Pluralism, Democracy, and Internal Minorities

: A Case Study of the Pasmanda-Muslim Counterpublic in India

Abstract

The main question that this study pursued was to understand how subaltern counterpublics like the Pasmanda Muslim Counterpublic (PMC) inform the broader understanding of pluralism and democracy. The Pasmanda counterdiscourses on identity, violence, and equity deepen the already intermeshed lines of recognition and redistribution. In a way, “by pluralizing the category of oppression” (Young, 1990, p. 63), the PMC also conceptually rips open the foundational consensus on the conceptual infrastructure of the nation, majority-minority, and secularism-communalism in India.
This study showed how the PMC elucidates that the aforementioned conceptual matrix is elite-driven, and that the dichotomies staged constitute and reproduce its control despite the contrarian rhetoric. The subaltern aspiration to transcend this foundational consensus is often arrested through violence. The persistent episodes of communal violence which create a “state of exception” (Agamben, 1998) where the democratic institutional laws are suspended, can be framed as what Walter Benjamin calls “law preserving violence” (Benjamin, 1986, p. 285). The laws are suspended so that the foundational elite consensus or the Law may be preserved. William Connolly also points to the dialectical relationship between pluralization and fundamentalization (Connolly, 1996, p. 60). More pertinently, the Pasmanda narratives indicate that the “minority” concept is the pivot around which this consensus revolves. The destabilization of the minority concept, as substantiated in this study, may be central to the democratic aspirations of subaltern communities, including the Pasmanda-Muslims. This study confirms the limitations of the settled notions of pluralism and democracy indicated by the emergence of new conceptualizations like “pluralization” and “subaltern counterpublics” to capture the complexities of new transformative spaces and justice claims. What the PMC struggle indicates is the need for a new consensus on the foundational concepts like nation, majority-minority and secularism. As Chantal Mouffe has repeatedly urged, this consensus cannot only be rational but has to necessarily be a precarious and “conflictual consensus” (Mouffe, 2013, p. XII). The findings in this research indicate that in developing a new conflictual consensus through a democratic grammar, the subaltern counterpublics should play a key role.

Date of Award	15 Jun 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University for Humanistic Studies