Examine the ways in which Indian society can be strengthened as multi-cultural society. Is the dominance of single culture a hindrance to multiculturalism in India? (2002)
Bhikhu Parekh draws the distinction this question turns on. A multicultural society is a fact: distinct ways of life sharing a polity. Multiculturalism is the normative response, a settlement giving diversity public standing. India has always been the first; at issue is the second.
Group-differentiated rights
Will Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) held that equal citizenship in a multination state requires group-differentiated rights — self-government, polyethnic and representation rights — legitimate as external protections of a minority, illegitimate as internal restrictions on its members. India’s founders built all three in: the Sixth Schedule councils of the north-east and Fifth Schedule scheduled areas; Article 29 on the script, language and culture of any section of citizens and Article 30 on minorities’ educational institutions; and reserved seats.
Honouring that design is the live task. In Ladakh, after agitation for Sixth Schedule status, the government in September 2025 recorded Scheduled Tribe reservation raised to 84 per cent, Bhoti and Purgi notified as official languages and a third of hill-council seats reserved for women.
Recognition and the dialogical method
Linguistic reorganisation after 1956 turned a secessionist grievance into ordinary federal politics, and the Eighth Schedule now carries twenty-two languages. Charles Taylor (“The Politics of Recognition”, 1992) explains why this matters: identity is dialogical, so misrecognition is injury, not discourtesy. The Sarna code demand — a census column for tribal nature-worship, urged by a Jharkhand assembly resolution in 2020 — is such a claim: some fifty lakh people wrote “Sarna” into a 2011 Census column offering no such entry.
Parekh’s Rethinking Multiculturalism (2000) rejects both monism and a mosaic of sealed cultures: none is self-contained or beyond criticism, and coexistence is negotiated through dialogue about operative public values that are themselves revisable. Rajeev Bhargava‘s principled distance is its Indian form — the state neither walls religion off nor treats all communities alike, but engages or abstains as liberty and equality require. So Article 25(2) reform of Hindu practice and Article 30 aid to minority schools coexist.
Is single-culture dominance a hindrance?
It is, though not the only one.
- Absorption, not plurality. M. N. Srinivas‘ Sanskritisation describes mobility into the dominant idiom; N. K. Bose named its tribal form the Hindu method of tribal absorption. Recognition comes at the price of distinctness — which the Sarna demand refuses.
- Language. The National Education Policy 2020’s three-language formula revived the fear of Hindi imposition; Tamil Nadu held to two languages and issued its own education policy in 2025 amid withheld Samagra Shiksha funds.
- Uniformity mistaken for equality. The Uniform Civil Code in force in Uttarakhand from 27 January 2025 imposes common rules of marriage, divorce, succession and live-in registration, yet exempts Scheduled Tribes — conceding the differentiation it denies elsewhere.
- Exit restricted. Anti-conversion statutes in ten or more states curtail the right to leave a community — an internal restriction Kymlicka rejected.
Conclusion
Dominance in India is polycentric, and every demand above is pressed within the constitutional frame. The real hindrance is less a majority culture than the temptation to read unity as uniformity and equality as identical treatment. India’s achievement was to write recognition into constitutional design rather than treat diversity as disorder. Multiculturalism is strengthened wherever the majority’s culture argues as one voice among many, not as the nation itself.