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Abstract
Liberalism and pluralism are seen as being in tension in liberal Western nation-states, while multiculturalism, as a policy of resource allocation to minority groups, has been the standard response to pluralization. This limits the pluralist potential of a constitutional liberalism. The fusion of a liberal theory of autonomous individuality with a pluralist theory of multiple belonging has to look beyond multicultural policy in order to enhance liberal commitments to citizens through pluralist provisions. An analysis of the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Rights, as a normative document, shows that the citizen can be understood as an autonomous individual given identity through belonging to a plurality of groups. Consequently, rights are taken to accrue to all citizens equally as autonomous individuals, but also by virtue of their belonging to groups, with special provisions made available for vulnerable ones. Rights for a plurality of vulnerable groups should not be seen as illiberal additions but integral to the conception of liberalism. If such a view of citizenship were to be integrated into the liberal constitutions of irreversibly pluralizing Western democracies, then a pluralistic constitutional patriotism could be fostered amongst members of vulnerable groups, while demonstrating that standard liberal rights guarantee equal citizenship for all.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank two anonymous referees for remarks on a previous draft of this paper.
Notes
1. Of course, the literature on liberalism and pluralism is vast, with formidable contributions from a range of thinkers. For present purposes, my own tour d’horizon of the relationship between them suffices. But for a range of views, see Bellamy (1999), Brooks (2001), Crowder (2002), Kekes (1992) and Talisse (2004).
2. On ethnic cores in liberal conceptions of nation (or ‘liberal nationalism’), see Abizadeh (2004).
3. For a response to this task that looks at the case of race in the United States, articulates a concept of ‘nondomination’ between individuals (‘agents’) and within power relations, and calls for institutional practices that can secure them, see Hayward (2011). I am broadly sympathetic to her perspective and innovative argument, but look for a more radical normative account on which to base my response.
4. The locus classicus on law and religion in the pluralistic history of India, is Derrett (1999).
5. This does not imply that anything turns on a theory that Indian modernity can be dated to the 19th century; I merely note the historical fact that the 19th century saw the influx of particular Western ideas that may or may not have been critical to the formation of Indian modernity.
6. I am deeply indebted to Rajeev Bhargava for his call to treat the Indian Constitution as a normative document and novel source of political theory.
7. For a range of views on the theory and practice of the Indian Constitution, see the essays in Bhargava (2008).
8. Sen (2010) looks at how the Indian Supreme Court has handled the constitutional provisions in the context of religion.
9. For discussions of the Indian version of secularism in the context of various political theories concerned with the Western experience, see the essays in Bhargava (2000).
10. As Jacobsohn as argued, it is precisely this continuing commitment to addressing the changing needs of Indian society that give an identity to the Indian Constitution and, thus, to the idea of India itself (Jacobsohn 2006).
11. Indeed, a criticism of the Indian Constitution is that it did not make justiciable the articles under the Directive Principles of State Policy (that call for these principles to guide future laws), given that these principles are primarily concerned to bring about a fairer society in which justice is articulated primarily in terms of equality.
12. It is another controversial matter that the institutional culture of the Indian State is seen by some to in fact make a majoritarian Hindu identity substantive.
13. The author thanks an anonymous referee for stating it in precisely these words.
14. The erosion of freedom of speech in India due to the supposed hurt to the sentiments of groups – as in the 1988 ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses – is therefore an egregious violation of the spirit of the Indian Constitution, the cautious circumspection of Article 19 on freedom of speech notwithstanding. It takes extraneous considerations about the right of juridical evaluations of larger issues like public order or national security to motivate any legal steps such as led to the ban.
15. Article 25 (2) (b), including Explanation II.
16. This is the reason why I take this discussion to be quite different from ones about multiculturalist policies regarding group rights, such as rights of self-government, territorial autonomy, public funding of cultural life, etc. (Kymlicka 2007). While some of these can indeed be seen as policy consequences that can flow from provisions of the Indian Constitution too, they are, in Western countries, specifically distinguished from those guaranteed by liberal citizenship.
17. For a wide-ranging and incisive collection of views on the vision of the Indian Constitution and the challenges it has faced in practice, see the essays in Seminar (2010).