India's Civic Identity

The Indian Republic is approximately 1,262,000 square miles in territory. It has a population of 1,100 million people. Its institutional inheritance and shared civic norms help unite a varied and heterogeneous land.

Independent India is premised on a civic identity. This includes its institutions, its constitution, the rule of law and due process. The emphasis is on liberty, equality and individual rights. The institutions include the Indian administrative service - once the steel arm of empire, the Indian army, the Indian judiciary, the Indian railway and the Indian print media. The Indian middle class of 300 million further strengthens national cohesion. This focus on the civic rather than on race or religion distinguishes India from its neighbors. The accent is on liberal political values.

This civic identity has been under threat since the late 1960s, first by the super-imposition of language-based administrative units and then caste-based public sector recruitment.

British India had multi-ethnic administrative units such as the Bengal, Bombay and Madras Presidencies. The princely states of Hyderabad, Kashmir and Travancore were also multi-ethnic. Administrative units demarcated by language were only created in the late 1960s. This included Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, the 7 states of the North East and the Punjab.

The Indian constitution did not envisage caste-based affirmative action as a permanent fixture either. The original intent was to introduce caste-based reservations for a limited duration of time to address legitimate issues of social justice and to then jettison it in the mid 1960s. The unanticipated continuation and extension of caste-based reservations to a whole slew of non-scheduled castes and tribes only began in the late 1960s.

Fortunately, the politics of language have receded. Caste politics have also stabilized despite pockets of Maoist violence. The current administration now plans to use religion as a yardstick to apportion public and private resources.

The Government intends to introduce reservations in the public sector for Muslims, support religious minority schools, assess the religious composition of the military and survey the socio-economic conditions of Muslims in different parts of the country in order to design a religion-based affirmative action package. Efforts are underway to over-rule the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Illegal Migrants Determination Act. These initiatives will further undermine the civic identity of the Indian state.

The Congress party hopes to gain electoral advantage in doing so. However, this short-sighted policy will only lead to the resurgence of religion-based politics, one that will sweep the party away. It is time to revert to the original vision of the Indian constitution. The emphasis should be on civic norms and institutions, not ascriptive definitions of race, caste and religion.