Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

INTRODUCTION
Rita Manchanda
Majority-Minority Discourses in South Asia
The final solution- Partition 1947, did not resolve the subcontinent’s minority question. It
produced a South Asian state system of ethnic kin states where a majority in one state
was a minority across the border, entangling the minority question in the power
intricacies of inter state relations and even casting the constituent members of a minority
group as ‘proxy citizens’ of an enemy state. In the national imagination, the question of
minority rights conjured anxieties about the integrity of the nation state and true
‘belonging’- splintering into questions of nationalism vs separatism, of who is a true
citizen and who a ‘proxy citizen, of communalism vs secularism, of ‘special rights (read
‘appeasement’) vs equal rights (read ‘majority’ setting the norm) and ‘insider’ vs
‘outsider’ politics.
Some seven decades after independence, the states of South Asia are still grappling with
myriad sub-nationalities and religious communities, a profusion of linguistic, ethnic and
caste groups – all jostling for recognition and resources. The identities of such groups,
under colonial administrations, had been politicized, and during the process of
constitutional reforms in the transition to independence, such identities became more
entrenched. Democracy as practiced in these post colonial states has got articulated in the
official discourse of majority and minorities rather than transcending the politics of
numbers.
Post independence as these countries transformed themselves into modern states, the
challenge was to construct a state before the emergence of nation, of seeking to make a
‘people’ congruent with territorial borders. It produced the ‘modern’ minority
problematic. As Andreas Wimmer, coming from the domain of anthropology to political
science, argues “nationalist and ethnic politics are not just a by product of modern state
formation (built on democracy, citizenship and popular sovereignty) but that modern
principles and institutions of inclusion (of the ‘true nation’) are tied to ethnic and national
forms of exclusion, producing the ‘the other’.” i Such especially is so in multi ethnic,
multi religious and multi lingual societies.
In South Asia – a land of minorities, the challenge of pluralism is truly formidable. More
than 800 languages are spoken in the region and only 66% of the population have access
to education in their mother tongue. ii “The Minority like everywhere is a fluid identity in
South Asia,” as Tapan Bose reminds us “Its markers are language, culture, religion and
ethnicity. But the most important marker is the position of ‘non-domination’ or
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