Majoritarian State Research Articles

Strategic Imperatives of Muslim Leadership in Post-War Sri Lanka: Citizenship, Rights and Reconciliation

This study examines how a few selected mainstream Sri Lankan Muslim civil organisations have been responding to the Sinhala Buddhist ideological paradigm in post-war Sri Lanka. The ideology perceives that Sinhala Buddhists are true citizens of Sri Lanka while minorities are “others” or “guests”. Hence, the ideology plays a structural role in generating anti-Muslim sentiments in post-war Sri Lanka. Contrary to prevailing wisdom which argues that minorities attempt to deconstruct the majoritarian ideological foundation in their struggle for equality, dominant and mainstream Muslim civil society organisations in Sri Lanka have chosen to reconcile with it while resisting only its practical implications upon the community. Even though this strategy brings self-contradictory elements into play on theoretical grounds, Muslim civil society organisations think that it is a practically reasonable strategy given the developing socio-political context of the state. Based on primary and secondary data and the thematic qualitative analysis, this study builds an argument by analysing discourses of the selected mainstream Muslim organisations that minorities pick strategies for their struggle against majoritarian state and ideology taking their political and other demographical realities into account. Hence, their choices are not static but rather dynamic.

Accounting for <i>Hijab</i>: Interrogating the Post-Secular

This article questions the idea of the ‘post-secular’ as a category for understanding Indian women’s experience of religion as an existential practice in neocolonised capitalist patriarchy. The majoritarian state’s manipulation of an identitarian regime of signification to use and control women’s lives is located in a plural, democratic society that is currently riven by the violent politics of conflicting religious and secular constructions of <i>hijab</i>, a head covering worn by Muslim women. From an engaged ideological perspective that seeks radical transformation, feminist struggle includes the right to practice and profess one’s faith, against a majoritarian norm that bulldozes difference and imposes its prescriptions as ideal. This article aims to show, from a feminist perspective, the manipulation of significatory practices in India, linking women’s ‘dress’ with progress to essentialise and politicise identity. It questions whether redressal against violence wrought on women by religious fundamentalism can be found in a secular state policy, based on the norm of equality of difference. Feminist practice would actively use the guarantees given to the citizen by a pluralist secular constitution to challenge the violence of interlinked discriminations, necessary for the survival of a plural society in which diversities co-exist.

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.

‘The Irregular’ and the Unmaking of Minority Citizenship: The Rules of Law in Majoritarian India

This article focuses on the important aspect of India's democratic decline, the ascendance of the Hindu majoritarian state, and its relationship with the law. It argues that the law is central to the Hindu majoritarian project but often in obscurely informal ways. India's majoritarian state seeks to radically reconfigure the law in Indian social life by making the rule of law inapplicable to its minorities. Through a series of examples drawn from the everyday socio-legal life in contemporary India, the article shows how arbitrary and extralegal state violence is endorsed, affirmed, and acquiesced on grounds of serving ethnonationalist values and interests. It theoretically develops the novel interpretive framework of ‘the irregular’ to capture the practices of the ethnicization of the law, ethnonationalist legitimisation of extra-legality through intense political mobilisation, and the production of subordinated minority citizenship without the formal incorporation of graded citizenship.

BOOK REVIEW: Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for International Community by Rohan Gunaratna

Rohan Gunaratna's recent publication titled Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for International Community tries to explore the “Easter Attack massacre” and its root causes in Sri Lanka. The work would indeed become one of the main references for those interested in exploring the sources and roots of the Easter Attack. Although the Easter Sunday massacre was a watershed event in Sri Lankan history as well as the ‘September 11’ of Sri Lankan Muslims, there has been a lack of detailed analysis on the subject thus far. In this sense, Gunaratna's work could be seen as the first detailed study of the tragedy, elaborating on the background of the bombers, their preparations, and the execution. In the aftermath of the attack, there has been a serious public debate on the nature of tragedy and its root causes. Participating in this debate, Imthiyaz Razak argued that the Easter attacks were a by-product of both “violence against Muslims since 2012”, unleashed by the Sinhala-Buddhist extremists and cultural exclusivism of Muslims, enabled by the political bargaining between the majoritarian state and minority political elites. For his part, Rajan Hoole argued in his work Sri Lanka's Easter Tragedy that the Easter Attack was the result of the entrenched phenomenon of the deep state that tries to manipulate religious extremists for their political ends. For him, the Easter Attack was more political than ideological. However, Gunaratna stressed the point that the Easter Attack directly resulted from the religious radicalization of a segment of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka, who embraced the Salafi-Wahhabism ideology of political Islam. The book elaborates this argument through a lengthy introduction and subsequent four chapters.

Hindu Orthodoxy versus Indian Pluralism

The rise of Hindutva or Neo-Hindu nationalism has undermined the inclusive, all embracing and coexisting nature of Indian secular democracy. The political utilization of the doctrine of Hindutva has led to multi-dimensional challenges in the Hindu majoritarian state of India. The exercise of extant communalism has driven the Indian minorities to a state of constant insecurity. It reflects religio-nationalist identity politics particularly under the Modi regime, which is posing security challenges to multiple communities in India. The divided Communalism with Hindu majoritarianism has characterized the state of India with deeply entrenched Hindu racial supremacy that has caused increasing human insecurity in India. The study analyses how the rise of Hindutva is creating problems for the Indian pluralism. The study argues that the rise of ultra-Hindu-nationalism in practice of populist identity intellectual leadership in India has threatened the human security at the domestic level.

Institutional ‘Presence’ and the Indian State: The Long Narrative

The long durée narrative of the state in independent India is one of accumulation of incremental and aggregate power relations arrayed in and through political institutions inhabiting a field of power. These relationships are protean, exhibiting conflicts and contestations among institutions that compete for power within the domain of the state. The ‘ebbs’ and ‘flows’ in power are visible in the state-space represented by institutional arrangements and the patterns of relationship among them. While institutions perform the function of legitimation for the state, they also manifest the crisis that besets the state, reflecting dissonance between its moral–political goals of bringing about socio-economic transformation and its ability to achieve them through ‘state-bureaucratic’ practices. The constitutional state in India can be seen as the setting where the state-idea as limited by law and as an ‘instrument’ for bringing about transformative change was situated. Institutional crises during the emergency and the uneven trajectories of institutional presence in the ensuing period show the marginalization of institutions such as Parliament and the ambivalence of the judiciary in articulating the principles underlying the constitutional consensus. A dominative presence of the executive corroding deliberative spaces making them sites of adversarial combat and the populist appeal of the ‘leader’ drawing upon communitarian emotions has paved the way for a majoritarian state.

The shift to consensus democracy and limits of institutional design in Asia

A ‘majoritarian turn’ identified by scholars of Asian democracy in the 1990s saw the rise of mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems and more centripetal party competition across both Northeast and Southeast Asia. In this paper, we argue that since the 2000s, the institutional pendulum has shifted, with more consensual approaches to democracy appearing to better represent key identity cleavages of gender, ethnicity, and territory—a trend evident not just in East Asia but South Asia as well. This new ‘Asian model’ typically involves increasing the proportional components of existing electoral formulas and grafting gender quotas, multiethnic party lists, and quasi-federal elements onto ostensibly majoritarian state structures. We show that these reforms have, as intended, mostly increased female and ethnic minority representation and decentralized governance structures. At the same time, however, these de jure changes are not associated with de facto political development in terms of greater democratic quality, counter to theoretical expectations. Indeed, democracy has declined across most of Asia at the same time as its democratic institutions have become more consensual.

Dialectical democracy: Indian Muslims and the politics of resistance

Majoritarian regimes use perfectly legal and democratically uncensurable strategies to subordinate dissenters and unpopular minorities with the consent of their electorally significant mass of supporters. The anxieties ensuing from democratic subordination can be mitigated only through democratically workable participative cultural productions, the Hegelian concept of Bildung of the subordinated, recognised as legitimate by civil society and as uncensurable by the majoritarian state. Employing the illustrative case of Indian Muslims and Hegel’s master-servant dialectic, this paper argues that the fragile essence of democracy itself must be understood in terms of the dialectical relation between the citizen’s particularities and the state’s universality.

The political development in Sri Lanka after civil war ended: a critical review for after Zarb-e-Azb operation in Pakistan

The Sri Lankan civil war began in 1983 and lasted until 2009. The tension stems from Sri Lanka's colonial period and subsequent post-colonial policies that harmed the Tamil people. Without viable alternatives, a part of the Tamil population resorted to the degree of brutality that precipitated a second civil war. Regional, domestic, and global attempts to bring the war to a halt have been futile, though some more local measures have been active. A ruthless military campaign brought the conflict to an end. However, nothing has been done in the aftermath of the war to try to resolve the civil war, including its roots. Sri Lanka's civil war exemplifies the uncertain existence of civil war resolution. With this in mind, the war's conclusion was unquestionably the product of a strategic triumph. However, the civil war should have ended; a unique constellation of structural, state, and national forces collaborated to allow for unrestricted military aggression. As long as the dominant forces, including the United States and significant European countries, understood that enough bloodshed had happened, the country's aggression could be brought to a stop. China and India, with India abstaining, voted to support the Sri Lankan government in its major offensive against insurgents. Internationally, the newly restored government used the full might of the forces against the rebels. As a consequence, those variables are deemed unusable in other situations.
 Tamil-Sinhala rivalry stretches all the way back to Sri Lanka's colonial period. The Tamil community took advantage of numerous market opportunities under British rule, which lasted from 1815 to 1948. Additionally, many group members attended school in colonial countries owing to a shortage of educational facilities in their home countries. With the exception of a few, the Sinhalese culture, on the other side, maintained its isolation from the British. As could be anticipated, the proportion of Tamils employing in the civil service, academia, and law increased dramatically following Sri Lanka's independence in 1948. Historically, the Sinhalese population has been hesitant to accept pluralism, having collaborated with the British to effect a shift of domination since the 1930s. When Sri Lanka's compulsory adult franchise was expanded to all citizens in 1931, there were no arrangements for minority rights. Tamil and Muslim community members shared discontent in the inconsistency with which their desires are pursued. T was dissatisfied with current political developments, and a large number of Tamils boycotted the elections conducted in compliance with this document. Also immediate liberty was abolished in 1947 by the Soulbury Constitution. The argument that no individual should be discriminated against on the grounds of racial origin or faith, though, proved to be a procedural impediment. Finally, in effect, it established a unitary and majoritarian state.

Israel’s Constitutional Order in Upheaval? Attempts of the 34th Government Coalition to Transform the Constitutional Order

Responding to the Supreme Court’s empowerment through the 1992 Constitutional. Revolution, Israeli policy- and lawmakers repeatedly challenged Israel’s constitutional order and the role of the Court within it as an unwelcomed restrain on executive and legislative powers. The 2015-elected Israeli government has been partially successful in entrenching its partisan vision of a majoritarian state serving the particular interests of the Jewish majority, rather than a state of all of its citizens following universal values. This vision has been enshrined in the Nation State Law, a new chapter of Israel’s fragmented “quasi-constitution” and complemented by the appointment of conservative judges to all levels of the Israel court system, including its Supreme Court. Threatening to change the judicial appointment process and restricting the Supreme Court’s authority to exercise judicial oversight over legislative and executive acts, the government sought to discourage the Court from exercising judicial activism. While the NSL represents a parting from a thicker, normative notion of constitutionalism, adopting the proposed Basic Law on Legislation would presumably pave the way for an executive unbound.

Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India,c.1900–1920

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlierThe Indian War of Independence(1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment ofThe Indian War of Independenceand situates it within the political and intellectual context offin de sièclewestern India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

India under Modi’s second term: Democratic resilience amidst illiberal impulses

Almost all observers believed that India’s 2019 general election would result in a hung parliament and a coalition government. Yet, the election returned Prime Minister Narendra of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a second five-year term in office. The BJP not only increased its parliamentary majority, it also won seats in states and regions beyond the Hindi heartland. Indeed, Modi is the first prime minister since Indira Gandhi in 1971 to be reelected with a larger majority. What explains Modi’s spectacular electoral victory, and what does his victory bode for India’s representative democratic political order? Will India turn towards illiberalism as Modi tries to turn India into a Hindu majoritarian state? The following pages argue that such pessimism is unwarranted since India’s democracy is far more resilient, with built-in mechanisms against potential strongmen.

A new party system or a new political system?

ABSTRACT Defying many odds, the BJP has held on to the political space it conquered five years ago and succeeded in expanding its territorial imprint. It did so through a campaign that was substantially different from the 2014 General Election campaign, which was marked by the rejection of the Congress and an enthusiastic embrace of the BJP’s promise of development for all. Five years later, much has changed in India with regard to the political system, which has become more centralized and less liberal. Since the 2019 election, the second Modi-led government has pushed the transition from a de facto Hindu majoritarian state towards a de jure Hindu majoritarian state through the adoption of controversial policies affecting some of the basic normative tenets of India’s old constitutional order, so much so that the BJP’s rise to power has transformed not only the party system, but also the political system itself. This is reflected in India dropping several ranks in most indices of democracy. At the same time, Indian national and state politics have followed divergent paths: the BJP dominates the national stage unchallenged by any rival, but is finding it increasingly difficult to sustain its sway in state elections – leaving the question of the Hindu nationalist hegemony open.

Fighting impunity in hate crime — history, ethics, and the law: An interview with Harsh Mander

This interview with writer and activist Harsh Mander was conducted on 21 and 23 April 2020 while numerous instances of hate crime, during the severe COVID-19 lockdown, were coming to light. This came on the heels of the popular protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, and the February 2020 violence in Delhi. The interview situates the present moment, tying together history, socio-legal assessments of sectarian violence, evaluation of legal reform, and the ethics of anti-hate activism. First, Mander draws from his extensive experience — as a former bureaucrat, anti-hate advocate, and legal activist — to offer the larger historical trajectory of sectarian violence in India. His account highlights the role of the rising majoritarian state ideology in facilitating and celebrating sectarian hostilities. He also develops an account of how we should understand the social and personal harms of mass violence and the phenomenon of lynching. Second, he discusses the contentious question of legal reform for ending impunity in hate crime cases. Specifically, he notes the problem of state complicity in violence and the failed attempts to legislate an anti-communal violence law. Third, he elaborates on the protracted challenges of building viable strategies of litigation in the aftermath of sectarian violence. He evaluates Nyayagraha (literally meaning struggle for justice), his unique experiment after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom based on an ethical practice for legal justice.

Moving Cultures: Engaging Refugee and Migrant Culture Rights in International Heritage Law

In thinking about the rise of the Anthropocene, an important facet of this looming new era remains under-explored: namely, how cultural identity, and its tangible and intangible markers, are to be renegotiated and protected. Notwithstanding that the origins of international heritage law lie in protecting heritage in times of crisis (wartime and natural or man-made disasters), regimes under UNESCO for safeguarding cultural heritage in international law are ill-prepared for the challenges of the Anthropocene. A particular question that needs to be considered is the protection in international law of cultural heritage and identity when communities are displaced from their homes. Because international cultural heritage law is connected to state territoriality, states have the ultimate authorizing power over the meanings and uses of cultural heritage. In the past, this power has at times been used to the detriment of minority groups contesting the majoritarian state. But how might this power play out in a context where communities are forced to move? What, if anything, can international heritage law do to ensure that these populations, who have already lost their homes and livelihoods, can maintain their cultural identity through the protection of their heritage? I argue that international law’s separation between the cultural and biological facets of human existence presents a major obstacle to safeguarding the cultures of migrant and refugee groups, ultimately frustrating the very objectives that this separation was meant to achieve, namely, the protection of these populations. Only by reintegrating biology and culture can international law create the means for reimagining civilization in the Anthropocene.

Dereliction of Duties or the Politics of ‘Political Quadrangle’? The Governor, Hill Areas Committee and Upsurge in the Hills of Manipur

This article looks into the role of the Governor of Manipur, particularly its ‘special responsibility’ under Article 371C of the Constitution of India, ‘in order to secure the proper functioning’ of the Hill Areas Committee (HAC), and attempts to explore whether there is dereliction of duties on the part of the governor in fulfilling what the constitution intents. Consequently, it examines whether the HAC is able to perform its functions under the Manipur Legislative Assembly (Hill Areas Committee) Order, 1972, to ‘safeguard the interest of the people of the Hill Areas’. The article identifies the existence of the politics of ‘political quadrangle’ which unleash a peculiar ‘political process’ in which the role and functions of the governor and the HAC are constrained in protecting the rights and interests of the hill people. This ‘politics’ is largely shaped by the very peculiar political process in the state, particularly the electoral trend and government formation, in which there is propensity to change government with the corresponding change in the ruling party at the centre. This has a significant role to play as the majoritarian state government’s reluctance for tribal autonomy is perpetuated by the existence of the same political regime at the centre, with a politically affiliated and politically appointed governor, in which acting on the ‘advice of’ largely becomes ‘diktat of’ the ‘council of ministers’, thereby circumscribing the role and functions of the governor and the HAC. The recent upsurge in the hills of Manipur is a clear case of the state Legislative Assembly overriding the HAC on scheduled matters that affect the hill areas.

Majoritarian State and the Marginalised Minorities: The Hindus in Bangladesh

The problem confronting the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is analysed in this article within the framework of a majoritarian state, which embodies the socio-cultural ethos of the majority community in its effort to establish itself as a nation state with a unique history. Such a state by its very nature marginalises the minorities, who are considered unequal in the construction of the ‘nation state’ narrative even though constitutionally they enjoy equality as citizens. While the article looks at the role of the Hindus in politics in former East Pakistan and later in Bangladesh, it also explores whether the approach adopted by the Hindu minority in recent years has provided physical security, economic and political opportunities, and made them important stakeholders. The article also analyses the future of minorities in the context of the larger national identity debate in Bangladesh.

Ethnic Democracy Revisited: On the State of Democracy in the Jewish State

The current state of the debate over Israeli democracy and the state of Israeli democracy itself are analyzed through the citizenship status of Israel's Palestinian citizens. The two main theoretical models featured in this debate—Smooha's "ethnic democracy" and Yiftachel's "ethnocracy"—are discussed, focusing on the 'framework decisions' that inform their arguments. After demonstrating that the question of Israeli democracy should be viewed dynamically and historically, it will be clear that the Israeli state has been evolving from non-democratic ethnocracy, though ethnic democracy, toward non-democratic majoritarianism. For each one of these phases, prior to October 2000, we analyze a seminal decision of the Supreme Court that highlighted the citizenship status of the Palestinian citizens during that phase. For the period since October 2000, we analyze the Or Commission report and its reception by the government to argue that Israel may be on its way to becoming a non-democratic majoritarian state.