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Democracy, Identity and Group Rights
Democracy, Identity and
Group Rights
Locating the Northeast Indian experience in a Comparative
Perspective
Contemporary debates in political theory and problems in
politics are said to be marked by a complicated intersection
between identity politics and democracy. Worldwide resurgence
of claims centring on a “sense of identity” has
not only provided new substance to increasing political conflicts
but one that challenges and interrogates what Taylor says
is the “utter facile moral psychology” of the
procedural account of liberal thinking on justice. The recovery
of group “identity and [its] capacity for moral agency”
that purportedly was emasculated by the neutral ‘atomistic’
bias of liberal democracy is, therefore, being reformulated
and sought to be restored through communally embedded “subject
positions”. It is broadly with this rationale that democratic
countries in many parts of the world are engaged in devising
methods through which differences of culture and claims of
identity and group-differentiated rights could be reconciled
institutionally with an affirmation of already existing set
of individual rights.
India’s encounter with democracy, like many of its
colonial cousins, is mediated not only through the colonial
experience but also through its complex social formations
and the diversity of their historical claims. In crafting
a constitutional democracy that normatively seeks to uphold
“formal political equality” through a set of individual
rights, the democratic edifice made an attempt to move beyond
and appreciate the shared practices and historical understandings
of an array of embedded communities. The Nation-state, as
Bhiku Parekh suggests was, thus imagined, as “an association
of individuals and a community of communities, recognizing
both individuals and communities as bearer of rights”.
Such a constituted political community defied conventional
democratic designs and norms that articulated a negative relationship
between the establishment of stable democracy and the presence
and recognition of ethnocommunitarian plurality.
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