1 Introduction

The problematic that this paper¹¹ seeks to address is what happens to the sense of belonging amongst citizens in constitutional democracies when the cultural hegemony provided by a shared imaginary of liberal values is put under pressure by the pluralisation of society. In the specific case of such countries as Germany and the United Kingdom, an argument has emerged in recent years that a social solidarity provided by a culturally specific political liberalism (with a long, gradual history in the United Kingdom, and a dramatically rapid, redemptive one in Germany, but both tethered to half a millennium of political philosophy) has been challenged by the immigration of groups without that shared history. Can there be any shared commitment to the same nation-state without the solidarity given by a common culture available, and only through historical memory? Has not the multicultural policy oriented at giving these new groups their own cultural space made the fragmentation of society worse? Of course, there are unpleasant and extreme versions of this anxiety, but it has been expressed in the political mainstream of these countries, as well.

The response in this essay is deliberately focused on a narrow, yet generally held view of democratic nation-states and belonging: the view that a relatively stable polity with a democratic constitution based on the values of liberal individualism ought to have the loyalty of its citizens, whose belonging to it entitles them to its freedoms. There are many ways of querying this attitude, of course, from radical democracy with its insistence on the primacy of equality and cosmopolitanism, with its argument for a worldwide community of human beings, to authoritarian demands for loyalty to an economically efficient state, as well as to still-existing Marxist ideals for a post-national, post-capitalist society; not to mention some varieties of theological calls for submission to the singular sovereignty of God.

Addressing, then, a fairly standard view of the situation as one about how liberalism copes with pluralism in a constitutional democracy, I suggest that if there is to be a shared commitment to the nation-state on the part of both those who locate themselves in its cultural history and those who have become members of it more recently, then the constitutional dispensation must be effective in acknowledging pluralist requirements within a liberal framework. Such a perspective must offer a view of the citizen as an individual who is also given identity through collectives, a view I argue is found in the normative vision of the Indian Constitution; for, read as a philosophical document independently of its subsequent practice, it conceives of a liberal democratic state whose society has historically been deeply plural – so plural that there is no agreement at all on what the common historical memories of a national Indian civilization ought to be. If a constitutional dispensation (in whatever form, since constitutions vary a great deal in the Western societies in question) is such that political life is founded on individual liberty, but also invites plural senses of belonging, then it might be possible for loyalty to be encouraged towards the constitution from which such political life flows. As such, commitment to that constitution need not be a dry rationalisation of citizenship in the place of emotional bonds, as critics of constitutional patriotism have said; rather, commitment to the constitution would be loyalty to provisions and processes that would themselves show faith in the dignity and entitlement to freedom of all citizens. There would be no need to think that pluralism and liberalism were always in tension in a polity. (I mean, of course, only the need for a theory; how it would work out in practice is quite another matter, but one must start somewhere.)

2 Pluralism within Liberalism: Theory, Practice and European Experience¹²

Let us begin by stating relatively conventional, if highly abstract, understandings of the two concepts of “liberalism” and “pluralism”. By “liberalism”, I mean here the core commitment to individual liberty as the fundamental requirement of any political settlement. Individual liberty is based on an understanding that each human is an autonomous entity whose capacity to exercise agency, express selfhood, and seek ends is their own and not derived from others. Set within a democratic constitutional context in which there is formal equality for all such individuals, we have a general, if rather idealized description of the polity of most Western nation-states. This philosophical understanding of liberalism is usually traced back, through 19^th and 20^th century interpretations, to the Enlightenment’s novel exploration of the human individual as a rational human, capable of free thought and action, which, therefore, is to exist ideally in a political space where such freedom would be guaranteed. Of course, both the idea in itself and its genealogy are much more complex, as well as contested. (Of what does that freedom consist? What should constitute that political space? How is freedom practically guaranteed? What are the limits of freedom and what limits it? And so on.) Here, I only want to draw attention to two aspects of liberalism relevant to this essay: (i) it conceives of citizens of democratic polities as essentially autonomous individuals; and (ii) such a conception is understood as having developed through a particular historical experience, in Western Europe and North America, at least.

By “pluralism” I mean, minimally, the co-occurrence of different, and at least at some level incommensurable and possibly conflicting values or value-sets; and even if they are not self-contained and systematically structured, these values can be seen as clustering around certain norms, sources of authority, patterns of conduct, interpretations of reality, modes of discursive self-representation, and the like. Within the more abstract, philosophical issue of value pluralism, we have the substantive fact of a plurality of cultures within some shared habitat.

It could be said that the dialectic between liberalism and pluralism has been formulated, broadly, in two ways. The first, memorably going back to Isaiah Berlin, emerged in the troubled experience of early and mid-20^th century Europe, and evolved in his work as a quest to understand the relationship between liberalism – a commitment to the liberty to exert agency in choosing values and permitting others to do likewise – and pluralism – a commitment to the existence of multiple values that need not be ranked or even be amenable to mutual evaluative comparison (therefore being incommensurable). This tradition has generated a rich literature about the abstract question of the universality of values, the possibility or desirability of absolute values, and the threat of incoherent relativism between values. The debate here is whether liberalism and pluralism are compatible in any way: does individual freedom, and the practices and guarantees that surround it, derive from or imply multiple, conflicting ways of living? The second form of the dialectic has been grounded in the actual experience of Western European and North American societies since the latter part of the 20^th century, where liberal democratic polities have had to engage with various pluralising trends. Usually, this dialectic has taken the form of debates over policies of multiculturalism, and there are diverse groups within these societies that do not find their own set of values compatible with the liberal framework, but that also do not see the liberal democratic state as capable of providing them with the collective outcomes they seek. In other words, where the philosophical discussions about pluralism concern values in a moral sense, here we have pluralism broadly concerned as having cultural roots, be they derived from language, ethnicity, race, ancestral nations or – ever more importantly – religion. In the U.S. in particular, public debates over a plural society engage with cultural diversity, especially religion, ethnicity and race, as well as with moral pluralism. In Europe and Canada, by contrast, moral plurality does not prompt quite as much public agonism, while cultural diversity, in the form of immigration and Islam, does so very much. There is also the complex issue that, while some manifestations of cultural diversity like music and cuisine are relatively unproblematic in liberal societies, when cultural diversity is closely tied to larger values, including global conceptions of the good, then it becomes difficult to make easy distinctions between philosophical and practical conceptions of pluralism.

This essay is concerned with the second form of the dialectic much more than the first, although, of course, they are conceptually related. When looking at the practical tensions between liberalism and pluralism, it often seems as if the more abstract or philosophical version is culturally circumscribed, in that the value of the pluralism in question seems to be founded in the cultural history of those discursively hegemonic countries that are called “Western”. This is not always the case: the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or between Quebecois and English-speaking Canadians surely have their origins entirely in the “Western” historical experience. It is true, however, that the challenge of what Charles Taylor calls “deep diversity” in places like Canada does indeed seem to concern groups outside the cultural history of the West: native tribes in Canada, both Aboriginal tribes and Asian immigrants in Australia, Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany, Maghrebi in France, or various immigrant groups in the United Kingdom.

So, liberalism is both an evaluative reading of modern Western European history, and a theory of procedural negotiation of rights, duties and identities. It can accommodate a certain amount of pluralism or diversity, including that which is generated by religion, ethnicity and language. If we start from a general liberal commitment to individual autonomy within a democracy, certain sorts of diversity seem to be permitted for a liberal society worthy of its name. However, at a certain “depth” of plurality, liberalism finds itself challenged by pluralism. This is the situation in the pluralizing societies of the West, but perhaps especially in European countries that do not have a self-conception, as do such immigrant nations as the U.S., Canada or Australia, for the imperfections over who is included. (Of course, the challenges of identity politics are not limited to European countries, and the immigrant society of the U.S. was in fact the place where the whole debate on identity was first articulated as a problem for liberalism [Young 1990].)

In European countries like Germany and the United Kingdom, the abstract dialectic quickly thickens into heated discussions over Muslims. There are various political positions regarding the supposed relationship between the values and consequent practices of liberalism in European countries on the one hand, and the values and consequent practices of plurality-making groups like Muslim communities on the other. They map somewhat uneasily onto the philosophical discussions we have considered above. Abstract views about the incompatibility of liberalism and pluralism do not have the bite of political arguments that also assert such incompatibility. From such a political perspective, it seems that there are countries with a particular history of hard-won freedoms based on the essential autonomy of the individual, with rights and duties centred on each citizen in and of herself, and freedoms guaranteed by constitutional democracy. Such a liberal conception is at once historically specific to the cultural achievement of Europeans, and also apparently universally applicable. Both in terms of a citizenship that extracts conformity to juridical requirements and in terms of the universality of the values expressed through those requirements, Muslims must, it is said, set aside their commitments to their own conception of the human, with its embeddedness in authoritative values, wherever those values are incommensurable with democratic liberalism. In such a perspective, of course, liberalism is interpreted in a very culturally particular – even ethnic – way.¹³

From the 1970s onwards, it came to be understood that ways had to be found of preserving the autonomous individual of classically conceived liberalism, even while accommodating pluralism – with the latter being conceived as the presence of collective identities that de-emphasized the autonomous individual and took evaluative readings of history from sources other than those of (“Western”) liberalism. So pluralizing societies in nation-states founded on a historical reading of liberalism were seen by the liberal elites to be facing the task of developing a normative political account and practice of common belonging that was not simply exclusivist or assimilationist. Now, if liberalism were to be interpreted as a broader and culturally unconditioned notion of liberty, the alleged inconsistency between democratic liberalism and the sort of value pluralism represented by most of the Muslim (and other diversity-forming) populations might not seem quite so compelling. This more liberal liberalism has partly informed the theory and practice of multiculturalism. For the purposes of this essay, I propose to understand the actual policy of multiculturalism as a process of assigning symbolic value and allocating public resources to groups based on collective (non-“Western”) cultural norms (in a process penetratingly analyzed by Will Kymlicka) ¹⁴ while preserving the political process as one concerning a public citizenry of autonomous individuals. This, I would argue, is precisely because of a paradox in European liberalism. A great deal of cultural pluralism, in its expressive forms – like music, cuisine, art, and the like – is seen as compatible with the dominant notion of liberal European society, where there is very little debate about value pluralism; but precisely because of this, where cultural minorities also express their identity through commitment to values outside of European liberalism, they find themselves challenged, rejected or pressured into conformity. Thus, liberalism that permits pluralism, so long as the latter is “purely” cultural, rejects it when cultural pluralism is seen to derive its self-expression from value pluralism; and this is so, because European liberalism has taken itself to be the culturally hegemonic form of European values.

Seen in this way, multicultural policy seems to flow naturally from liberalism. The major political battle has been with entrenched conservatives, whose more restricted notion of cultural identity rejects cultural pluralisation in the first place, let alone resources for groups causing such pluralisation. In short, the pluralism that is seen as consistent with liberalism is largely one of non-political diversity of self-expression; if there was any perception of the deep value pluralism that might inform religious and other aspects of these groups, it has been either ignored, or seen as amenable to eventual dispersal through cultural freedom.

Over the past forty years, the political sphere of liberal practice has not engaged with the value pluralism implied ultimately by burgeoning cultural diversity; it is a critique of this liberal limitation – within a broadly liberal framework –that has informed the work of such thinkers (in their different ways) as Bhikhu Parekh (2000; 2008) and Charles Taylor (1994; 1998). (Others have, of course, made even sharper claims about the incompatibility of liberalism with pluralism, like John Gray [2000].)

This multicultural settlement, however, has not seen collective identities dissolve into the individualism required of liberal political processes. In other words, the expectation has not been met that newly arrived groups would assimilate into the host society in return for recognition of symbolic presence and collective cultural activities through resource allocation. Instead, the opposite has occurred: a greater divide has opened up between group identities and the hegemonic and normative requirement of liberal individualism. Collective identities have been reinforced either through the complex process of contesting and/or receiving group-oriented resources, or through estrangement from the settlement of resource allocation. In a system whose commitment to liberalism requires political activity to be founded upon the agency of autonomous individuals –which, indeed, takes democracy primarily to be about the freedom of individual choice – citizens whose self-conception is imbued with collective cultural influences have been given no other choice but to shed such influences. This is not a simple task in the moral psychology of political representation. Life experience, orientation towards sources of authority, the epistemic framework of judgements, even simple emotional bonds and impulses are all obviously culturally conditioned. Alienation appears to have been the result of the pressure on citizens from immigrant backgrounds to be separating the collective forms of self-expression, which a multicultural policy has allowed, from the individuality required normatively in political engagement. The well-worn commitment to the formal privatization of religion in modern Europe, coupled with the role religion (primarily Islam) has played in collective cultural identities, has combined to generate a sense in the dominant public discourse that pluralism should certainly be very restricted in a liberal polity.

This is the context in which we find ourselves today, and which informs the discussions that shape most of the essays in this collection. It is clear that the cultural pluralisation of broadly liberal polities has raised questions about the relationship between liberalism and pluralism. While multiculturalist policies have constituted the liberal strategy of containing plurality in cultural diversity alone, they have had limited success. On the one hand, the liberal expectation that pluralism could be contained, and collective identities dissolved into liberalism-as-dominant-Western-culture, appears misplaced. At the same time, citizens, for whom collective identities are significant in terms of self-expression, have found barriers to their hopes of influencing political life, because such life has been conceived as not negotiable in the dominant constitutional discourse of liberal democracies as normatively determined by liberal individualism. It seems appropriate to ask whether the very nature of political negotiation and constitutional provision should be re-imagined in the face of the historical trend towards pluralisation.

To approach this task, I turn to the very different history of India and the constitutional philosophy that resulted from it, in order to ask how fundamentally liberal democratic provisions can nonetheless be understood within a context of deep pluralism in a national society.

3 The Pluralist History of India and its Impact on the Nature of the Indian Constitution

Unlike mid-century Britain or Germany, the framers of the Indian Constitution had no real alternative to dealing with a deeply plural polity. Although unified within those particular borders for the first time, India had had a diffuse but nonetheless recognisable civilizational existence for millennia. This existence was, from the beginning of recorded history, marked by a diversity of views about human reality, debates about authority, and relatively little concern for shifting political boundaries. In the longue durée view, the new nation-state was forming out of a land and people of extraordinary diversity. There were always syncretism and blurred boundaries between collective identities, whether marked by social status (importantly, caste), or religion (different Buddhist and Jain, but also sectarian Hindu groupings, and later, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism), language (there are over 850 dialects today), or political belonging (despite several unifying imperial formations, there were innumerable kingdoms and city-states). This history of pluralism was not one of competing essentialist identities, but rather a staggering variety of fungible senses of collective and individual self: Buddhist metaphysics might, over the course of centuries of philosophical dispute, also be adapted by Hindu philosophers; elaborately ritualised worship carried out by the high Brahmin caste of priests and intellectuals could include devotional poetry composed by saints at the other end of caste hierarchy; political confrontation between Hindu kings and Muslim generals could co-exist with the practice of Sufi shrines visited by both Hindus and Muslims. There was a contestation of, and engagement across, shared mental, ritual, cultural, social and political spaces. The combination of syncretism and contestation led to constantly re-formulated common epistemic systems – in texts, processes, and artefacts, whether in the Sanskrit language of classical Indian philosophy, or the elaboration of iconography in pre-Islamic traditions, or the development of cross-cultural architectural idioms in the pre-colonial period. That this had not changed by the time of India’s independence, was, indeed, only strengthened by modernity, which may be identified roughly as starting in the early 19^th century, when British military, administrative and intellectual re-configuration of Indian territory slowly began to be internalised by Indian intellectuals striving to explain their situation in the light of the explanatory techniques of the Enlightenment.

The 19^th century, when the mercantile and intellectually lively activities of the East India Company were slowly replaced by a more racist and ideologically informed imperial strategy, saw Indian intellectuals receiving European conceptions of nation, ethnicity, and governmentality as markers of political identity. Previously, collective identities had been largely societal, with political identity mainly confined to ruling elites. With the notion of national identity as a marker of society, nationalism grew in late-colonial India as a distinctively modern conception of collective self-determination. Earlier notions of identity were subsumed – but by a society whose deep plurality was only emphasised by modern nationalism, as contestation shifted to debates about who collectively constituted a polity. The key to this shift was, of course, the Indian National Congress, originally started by a Scotsman sympathetic to Indian culture, gradually developing as a loyal and restrained group of highly educated men, and finally transforming, from the 1920s onwards, and under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, into a middle-class mobilisation of – for the first time in history – millions of people from all class backgrounds; but even this self-conscious political modernity was fundamentally pluralistic. The Congress itself contained intellectual multitudes, from religious reformers and liberals to rational modernists to bourgeois Hindu traditionalists; beyond Congress, there were highly conservative Hindus in the Hindu Maha Sabha; and various shades of non-Congress Muslim opinion were contained in the Muslim League. There were many other types of political organisations, like the Akali Dal/Panthik Akali that sought to protect the interests of Sikhs, and the Justice Party that campaigned for the social rights of marginalised castes in South India.

Whereas, eventually with the partition of British India, Pakistan was formed out of one reading of nationalism – a polity conceived as the home of a supposedly homogenous Muslim people so that they would not be a permanent minority in a unified India – India was envisioned as a pluralistic polity, guided especially (despite their deep and fundamental differences) by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar. Although Gandhi played no part in the Constituent Assembly (his vision was too radical for constitutional processes), most of the significant intellectuals of that time ensured that the Indian Constitution that was designed between 1946–50 mediates between liberalism and pluralism. It articulates a parliamentary, federal democracy, with universal franchise. (It is worth noting that, as the Constituent Assembly began, Germany and Italy were facing life after authoritarian regimes; Spain, Portugal and Greece were a generation away from democracy; France and Switzerland had not enfranchised women; and Australia and the U.S. had racially discriminatory electoral systems; while Britain still had an empire in Africa in which “natives” had few rights, if any.) The Constitution enshrines fundamental civil rights and duties, but also allows for the protection of minorities and affirmative action for disadvantaged groups, which concerns collectives. In particular, the framers were keenly aware of the religious tensions that informed independent India’s historical pluralism, and sought to negotiate between minorities and majorities, individuals and groups. In short, as a deliberated outcome of normative political theory, the Indian Constitution should be seen as the effort of a nascent nation-state to grapple with a degree of diversity unmatched in a liberal democratic framework. This is the reasoning behind my suggestion that we look at the Indian Constitution in this way, as a philosophical document that might indicate how liberal societies respond constitutionally to the growth of plurality.

4 The Indian Constitution as a Philosophical Expression of Liberal Citizens in Plural Societies

The Constituent Assembly and the Indian Constitution that resulted as a consequence therefore had to struggle with the historically deep pluralism of “India”: the epistemological fact of world-views developed from often radically different sources of authority and frameworks of debate and self-exploration. Such pluralism also fed directly into deep inequalities, many of them elaborately developed by powerful groups to preserve their actual socio-economic domination, but also to try and close off the narrative spaces of dissent on the part of marginalised groups, who usually had their own, alternative accounts of selfhood, in oral narratives, counter-cultural rituals, social practices, and the like. While the Constituent Assembly itself was the result of debate from a plurality of views, it sought to write a constitution that could do justice to that very plurality, as Rochana Bajpai (2011, chap. 2) has admirably recounted and analysed. The Indian Constitution sought to express both the fundamental individuality of Indian citizens as beings of equal worth and the fundamental collectivity of their many identities. The Constituent Assembly sought to draw up a document that was committed to principles of liberal nationalism, which are instantly recognisable today in the “Western” world. Nevertheless, it also strove to express the reality of complex and multi-layered collective identities, based on religion, ethnicity, language and social histories. It is this latter feature that is of concern for us here, as the discussion in this essay is set within the pragmatic framework of a liberal constitutional democracy. (The culturally multiple ways in which the Indian Constitution approaches aspects of the liberally conceived individual citizen is a matter for another time.)

Rajeev Bhargava (2008) has eloquently made the case for the study of the Constituent Assembly Debates, and the Indian Constitution itself, as sources for political theory; my essay is, in many ways, inspired by his work (cf. also Bhargava 2010). The Indian Constitution is read here as a document of normative political philosophy; its complex and often grievously flawed practice in the Indian State is quite a different matter, not to be considered here.¹⁵ Its role in this essay is to open up and globalise the debates over liberalism and pluralism. This is, by no means, to say that it is a morally unflawed document. I want to suggest only that, within its great length, but especially in the Fundamental Rights on which I focus, it offers a vision of the citizen that integrates the demands of liberal individuality and plural belonging; and in contrast to multiculturalism in the West, does not seek to confine plural belonging to state-sponsored allocation of resources for collective private self-expression. I present its treatment of rights and identity as expressing a view of the human being as a person constituted through the complex interaction of individuality, autonomy, mutual responsibilities and multiple historical belongings. The document (as normative theory) thus functions to provide a constitutional representation of citizens within a pluralistic national society. When we consider those of its features relevant to this essay, we note that its provisions indicate a holistic view of the citizen, as individuals-within-collectives. This was the response of the fathers and mothers of the Constitution to the need to take the new citizens of India as both individuals and members of groups in a deeply plural society. As such, it offers a conception of citizens that questions the need to think of liberalism as threatened by pluralism. (Whether its precise provisions are adequate to support this vision of the citizen is yet another matter.)

The key to our understanding of the moral thought of the Indian Constitution lies in its repeated concern for vulnerable minorities, as Martha Nussbaum (2007, p. 128) has pointed out in her extended study of constitutional democracy and religion in India. Before explaining how this has a direct bearing on the relationship between pluralism and liberalism, let me explore the way in which this concern is shown. The Indian Constitution can be said to demonstrate its concern for vulnerable minorities in three inter-related ways in the Fundamental Rights.

First, there are those Fundamental Rights that are impeccably liberal in their formulation, such as Article 14, on equality before law; Article 19 on freedom of speech, assembly, movement, etc. (albeit carefully circumscribed by requirements for public order and the preservation of India’s integrity); or Article 21, on the protection of life and personal liberty. While in the Indian context, they are important because they address a history of profound inequality, philosophically they can be seen to be of a piece with what would now be thought the norm of any constitutional liberal democracy. (There are also more elaborately stated individual freedoms that have become a template for newer and economically developing countries, such as rights against exploitation.)

Second, some rights are explicitly cast in terms of groups, and are often juxtaposed with – and indeed, constrain – individual rights. An interesting example is Article 19 (5), which states that the State can impose reasonable restrictions on the freedom of movement, residence and settlement, not only in the interests of “the general public” but also “of any Scheduled Tribe” (i.e., those groups listed in a Constitution Order through the power conferred by Article 342).

Third, there are provisions that do not make the schematic and unrealistic assumption that fundamental rights can be a purely individual matter. This means that what ostensibly seems to be purely a matter of individual rights, on closer examination turns out to be best expressed only in relation to collective rights. This happens most strikingly in constitutional provisions for equality, a famously problematic notion in liberal theory. Before most other constitutional democracies, the Indian Constitution enshrined the right to equality (Article 14), prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. (Compare, for example, the chequered and relatively recent history of anti-discrimination legislation in the United Kingdom with its famous “unwritten constitution”.) Inequality is seen to hold primarily between groups, but the consequence is felt by individuals, so that, when the formal equality of all individuals threatens to preserve actual inequalities for individuals belonging to particular groups, then the State should support collective rights. Article 15 (3–4) makes this explicit, stating that the State reserves the right to make special provisions for women, children, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes (the latter as listed in a Constitution Order through the power conferred by Article 341). Notably, Article 17 abolishes “untouchability”, the horrendous practice of treating a number of groups as being beyond the realm of the caste system and therefore spiritually polluting if touched. The articles relating to the Right to Equality therefore admirably combine a liberal commitment to the individual and a pluralistic commitment to the collective contexts, which play such a crucial role in the identity of the individual. In short, it can be said that these provisions do not look at each citizen as a generic individual, but as located within multiple collectives, whether it be gender, or social status, or any other marker. Equality has a different bearing on each citizen, so each provision implicitly distinguishes between citizens, depending on, for example, whether their caste group practices or faces discrimination. At the same time, of course, the liberal value of the individual remains – so that the one who finds himself or herself in conformity with these provisions, or as one who benefits from them, is that particular citizen of India.

Articles 25–28, under Rights to Freedom of Religion, show this complex and visionary understanding of the citizen as standing at the locus of liberal individualism and pluralistic identity. Of course, the Constituent Assembly had as a model the radically original and elegantly minimal 18^th century articulation of the freedom of religion in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Nevertheless, it was precisely the deep pluralism of the Indian situation that called for a very different sort of State neutrality, which has come to be understood as the Indian version of secularism:¹⁶ that is, the State’s having no established or favoured religion; but furthermore, the State’s treating of all religious groups equally, with the further proviso that it could intervene to protect vulnerable groups, either within a religion or as groups constituting minority religions. It is, as Gary Jacobsohn says, an “ameliorative” model of secularism (Jacobsohn 2003, p. 49–50; p. 94). So, with regard to the situation within the broadly conceived “Hindu religion”, while 25 (1) entitles all persons to “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion”, 25 (2)(b) permits the State to intervene for the sake of “social welfare and reform”, and the “throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus”. The framers had in mind high-caste Hindu practices such as those of excluding lower castes from temples. Immediately the Constitution not only guarantees liberty, but also reserves the power to provide for equality; and this equality is directly articulated in collective terms (namely, the groups excluded by caste from temples). Still, freedom of religion also extends collectively to protection of minority religions. Under Cultural and Educational Rights, not only is discrimination in access to State-funded education prohibited, but Article 30 permits minorities to establish educational institutions, and safeguards them from discrimination.

Out of this discussion, let me attempt to draw an interpretation of the philosophical conception of the citizen in the Indian Constitution, which, I want to argue, offers an original and illuminating relationship between the normative commitments of liberalism and the real force of pluralism. My key contention is that the Fundamental Rights show that the citizen is taken to be an individual locus of liberty, but with identities drawn from collectives. Clearly and directly, this is the case with minorities; and although the Indian Constitution does not explicitly talk of them as being vulnerable, it is obvious that this is what it has in mind. (For example, the highest Hindu caste, the Brahmins, form less than 3% of the Hindu population, and the wealthy mercantile Parsis, or followers of the Zoroastrian religion, are even smaller, but such minorities are not the subject of protection.) Of course, vulnerability is not easily determined, and is mostly left to the courts in order to offer flexible interpretations in the future; but occasionally, minority provision is concerned with the symbolic value of the political and demographic situation of the concerned minority: so Explanation I under Article 25 permits the carrying of the knife (kirpan) that is required in the Sikh religion, because, although Sikhs were not socio-economically vulnerable, their crucial position as a community born out of conflict and interaction with Islam and Hinduism was deemed worthy of special recognition. Moreover, even socio-economically vulnerable minorities are minorities in often very different ways: provisions for Muslims, say, are often quite different from those for Scheduled Tribes.

From the constitutional discourse on minorities, several points relevant to our discussion of the relationship between liberalism and pluralism emerge. Firstly, talk of minorities offers an implied contrast with a “majority”, which is a powerful construct. The majority is technically one, simply by virtue of being all of the population that is not subject to special provision; but this technicality immediately shows the constructed nature of the majority, because it is a very thin notion, merely a logical negative (“not a minority”). Of course, this is not to deny that a psychologically powerful imaginary does surround the idea of a majority. The otherness of minorities appears sufficient to contribute to the rhetoric of the majority, as when we see, even in constitutional democracies, anti-immigration or Islamophobic campaigns in Europe, or Hindu nationalist ones in India, all of which talk of a native majority whose vast internal differences are conveniently set aside. (Would magical solidarity result from the expulsion of brown-skinned folk from Europe?) Yet by precisely not speaking of majorities, the Indian Constitution implies that there is an asymmetry of moral duty here. Whatever natural majority there is in a democracy, its interests are already provided for by the presence of the liberal provisions, for simply treating everyone as equally free is to privilege those who are already equipped to benefit – demographically, economically and socially – from freedom.¹⁷ This is an important circumscription of the liberal assumption that liberty suffices for the good of all citizens. It shows that a polity should be one that, in seeking to bring about the good life for all, should go beyond individual freedoms to forms of protection that can only be understood collectively (even when the aim is that individuals should benefit). Still, it also heightens the constructed nature of majorities, because it asks precisely how they can be described except in the logically negative sense. So, while majoritarian ideas (which have subsequently played such a deleterious role in India through the imagined homogeneity of an essentialized Hinduism) do indeed have potency, the Indian Constitution’s silence on the majority implies that there is nothing more than the thin, negative sense; there is nothing substantive about the notion of a majority.¹⁸ This shifts the focus back, for those mentioned under minority provisions, to fundamental individual rights: even while recognising that classic individual liberties tend in practice to privilege the already privileged, the Indian Constitution nevertheless builds collective rights on the bedrock of individual rights. This simultaneously additive and contrastive reading of the relationship between individual and group rights is vital to the conception of a polity in which liberalism and pluralism are not set in opposition, but in fact moderate each other through interaction.

The second important point that emerges from the Indian Constitution’s protective provisions for minorities concerns what it says about the role of plural communities. It is not just that, unlike in multiculturalist policy, the allocation of resources is not a merely legislative reflex, but a structural feature of the polity. More significantly, it locates the plurality of communities (symbolised by vulnerable minorities) within the political life of all individual citizens of the country. Collective identities are legitimate markers of a citizen’s presence in that political life, not mere tokens of a private existence that receives alms through the disciplinary motives of liberal governmentality. A citizen – an acknowledged participant in the political life – is an individual whose liberty includes the freedom of belonging to collectives. The richly disputatious existence of democracies is taken to include the cultural dynamics of identity (“identity politics”, not as the bugbear of liberal castigation but as the constituent of a plurally liberal mode of self-expression). There is, here, no false contrast between the solidarity of shared liberal (or even illiberal) nationhood and disuniting alterity; in the conception of the Indian Constitution, the truly shared culture is the culture of a pluralistic society.

Finally, this concern for minorities in the Indian Constitution becomes emblematic of how a truly liberal concern for citizens is the moral guarantee for pluralism. Every citizen is offered self-conception as, ultimately, an individual whose identity is given by belonging to collectives; after all, it is this that culminates in the belonging signified by the opening words of the Constitution, “We, the people of India […]”.

If this account is at all persuasive, then a rigorously moral conception of constitutional provision for a plurality of collectives, set within a well-grounded liberal democratic theory of the nation-state, is required for liberal but pluralised societies. In the final section, I take up the concept of “constitutional patriotism” as a commitment to a nationalism free of ethnocentricity, explore the conventional thought that it is incompatible with pluralism, and end with the argument that if in fact there is a constitutional framework along the lines argued for here, then constitutional patriotism turns out to be precisely the sort of commitment that can be asked from citizens of a pluralistic society.

5 Reinterpreting Constitutional Patriotism for a Pluralized Society

Let me reiterate what I said at the beginning: my discussion is focused quite specifically on commitment to a liberal constitutional democracy. It is in this context that I bring up the eminently centrist notion of constitutional patriotism. It is well known that Jürgen Habermas initially articulated the idea of constitutional patriotism as a form of identification for West Germans through commitment to the purely political principles enshrined in the democratic constitution; he offered this to counter what he perceived was a conservative tendency to treat German identity as once again, even after the gas chambers, going back to traditional forms of national pride. Of course, for conservative nationalists given to fundamentally ethnocentric notions of identity, this commitment to rational deliberation was never going to be acceptable; and that would be the case with constitutional patriotism in the context of any nation-state, whatever its history. Equally, the very notion of patriotism would render it anathema to cosmopolitans seeking a larger identity with a common humanity. Still, this essay is deliberately limited to a discussion of a liberal theory of polity, so let us look more closely at the relationship between liberalism and constitutional patriotism, before I turn to my own interpretation.

The standard criticism of Habermasian constitutional patriotism from the perspective of a liberal theory of the nation-state is that, by requiring loyalty to political norms and the constitution that guarantees them, there is no way of explaining why someone should be attached to their particular polity; if someone found another country’s constitution to deliver more elegantly the liberal principles to which she was committed, she could legitimately switch her loyalties. Still, Habermas’ commitment to the universal relevance of liberal political principles did not actually lead him to propose a constitutional patriotism that was thoroughly interchangeable across all liberal democracies. As Jan-Werner Müller (2007, p. 38) has pointed out, Habermas was not trying to be particularly inclusive when initially expounding his theory of constitutional patriotism. That is to say, he was not talking about either all liberal democracies or all citizens in a culturally pluralistic democracy. His constitutional patriotism was directed at German citizens, in the very specific context of a national culture coming to terms with a horrific near past. It was a call to solidarity from those who could no longer simply rely on history to give them a collective national identity. So, Habermas’ constitutional patriotism was not abstract at all, but very concrete – and its concreteness was founded on liberalism.

Despite Anglo-American liberal criticism that constitutional patriotism cannot extract a nation-based loyalty from citizens, its basic compatibility with liberalism is not in question. Indeed, in later writings, Habermas (1994) strives to argue that constitutional patriotism anchors the liberal value of individual autonomy, and its relationship with rights in a constitutional democracy, better than traditional liberalism does. In effect, constitutional patriotism moves the ethical significance of liberalism (that is to say, the constitutive freedom of the individual) from the cultural history of the nation, as in traditional liberalism, to the rational ordering of the principles and procedures of state; it is, and in this sense alone, post-nationalist (Cronin 2003, p. 19). From this perspective, Habermas’ later articulations of constitutional patriotism seek to locate cultural pluralism well within, and subordinate to, liberal autonomy, albeit in conformity with his abstract and legal requirements for a political life. Moving away from the earlier context of post-war Germany, Habermas ponders (in the paper cited) in a wider Western experience, such as in Canada, the tension between liberal individualism and collective cultural identities. It is with this later theory that I wish to engage.

In a spirited defence of the later Habermasian position, John Fossum (2001, p. 193) has brought out the significance of a two-level theory that hierarchizes “individual rights” and “ethical-cultural values” – i.e., the content of liberalism and the demands of pluralism, respectively. Let me explore this further in the light of my concerns. On a first reading, Habermas seems perfectly willing to acknowledge the role of cultural identity in autonomous individuals in a way that might seem compatible with the view of the citizen that I have suggested can be drawn from the normative thought of the Indian Constitution: “A correctly understood theory of rights requires a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed” (Habermas 1994, p. 113). On closer examination, however, it turns out that Habermas thinks a two-level theory is required for this purpose:

What is interesting here, in the context of our earlier discussion of the Indian Constitution, is that – although he shows no evidence of knowing about it – Habermas’ requirement of neutrality towards a plurality of collectives is remarkably similar to the Indian notion of secularism (articulated much earlier), as is his argument that loyalty cannot be legally enforced but arises out of citizens sustaining the institutions of freedom provided by the constitution itself. Where I want to differ is with regard to the two-level theory.

As Fossum (2001, p. 193) reads Habermas (in my opinion correctly), “Group-differentiated rights such as cultural rights provide citizens with access to their own culture and can thus be justified insofar as they provide citizens with the necessary resources for utilizing their basic civil and political rights”. In other words, this is the case for multiculturalism within a framework of an abstract political liberalism; for political life is seen as constituted by the actions of autonomous individuals, whose cultural inclinations are met by resources delivered as a result of liberal political deliberations. (Habermas is responding here to Charles Taylor’s [1994] more radical concern that pluralist group rights concerning authentic identity are severely restricted by the homogeneity implied by liberalism’s autonomous individuality.) Seen in this way, constitutional patriotism flows from liberalism alone (albeit in its political rather than its cultural formulation), while pluralism, in the form of cultural diversity, is not part of the political life of individual citizens.

By contrast, I would argue that the political life should be one in which the citizen participates as an individual in relation to collective identity. What we saw with the Indian Constitution is that it does not separate individual and collective rights, let alone hierarchize them. It is true that the very notion of political freedoms is a liberal one, and nobody questions the essentially liberal framework of the Indian Constitution – that is, indeed, the reason why I am using it philosophically in engagement with debates in the constitutional democracies of the West. Even so, its great insight is that citizens are neither generic individuals with no relevant culturally varied identity, nor members of a real or imaginary homogenous culture. Rather, they are both the individual loci of liberal freedoms and persons of specific collective identity. In a plural society with inequalities and asymmetries of power, it is precisely the guarantee of liberty that must be underwritten with provisions relevant to the situation of individual citizens. That relevance may be given by gender, it may be caste, it may be religion, it may even be age. Some contexts change, some may not involve permanent membership of vulnerable minorities, some may be minorities but elite ones, and so on; justice requires specific concern for those who are, at any point, vulnerable. Still, all of this can flow only from the initial conception of citizens as cultural individuals, a composite site of liberal autonomy and plural belonging. Consequently, political life under the Constitution is lived by persons who share the universal rights of liberal freedom, but also – more subtly – the universal right to specific contextual rights. While contextuality concerning vulnerability is the primary concern of the Indian Constitution, it also implies that the context of citizens might be given by more powerful collective identities, as when it reserves for itself the right to reform the practice of upper-caste temples to permit entry to all Hindus (including those who profess to be Jain, Buddhist or Sikh; Indian Constitution, Art. 25 (2) (b) including Explanation II). In short, the Indian Constitution conceives of citizens – participants in the political life of the nation-state – as autonomous individuals given identity as members of cultural, social, religious and other groups: so, e.g., a Dalit woman’s freedoms are those of any other citizen, but also of those resulting from provisions against discrimination against women, and those following from the abolition of untouchability. The fullness of liberty therefore requires the recognition of pluralism at the level of the liberally conceived individual.¹⁹

If constitutional provisions are seen this way, then the Habermasian point about the institutions of freedom of a nation being sustained only by legally unenforceable loyalty on the part of its citizens becomes reinforced through a much more complex conception of the constitution and the citizens it creates. All citizens, including those whose collective identity is vulnerable in different ways – by numbers, by newness of presence in a polity, by economic marginality, etc. – would live in a constitutional dispensation, whose commitment to liberal democracy had actually been displayed in its acceptance of their identity as individuals-with-collective-identities. Some citizens may not share, for example, the ancestral memories of the nation in which they were immigrants; and yet, their loyalty to it would come from the fact that they are not expected to choose (not just by the State, but even by its critics) between stripping away their collective identity and rejecting liberal values.

Of course, multicultural policy has struggled with the question of how to permit entry of collective identities into the political sphere; this is why theorists like Parekh have argued that a fundamental reconceptualisation of the political process of engagement between cultural collectives is required. Nonetheless, a key problem with multicultural policy has been that the failure to contain a plurality of collective identities through resource allocation has been met by other forms of governmental discipline, such as creating officially sanctioned represented bodies (in the manner critiqued by Schirin Amir-Moazami in this volume). What has not been considered is that individual citizens are also members of collectives, so that it is “ordinary” liberal politics that should include questions of group identity. Then the question of representativeness – moot at present, because officially sanctioned bodies are not part of routine democratic processes like voting – would become simply the question of democratic campaigns and debates.

There has to be a virtuous circle between changed constitutional regard for pluralism and a changed politics of representation. Obviously, it would be a matter of enormous complexity to consider what the specific changes in a constitution would have to be in different countries, since so many of the specific provisions of the Indian Constitution are quite beside the point in European contexts. In this essay, I have not been able to discuss any of these further issues, rendering it quite programmatic as it stands. All that I have argued for here is that, in the face of a pluralist society, the constitutional dispensation of liberal democracies should offer a more sophisticated vision of citizens, one in which liberal autonomy is not brought into tension with plural belonging. Many (especially socio-economically struggling) immigrant groups in Western Europe have experienced attempts by governments to buy them off with resources for non-political cultural activity, while having found it insufficient when their political life is restricted by the cultural norms of liberalism, and having become alienated from the political process. Governments have accused many such groups of failing the qualification of assimilation and loyalty to their new country. If, through an enlarged constitutional vision, political life permits collective concerns emblematic of pluralism to be integral – indeed, necessary – elements of liberal freedoms, then there might be a much better chance of encouraging constitutional patriotism in these new citizens. Constitutional patriotism would then become the loyalty to the rational procedures of the nation-state, a political commitment to its processes, just as originally envisaged; but when the constitution is one that integrates pluralism into its liberal framework in the way I have drawn from the normative ideas of the Indian Constitution, then such loyalty could well arise entirely unenforced.

Such a situation could come only through a profound reorientation of political thought in the countries at large; but pluralization is happening apace, and nationalist calls (even so-called “progressive” ones) for assimilative solidarity is psychologically unrealistic in a world of global flows. If liberal democracies are to be adequate to the task of working in pluralized societies, then the very constitutional theory of the citizen must be re-worked. The task may be opposite to the one faced by India, where a potentially visionary constitution has been battered by the failures of the political system;²⁰ if the political resources of rich Western countries are taken to be capable of handling new challenges, then it is their vision that must change.

Bibliography

Abizadeh, Arash (2004): “Liberal Nationalist versus Postnational Social Integration: On the Nation’s Ethno-Cultural Particularity and ‘Concreteness’”. In: Nations and Nationalism 10. No. 3, p. 231–250.

Bajpai, Rochana (2011): Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bhargava, Rajeev (Ed.) (1998): Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bhargava, Rajeev (2008): “Introduction: Outline of a Political Theory of the Indian Constitution”. In: Rajeev Bhargava (Ed.): Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 1–40.

Bhargava, Rajeev (2010): The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bellamy, Richard (1999): Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise. London: Routledge.

Brooks, Stephen (Ed.) (2002): The Challenge of Cultural Pluralism. Westport: Praeger.

Cronin, Ciaran (2003): “Democracy and Collective Identity: In Defence of Constitutional Patriotism”. In: European Journal of Philosophy 11. No. 1, p. 1–28.

Crowder, George (2002): Liberalism and Value Pluralism. London/New York: Continuum.

Fossum, John Erik (2001): “Deep Diversity versus Constitutional Patriotism: Taylor, Habermas and the Canadian Constitutional Crisis”. In: Ethnicities 1. No. 2, p. 179–206.

Gray, John (2000): Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: New Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1994): “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State”. In: Amy Gutman (Ed.): Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition/Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 107–148.

Indian Constitution, at: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html.

Jacobsohn, Gary Jeffrey (2003): The Wheel of Law: India’s Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kekes, John (1992): “The Incompatibility of Liberalism and Pluralism”. In: American Philosophical Quarterly 29. No. 2, p. 141–151.

Kymlicka, Will (2007): Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Müller, Jan-Werner (2007): Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha C. (2007): The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Parekh, Bhikhu (2000): Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Parekh, Bhikhu (2008): A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi (2012): “Liberalism and Pluralism: Reading the Indian Constitution as a Philosophical Document for Constitutional Patriotism”. In: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2012.691765.

Seminar (2010): “We the People: A Symposium on the Constitution of India after 60 Years, 1950–2010”. Seminar 615.

Talisse, Robert B. (2004): “Can Value Pluralists Be Comprehensive Liberals? Galston’s Liberal Pluralism”. In: Contemporary Political Theory 3. No. 2, p. 127–139.

Taylor, Charles (1994): “The Politics of Recognition”. In: Amy Gutman (Ed.): Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition/Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 25–73.

Taylor, Charles (1998): “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion”. In: Journal of Democracy 9. No. 4, p. 143–156.

Young, Iris Marion (1990): Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.