened. What does this tell us about the relationship between recognising an identity and containing it?

  4. Sociologists say that communalism is about politics rather than about faith. If that is so, why is religion — rather than, say, occupation or class — so often the identity that political mobilisation reaches for?

  5. Communalism works by treating a large, internally divided community as though it were one homogenous block. Where else in social life do you see this flattening at work, and who gains from it?

  6. Civil society is defined by what it is not — neither the state nor the market nor the family. Can an organisation that depends on state funding, or on selling its services, still perform civil society’s work of holding the state to account?

6.9 NCERT Questions

  1. What is meant by cultural diversity? Why is India considered to be a very diverse country?

  2. What is community identity, and how is it formed?

  3. Why is it difficult to define the nation? How are nation and state related in modern society?

  4. Why are states often suspicious of cultural diversity?

  5. What is regionalism? What factors is it usually based on?

  6. In your opinion, has the linguistic reorganisation of States helped or harmed India?

  7. What is a ‘minority’? Why do minorities need protection from the state?

  8. What is communalism?

  9. What are the different senses in which ‘secularism’ has been understood in India?

  10. What is the relevance of civil society organisations today?

6.10 Objective Questions

  1. The term ‘diversity’ emphasises:
    1. inequalities of wealth between groups
    2. differences between social groups
    3. the ranking of communities by status
    4. the disappearance of community identities [1 mark]
  2. An identity determined by birth, in which the individual has no choice, is called:
    1. an achieved identity
    2. a professional identity
    3. an ascriptive identity
    4. a legal identity [1 mark]
  3. According to Max Weber, a state is a body that successfully claims:
    1. the loyalty of a single ethnic group
    2. a monopoly of legitimate force in a particular territory
    3. ownership of all land within its borders
    4. the right to represent every nation within it [1 mark]
  4. According to the Census of India 2011, the number of languages and dialects spoken in India is about:
    1. 122
    2. 632
    3. 1,632
    4. 2,632 [1 mark]
  5. The report of the States Reorganisation Commission was implemented on:
    1. 26 January 1950
    2. 1 November 1956
    3. 15 June 2005
    4. 13 October 2005 [1 mark]
  6. Which of the following is NOT a part of civil society?
    1. A trade union
    2. A non-governmental organisation
    3. A government department
    4. A political party [1 mark]
  7. Assertion (A): Groups such as left-handed people are not regarded as minorities in sociology. Reason (R): The sociological sense of ‘minority’ requires that the members form a collectivity with a sense of solidarity, and usually experience relative disadvantage.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  8. Assertion (A): States often try to suppress the cultural identities of minority communities. Reason (R): Suppression reliably weakens community identity and produces a homogenous national identity.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  9. Assertion (A): Communalism is not the same thing as personal religious devotion. Reason (R): A communalist may or may not be a devout person, since communalism is a political identity based on religion.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  10. Match the items in Column A with those in Column B.
Column A Column B
a. Article 29 i. Right to Information Act
b. Article 30 ii. Right of a section of citizens to conserve its language, script or culture
c. 2005 iii. States Reorganisation Commission report implemented
d. 1956 iv. Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions

[1 mark]

  1. Fill in the blank: A policy of ____________ seeks to restrict public culture to a single common national pattern, while allowing other cultures only in the private sphere. [1 mark]

  2. Fill in the blank: The actual inter-mixing of religious traditions, as seen in the Bhakti and Sufi traditions, is called ____________. [1 mark]

  3. True or false: In its common Indian usage, ‘secular’ is understood as the opposite of ‘communal’. [1 mark]

  4. True or false: The three States created in 2000 — Chhatisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand — were formed mainly on the basis of language. [1 mark]

  5. True or false: The Finance Commission is set up every five years to decide the sharing of tax revenues between the Centre and the States. [1 mark]

6.11 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define cultural diversity, and name any two cultural markers by which communities are distinguished. [2 marks]

  2. What is meant by an ascriptive identity? Give one example. [2 marks]

  3. State Weber’s definition of the state, and identify the two conditions it contains. [2 marks]

  4. What is a state-nation? [2 marks]

  5. Name any two institutions or arrangements through which Indian federalism gives the States a real share of power. [2 marks]

  6. What are the two tests an organisation must satisfy in order to count as part of civil society? [2 marks]

  7. Differentiate between diversity and inequality, with one example of each. [4 marks]

  8. Differentiate between policies of assimilation and policies of integration. What assumption do both share? [4 marks]

  9. Why is it difficult to define a nation? Give reasons, with examples of criteria that fail the test. [4 marks]

  10. Explain, with an Indian example, why a group that is numerically small is not necessarily a minority in the sociological sense. [4 marks]

  11. Distinguish between secularism and secularisation, and explain how the Indian sense of ‘secular’ differs from the Western sense. [4 marks]

  12. Why is it said that communalism is about politics rather than about religion? Explain with reference to the communalist claim that religious identity overrides everything else. [4 marks]

  13. Study Table 6.2 in this chapter. (i) What proportion of the population did Muslims form in 2011, and what was their number? (ii) Name the three Christian-majority States. (iii) Explain, using the table, why a community that is a small minority nationally may be a majority within a particular State. [4 marks]

  14. Using the figures given in the chapter for the religious composition of India in 2011, explain why small percentages can still translate into very large absolute numbers. Illustrate your answer with one calculation of your own, using an approximate total population of 1.21 billion. [4 marks]

  15. “Suppressing cultural diversity is costly for a state.” Explain this claim fully, giving the reasons why states nevertheless attempt such suppression, and the consequences that follow from it. [6 marks]

  16. “Far from undermining Indian unity, linguistic States have helped strengthen it.” How far do you agree with this claim? Discuss with evidence from the Indian experience and from the experience of India’s neighbours. [6 marks]

  17. Explain why minorities require special protection in a democracy, and describe the provisions the Indian Constitution makes for them. What is the criticism made of such protection, and what is the reply to it? [6 marks]

  18. Discuss the causes and consequences of communalism in India. In your answer, distinguish the role of colonial policy from that of pre-colonial and post-Independence developments, and refer to India’s traditions of religious pluralism. [6 marks]

  19. What is civil society, and why does it matter in a democracy? Evaluate its importance with reference to the campaign for the Right to Information. [6 marks]

6.12 Passage-Based Questions

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Two districts lie on either side of a river that both depend on for irrigation. In a year of poor rain, the upstream district releases less water, and farmers downstream watch their standing crop fail. Public meetings are held in both districts. Within a few weeks, the newspapers on each side are no longer discussing cropping seasons and water-sharing agreements. They are discussing which language community has been cheated, and which has always looked down on the other. Old grievances that had nothing to do with water are recalled on both sides.

    1. Identify the sociological process at work in this passage.
    2. Explain why a dispute over a scarce resource so easily takes on the language of community identity.
    3. What does this passage suggest about the relationship between cultural difference and material inequality? [6 marks]

  2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    A newly independent country decides that it will have a single official language, that all courts and government offices will use it, and that all state-run schools will teach through it. The language chosen is the mother tongue of the largest community. Leaders explain that the measure is necessary to build one nation out of many peoples. Within a decade, communities that speak other languages find that they cannot address a court, sit an examination, or enter public employment in their own tongue. Their leaders begin to argue that they are not, after all, part of this nation.

    1. Which model of state policy described in this chapter does this country follow?
    2. Explain why such a policy tends to produce the opposite of its intended effect.
    3. How did India’s approach to language differ from the one described here? [6 marks]

  3. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    In a small town, a speaker at a public meeting tells the audience that whatever their occupation, however rich or poor they may be, and whatever their caste, only one thing about them finally counts: the religion they were born into. He tells them that all the people of the neighbouring locality think and act as one, and that they are therefore to be regarded as opponents. Nothing is said about scripture, prayer or belief.

    1. Name the ideology being expressed by the speaker, and give its definition.
    2. Explain why sociologists insist that this ideology is about politics rather than about faith.
    3. What sociological error is contained in the claim that the people of the neighbouring locality “think and act as one”? [6 marks]

  4. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For two years the residents of a low-income colony have received piped water for barely twenty minutes a day. The municipal office says the matter is under consideration. The residents form an association, keep a written daily record of the supply, and file an application asking the municipality to disclose how the ward’s water budget was spent. A local newspaper prints the record. A delegation of residents meets the ward officer, and the supply improves within a month. Nobody in the association is a government official, and the association earns nothing from its work.

    1. Identify the sphere of social life to which the residents’ association belongs, and state the two tests by which you decided.
    2. Which law made the residents’ application for information possible, and what does that law require a public authority to do?
    3. What does this episode show about the relationship between the state and citizens in a democracy? [6 marks]