Abstract
Building on the political experience of countering the Hindutva movement of the 1990s the Congress-led coalition government initiated and sought to legitimize an entirely new discourse on social policies. As soon as it came to power in 2004 the coalition government announced, and with alacrity implemented, a series of policy measures assumedly with a view to reclaiming the trust and recognizing the stake of the religious minorities in India’s secular democracy. Such measures were indeed urgently required considering that members of the minority communities, especially the Muslim and the Christian, felt highly insecure and emotionally shaken by the relentless, and at times violent, assaults on them by the Hindutva movement.
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Notes
- 1.
A deep apprehension about the adverse impact of the new policy discourse following the Sachar Committee Report on the backward Muslim communities is expressed by the leader of Pasmanda Muslim Movement, Shri Ali Anwar, on several public forums. See particularly his recent article in Hindi: ‘Sachar Committee ke Ayane me Musalman’, (The Muslim in the Mirror of Sachar Committee) in Samayik Varta, April 2007.
- 2.
See, for instance, Javed Anand: Yesterday Once More? Edit Page, The Indian Express, Thursday, 21 May 2009.
- 3.
A comprehensive discussion on the role of policies in the treatment of small linguistic minorities in different Indian States is found in Sumi Krishna, India’s Living Languages: The Critical Issues (Allied Publishers, New Delhi) 1999.
- 4.
For an analysis of the change in the political culture of Gujarat, especially the fusion of the lingual and ethno-religious (Hindutva) identities, see D.L. Sheth ‘Growth of Communal Polarization in Gujarat: The Making of Hindutva Laboratory?’ Chapter 9.
- 5.
For discussion of Durkheism’s Concepts of the Mechanical and Organic Solidarity, see Raymond Aron: Main Currents in Sociological Thought 2. (Pelican) pp. 21–33.
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Sheth, D.L. (2018). Minority Politics: The Shifting Terms of Policy Discourse. In: deSouza, P. (eds) At Home with Democracy . Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6412-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6412-8_12
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