Devangshu Datta: The majoritarianism paradox

The defining paradox of majoritarianism is that it's generally espoused by folks who are scared that they will soon become a minority. This can lead to unexpected outcomes. For example, the Brexit referendum was driven by the fears of elderly Britons who thought they would soon be swamped by immigrants.

This seems absurd in a land where, taken together, all ethnic minorities, including locally born fourth-generation minorities, amount to less than 13 per cent of population. Yet, ironic as it maybe, enough people feared being swamped, to force their fears and the consequences of those fears down every throat.

If you think about it, majoritarianism often doesn't work when the fears are real. A classic example would be erstwhile Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Ethnic Serbs were scared that sundry minorities would end up taking a larger slice of the pie and resorted to utterly brutal methods in trying to suppress Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, etc. The country came apart because the Serbs' fears were justified. The minorities did take over.

In America, a man who is often referred to as The Donald, is currently running a presidential election campaign that harps on the fears of folks who believe that, if America is to be made great again, it must be turned into a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) monoculture.

If the opinion polls are to be trusted, Mr Trump is trailing in a binary race. If he does lose to Hillary Clinton, it will be in part because his supporters, who think they are a majority, are merely the single-largest group. They are already outnumbered by coalitions of other groups, who are alienated by this racist message. Their economic clout has also eroded and declined past the point of no return.

In India the majoritarian party currently in power famously won a parliamentary majority with just 31 per cent of the vote. Given a Hindu population of 79 per cent, less than half of the largest community can have bought into the majoritarian message.

In fact, it is a misnomer to use the singular noun, "community" in this context. There are too many internal differences to claim that Hindus are one community with a straight face. It is a pipedream to imagine that so many different castes, creeds and linguistic divisions would see themselves as one.

To take a random example, there is little in common between the lifestyles and belief systems of a high-caste vegetarian from North India and a beef-eating Dalit from South India. Their languages, diets, faiths, forms of worship, preferred procreative partners, entertainment, etc., are all different. Neither has much in common with a fish-eating Brahmin from eastern India either. Note that these are differences within community.

At first glance, it may be surprising that a majoritarian message would even evolve in such an amorphous community. In another sense, given the central paradox of majoritarianism, it is inevitable that such a message would evolve.

India is possibly unique in that every Indian is in a minority. There is no single dominant community. The biggest of the linguistic groups - the speakers of various versions of Hindi - amounts to less than a one-third of the population. Caste is so localised, it is difficult to make classifications according to national buckets.

In that sense, the fears of Indians with majoritarian impulses are very real; they are in a minority and they have always been, slice and dice the differences any way you like. That thought drives the majoritarian to desperation and it results in the aggressive propagation of a false message of sameness.

The problem is that majoritarians can acutely emphasise the differences within communities and within nations simply by loudly denying the legitimacy of such differences. I think that has happened already with the aggressive pushing of the cow "protection" issue. This will not end well for the majoritarians because they are in a minority.

India probably will not go the Yugoslavia way for a variety of reasons. But there will be a lot of collateral damage before the nation comes to terms with its own exceptionalism and the majoritarians accept that they are in a minority.
Twitter: @devangshudatta