Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India

Democratic Accommodations: The Minority Question in India analyses the complex story of the accommodation of claims, interests and rights of minorities in India. It aims at what India-being one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse nations of the world-can offer to other nations, particularly to the countries of Europe that are confronted with ethnocultural and ethno-religious assertion.

The authors have endorsed the argument that all plural democracies-and all democracies can only be plural in the present historical conjuncture despite the attempts by regimes to make them majoritarian-must work out their own strategies of accommodation by evolving a policy matrix that is suited to the dynamics of their own societies. The book is organised along four rubrics-laws, institutions, policies and political discourse-to understand Indian democracy's distinct response to diversity. The rich and nuanced exploration of the Indian approach to the minority question presented in this book will advance the international debate on diversity and multiculturalism and help policymakers in pluralistic democracies to develop their own particular strategies to deal with minority claims.

Peter Ronald deSouza is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. He was the director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, where he served two terms from 2007 till 2013. He was with the Goa University, Department of Political Science, from 1987 to 2003. His area of research is on democratic politics in South Asia. He is the author of In the Hall of Mirrors: Reflections on Indian Democracy and has edited At Home with Democracy: A Theory of Indian Politics.

Hilal Ahmed is an associate professor at CSDS, New Delhi. He works on political Islam, Muslim modernities/representation and the politics of symbols in South Asia. His book Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation looks at these thematic concerns to make sense of the nature of contemporary Muslim political discourse. He has also authored Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India, where he presents an evocative story of politics and Islam in India that goes beyond the given narratives of Muslim victimhood and Islamic separation.

Mohd. Sanjeer Alam is an associate professor at CSDS, New Delhi. He works on a variety of themes including socio-spatial inequities in education, social exclusion, affirmative action and electoral politics (Muslim politics in particular). His major work is the book titled Religion, Community, and Education: The Case of Rural Bihar. Along with K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, he has co-edited Fixing Electoral Boundaries in India: Processes, Outcomes and Implications for Political Representation.