Indian Concept of Minorities | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

Indian Concept of Minorities

Scheme of the Essay:

Exposition: The word ‘minorities’ forms a part of popular political vocabulary but its connotation is fallacious.

Rising Action: It is used to denote non-Hindu religious communities.

Climax:

1. Minorities cannot be based on religious differences.
2. Indian society is most ubiquitous and inequity is associated with social communities.
3. Two such communities of one community may be disadvantaged in one region but not in the other. So, every social community will be the minority.
4. Indices to determine minorities should be social deprivation and economic constraints.

Falling Action: Some social communities which are minorities are not disadvantaged educationally socially or economically.

Ending: Indian concept of minorities is not correct.

Even though the word “minorities’ forms part of the popular political vocabulary in the country, its precise connotation is far from satisfactory. Usually, it is used to denote those non-Hindu religious communities whose members are for one reason or the other inclined to assert their distinctiveness in relation to the Hindu community. Thus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, and Jews are commonly described as minorities in India. Members of the Scheduled Tribes whose members are in many ways more severely disadvantaged are hardly ever characterised as minorities. On the whole, therefore, the word ‘minorities’ seems in India to have been narrowly defined and denotes religious communities whose members project themselves as being different from the majority community. This narrowing down of the word’ minorities cannot be based on religious difference. They are based on social disadvantage and deprivation. Even if the application of the word minorities to the religious communities carries the connotation that they are in some ways socially disadvantaged, arbitrarily restricting its application to religious minorities ignores the fundamental nature of Indian society. There is, therefore, a need to see the concept of minorities in a vastly broadened perspective.

Indian society is among the world’s most iniquitous. Analyses of Indian society have tended to suggest that such inequity as exists is associated with social communities whose boundaries are clearly defined and fixed. Our contention is that this is a gross misrepresentation of the reality of Indian society. Indian society is essentially a segmentary society wherein every social community unites itself against others and at the same time becomes segmented into smaller social communities.

Further, inequities exist in this society at every level of segmentation of social community. A social community considered advantaged in relation to other similar social communities may contain within it two sub-communities one of which may be more advantaged than the other. Perhaps, the case of the Brahmins in Northern India would serve to illustrate this point. The Brahmins are recognised to be an extremely advantaged group by virtue of their caste standing, hold over land, and access to higher education and administration. However, this advantaged position of the Brahmins obtains in relation to other castes and communities. Within the Brahmin social community, the Saryupari Brahmins are disadvantaged in relation to the Kanya Kubja Brahmins. Or, again, within the Kanya Kubja Brahmin social community, the Bis Biswa Brahmins are more advantaged than the Sola Biswa Brahmins. The situation in respect of such segmentation and distribution of social advantages is not particularly different among other social communities whether or not they are recognised as minorities.

The implications of this are obvious. Every social community in India is a minority at some level of social segmentation or another. In other words, it is problematic in the Indian context to speak of some social communities as minorities and to contrast them with the majority or to assume that the minorities are any more disadvantaged and deprived than other social communities. Everyone in Indian society is in one sense or the other disadvantaged as the claim of the Brahmins in South India that they should be granted reservation amply demonstrates. Perhaps, the only difference is in the degree, scale and intensity of the disadvantage and deprivation they can be said to suffer and reflect.

Since inequity and social deprivation is all-pervading within Indian society, it seems that we can classify Indian social communities at any level of social organisation into two broad categories. The first category will be of those communities which are undoubtedly deprived but whose disadvantage and deprivation is relative. They are advantaged in relation to some social communities but disadvantaged and deprived in relation to certain other social communities. The other category will be of those social communities whose deprivation and social disadvantage is absolute. They are disadvantaged in relation to all other social communities and are advantaged in relation to no social community.

It may be asked how or on what criteria is one to determine whether a social community is to be classified as relatively deprived or absolutely deprived. It may be contended that attempting such a classification of social communities in Indian society will call for evolving elaborate indices of the degree, depth and intensity of social and economic deprivation. Fortunately, this is not an insurmountable difficulty. It will be conceded that access to political power, the degree of social homogeneity and absence or otherwise of internal economic differentiation within the community and the intensity of social disabilities to which a social community and the intensity of social disabilities to which a social community has been exposed are fairly reliable indices of deprivation and can serve as a basis for distinguishing the social communities along the relatively deprived-absolutely deprived axis. The position of each community in terms of these three indices is already known and is a principal determinant of the position which they occupy in contemporary society.

Once we begin to look at the social communities in India in terms of the principle already enunciated, it would be evident that the conventional orientation to see social communities in terms of minority-majority or even to isolate some communities as minorities tends to distort the nature of their identification as minorities seem to be disadvantaged and therefore deserving the special consideration in educational development of social communities, we must work towards the strategies for the purpose in terms of clear distinction of the communities according to whether they are relatively or absolutely deprived and not necessarily whether they are minorities or otherwise.