Book Review: Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Rajeshwari Deshpande |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023013482801 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
125
Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press. 2011. 324 pages. ` 795.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013482801
Political discourses on group rights in India acquired a complex character in the post 1990 period as
several uneven claims of representation and social justice arrived on the scene. The book under review
is an ambitious attempt to unravel some of these complexities in its revisit to the Indian debates on
difference.
The exercise is an ambitious one because it addresses the debates around group rights from several
simultaneous vantage points to develop a nuanced understanding of the working of Indian democracy, of
liberalism and liberal multiculturalism and also of structuring of the ideologies.
The main argument of the book develops around two critical junctures in the history of the post
independence Indian state—the late 1940s and the 1980s. It selects three landmark debates from these
two phases—the constituent assembly debates of 1946–1949, the Shah Bano debate of 1986 and the
Mandal debate of 1990 for detailed investigations of the discourses on group rights. The investigations
are guided by a distinct methodological choice (what the author refers to as a ‘different route’ to track the
postcolonial realities) of textual analysis of legislative debates. The focus is to understand how the con-
struction of ideology occurs through practical engagement in policy making and in routine practices of
political debates. The approach helps the author with an empirical study of ideology without essentially
focusing on key individuals and without succumbing to instrumentalist accounts of ideology.
Instead, mainly following Michael Freeden’s framework of ‘ideologies as political resources’, the
book develops a conceptual model to understand the dynamics of political ideology in the Indian con-
text. The model is based on a set of inter linked concepts of...
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