Between ‘Minorityism’ and Minority Rights

Abstract

Three years since the submission of the Sachar Report, the official paradigm remains shrouded with an intrinsic ‘minorityism’ insofar as devising ameliorative strategies is concerned. Quite opposed to the majoritarian invocation of minorityism as minority appeasement, this article claims to make a conceptual departure by making a distinction between ‘minorityism’ and minority rights. Minorityism is a culturalist myopia that appeals to identity mobilisations, religio-cultural symbolisms and homogenous profiling of communities while glossing over the inequities of power and deficits of development faced by such groups. Such a distinction, the article argues, is critical in dispelling obfuscation of reality through the formulation of generic categories like ‘minority’ that obscure intra-group differentiation along caste, class and gender. Equipped with these conceptual tools, the article interrogates the implementation of the Sachar Committee recommendations.