Abstract
Abundant literature exists that explores the question of religious minorities in India, in particular Muslims. However, the book: The struggle for equality: India’s Muslims and rethinking the UPA experience, published by Cambridge University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781108416108, 260 pages for $76.50 stands out from the existing works on two major counts.
First, the methodology employed by the book makes a fresh intervention in understanding the state of minorities in India and the response patterns of the state. Second, the implicit hypothesis centres the question of religious minority beyond the domain of electoral politics. It instead explores other variables to understand the limitations of the government in responding to the demands of the religious minority. Placing the central argument first, Heewon Kim argues that political incentives (p. 10) alone cannot explain the reluctance of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to implement new initiatives generated by its policy process.
The book attempts to ask the following: what were the political considerations that led the UPA to adopt policies to promote substantive equality of opportunity for religious minorities, especially Muslims? How were these policies formulated, did they mark a radical break with the previous experience of the Indian state? To what extent did they represent a paradigm shift? Also, implicitly, has electoral politics designed the matrix of structural response in plural societies. Or does the way structures have come to work, render electoral politics towards the peripheries, despite being the axis of Liberal democracy.
Building on an institutional policy analysis, this methodological intervention combines neo-institutionalism with historical institutionalism to echo larger theoretical concerns. Employing a policy analysis of UPA viz religious minorities, in particular Muslims, the author provides a perspective for situating the comparative experience of minorities. Furthermore, while evaluating the policy process, two key areas – employment and service delivery – have been undertaken through the methodological prism of institutional policy analysis. To map the institutional pattern and outcome, the author relies on the use of the concept of path-dependence, across a distance travelled from contestational juncture to critical juncture. The contestational juncture accentuates various issues viz the state’s responses in form of policies that were contested by the religious minorities, especially after mid-1980s. The author understands critical juncture through the constitution-making process, wherein the dynamics emanating from the partitioned led to certain provisions and policy concerns, locking a certain path-dependence, which generated the present structure vis-a-vis the question of religious minorities. This is a work which for the first-time sheds light on why some policy options were pursued and others left in abeyance.
Thus, more than electoral politics, resistance to initiate policy reforms for minorities came from other corners and constituencies. Given the partition-logic used to set the template for minority rights, the first opposing constituency was to be the institutionalised SC, ST and OBC lobbies; second, it was the state structure, civil servants and judiciary operating within a kind of institutional resistance and finally the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), forces of Hindutva and some lobbies within the Congress as well. So much so is the structure pivotal, that different regimes cannot be seen responding differently in qualitative terms to the minority question, but only in terms of degrees. Given the historical management of these concerns, the author argues, any improvement is unlikely to happen in the BJP regime. This so on account of the locking of path dependence through institutional policies. This brings to light a more or less continuation of policy paradigm in the case of religious minorities. That in turn has been used to point out the structural constraint locked in by historical prejudices and compulsions, fixated by the institutions and certain constituencies.
However, the framework used suffers from certain limitations. Using policy analysis for selected policies to critique the functioning and the normative idea of Liberal democracy burdens the former a great deal with unrealistic theoretical weight. At the same time, a thorough policy analysis seems practically cumbersome a task to be doable. Furthermore, the constituencies mentioned that limit government’s policy initiatives also do not escape the domain of electoral contingencies. The network is far more interlinked and overlapping to be just reduced to three clear compartmentalised constituencies. So much so that it cannot be seen far off detached from the question of political incentive. However, the work is commendable on account of not only the fresh methodological intervention but also for bringing in a new dimension to light to capture a range of variables to study the response of Indian state to the question of religious minority. Also, given the current state of minorities in India, the book assumes a greater significance for those who wish to evolve definite understanding of minority question in the light of the bills and amendments recently passed in the Indian parliament and contested on the streets of the country by wide section of the population.
