The state and minority status

Demands for assimilation have replaced a sense of multiculturality, without any attempt to create the necessary conditions

February 16, 2015 10:43 pm | Updated February 17, 2015 08:02 am IST

BECOMING MINORITY — How Discourses and Policies Produce Minorities in Europe and India.

BECOMING MINORITY — How Discourses and Policies Produce Minorities in Europe and India.

This remarkable book could not have been better timed. Some of the largest states in the European Union (EU) have finally noticed that their importation of cheap labour from the poorest classes in the world’s poorest regions, for their own post-war reconstruction has created a generation who are in many ways thoroughly European but who are excluded from enormous areas of European life. Ghettoised into tower blocks in French banlieues, for many years covertly forced by British estate agents into de facto enclaves, banned from citizenship for decades by the then Federal Republic of Germany, such Europeans look easy targets for recruitment by terrorists. Only France has — recently — shown any recognition of the task EU states will need to undertake in response. These 15 papers start with questions of how minorities become minorities; policy detail follows, and the book concludes with specifically Indian issues.

The policy analyses are excellent. Abdoulaye Gueye sees the 1980s and 1990s as an era of minority revolutions in France, with sameness and difference often dramatically asserted by young French-born North Africans, who called themselves beurs, by feminists — especially — and by gay campaigners. Yet some French local and provincial governments specify limits when allocating public housing to those of African or Antillean descent.

If social and political processes in France have created French blackness, Sweden has created a version of the Sámi people. Ulf Mörkenstam shows how the 1971 Sámi rights law replicated 19th century errors by ignoring the fact that the majority of the Sámi had long ceased to herd reindeer. Secondly, the Swedish state has taken the absence of a concept of land ownership in Sámi culture to let mining interests override Sámi rights; Mörkenstam calls this discursive colonisation.

That involves mendacity and self-deception of a kind Gëzim Alpion traces over the impact of Enoch Powell in Britain. Powell’s claim, in his infamous 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, that Britain knew no discrimination between one citizen and another was nonsense. European and Russian immigrants to Britain had faced enormous hostility, as had the Irish labourers who helped Britain industrialise. Alpion also notes the theory that Powell’s speech was part of his plan to replace Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader, and he remarks that the British political classes are often nervous about populism. Yet resistance to Powell may well have been more complex than that. Powell showed his speech in advance to a close friend, the editor of a Midlands newspaper; the friend refused to publish it, all but ordered Powell out of his house, and never spoke to him again. Many of Powell’s examples were also fabrications, but Powell, for some decades, made public expressions of racism almost respectable.

Changing tides sometimes reveal the rocks below political waters. Sherrill Stroschein, writing before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, is aware of lofty English attitudes towards Scotland; even BBC Glasgow staff nearly closed the station on the evening of the referendum, over their London-based seniors’ arrogant and pejorative reportage. Scotland looks unusual, because the move towards independence does not rely on any obvious claim to ethnic, cultural, or religious identity; it is more like a modern, perhaps even modernist, claim to statehood.

Almost the opposite emerges in Greece, where the 120,000-strong Turkish minority in western Thrace were subjected to fascistic exclusion by the 1959 ethno-nationalist definition of Greek citizenship. Pressure to amend such laws now comes from the EU’s system of rights, but Apostolos Agnantopoulos finds that local officials resentfully resist.

The results can be ugly; Peter Hervik details the way the Danish political right has constructed a monolithic vision both of so-called Danish culture and of Danish Muslims, in order to advance its main domestic agenda — to destroy the left. The former Danish Prime Minister and later NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmusssen, was the chief crusader here. Similar has happened in the Netherlands, as Paul Mutsaers, Hans Siebers, and Arie de Ruijter show. Demands for assimilation have replaced a sense of multiculturality, without any attempt to create the necessary material conditions. Unemployment among non-western migrants in much of western Europe is four times higher than it is among the white population.

Substantive political modernity can seem equally remote in a former colony. Mohamed Mehdi’s devastating critique of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code shows how claims of hurt religious feelings, with no apparent evidence or justification, are used for repression within faiths, while the state uses the claims to impose repressive policies, and panders to vote banks. Matters become even more intractable, Malavika Menon notes, when we forget that political secularism is not a separation of the sacred and the secular but a way of regulating relations between the two so as to promote democratic values. Legal equality cannot itself end cultural discrimination, but in India the courts have had to decide the scope of linguistic and cultural minorities’ constitutional right to establish and run educational institutions. The Supreme Court has laid anti-discriminatory duties on those institutions, but has stated that private bodies have moved into education only because the States have failed to provide education to all.

The state is a key factor, and Bishnu Mohapatra identifies tensions in the governmentalisation of minority questions. Policies place minorities among socially and educationally backward classes, but minorities qua minorities do not qualify for the same ameliorative measures as Other Backward Classes under the Constitution, and their identity as minorities is primarily defined by religious difference. Under this dispensation, the problem is insoluble.

The Indian state, moreover, often exacerbates matters; Shireen Mirza notes that after the violence — the 1948 Police Action — which accompanied the forced accession of Hyderabad to India, the flight of many Shia Muslims from the old city was followed by substantial Hindu immigration into the area. Deepening segregation and communalisation ensued, and what was a form of public space in the princely state became private Waqf land in the republic.

Anjana Raghavan, examining the ways Tamil has come to be characterised as a language, a form of ethnicity, and a religion, completes this section. The majority-minority relation presses both sides towards seamless narratives which elide the fragmentation and complexity on either side of the supposed divide, and Raghavan also remarks that Dravidian political parties have replaced genuine ideological commitments with symbolism and propaganda.

All the policies examined here exemplify the issues in the opening section. Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Sudarsan Padmanabhan show how liberal democratic theory, which presupposes individualism, cannot justify minority rights; they also resist any essentialisation of minority membership. The idea of pre-discursive minority is as meaningless as the idea that cultures are clearly defined wholes, and Barbara Franz contextualises the construction of sameness and difference in Europe, with Lajwanti Chatani showing that the discursive nature of that context undermines the homogenising effect of dominant conceptions of nation and nationalism. Several contributors show how important it is to ask in respect of what we are identical and different — a question arising from Hume; meanwhile, Hegel’s master and slave watch silently throughout. The whole book is a rewarding and informative analysis of one of the thorniest issues of our age.

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