Mukul Kesavan - False citizens: What does a nation do with a minority that it cannot purge?
What does a nation do
with minorities that it doesn’t regard as real citizens? Hitler’s answer was
genocide but modern nations have experimented with other solutions, expanding
the menu of discriminatory options available to the majoritarian State. These
are worth examining. The Holocaust was, in scale and intent, so evil that
pundits hesitate to compare the industrial murder of Jews to the persecution of
minorities elsewhere. This is a useful check on rhetorical excess but it stops
us from seeing something true: all majoritarianism isn’t fascism, but fascism
is always majoritarianism unbound.
Majoritarianism is a
clumsy but necessary word for a scapegoating nationalism. Not every example of
the gravitational pull of a cultural, linguistic or religious majority
qualifies. So the surname-less hero called Raj who used to be the hero in every
other Hindi film not so long ago, was the film industry’s gesture at normalcy,
a lazy (if loaded) take on an Indian Everyman, not a symptom of
majoritarianism.
Political
majoritarianism is a supremacist project. It is the ideological claim that the
natural owners of the nation state are the members of its ethnic/religious
majority. It denies the legitimacy of political majorities forged with the aid
of minority support or votes; see Modi’s suggestion that Rahul Gandhi’s choice
of Wayanad, a Muslim majority constituency, represented a flight from the
national mainstream. Demanding obedience, deference and public abasement from
minorities is the majoritarian’s stock-in-trade; see, for example, Maneka
Gandhi’s hectoring speech to her Muslim constituents, threatening to withhold
patronage if they didn’t vote for her.
A majoritarian State
will put minorities on notice by selectively allowing vigilantes to target
them. This achieves two things: it lets minorities know that they live on
sufferance outside the protection of the rule of law and it allows members of
the ethnic majority to feel vicariously superior to a vulnerable underclass.
The first priority of this ideology is to consolidate the majority as a vote bank
by uniting it in the subordination of a ‘dangerous’ minority. The second, which
follows from the first, is to make minorities marginal, even irrelevant, to the
political life of the nation… read more:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/false-citizens-what-does-a-nation-do-with-a-minority-that-it-cannot-purge-the-case-of-rohingyas-uighurs-and-indian-muslims/cid/1689523