Respect for diversity and minority rights

The Indian Constitution tries to secure equal respect between communities, and this was never an easy problem to solve in India's context, for two reasons. First, communities in India do not naturally relate to one another as equals — they tend to sit in hierarchical relationships, as caste relations illustrate clearly. Second, even where communities do begin to see each other as equals, they often become rivals instead, as is visible in relations between religious communities. This posed a genuine challenge for the Constitution's framers: how could communities be made liberal in their outlook, and a sense of equal respect fostered among them, given a starting point of entrenched hierarchy and intense rivalry? One easy way out would have been to simply not recognise communities at all in constitutional terms — the approach taken by most Western liberal constitutions, which deal only with individuals. But this route would have been unworkable and undesirable in India's own conditions. This is not because Indians are somehow more attached to their communities than people elsewhere — individuals everywhere belong to cultural communities with their own values, traditions, customs and language (a linguistic community in France or Germany, for example, commands deep attachment too). What genuinely sets India apart is that it has more openly acknowledged the value of communities, because India is a land of multiple, overlapping cultural communities in a way few Western nations are — with far more linguistic and religious communities than a country like Germany or France. It was important to ensure that no single community could systematically dominate the others, and this made it necessary for the Constitution to recognise community-based, not just individual, rights. One con …