TWO contradictory precepts shape our conflicting and apparently opportunistic beliefs about the moral meanings of majorities. Both are deeply embedded in contemporary common sense and could also be regarded as precepts on minorities. Let us label one as the ‘republican’ and the other as the ‘excellence’ precept.

In its ubiquitous everyday form, the republican precept is familiar to us as the principle of ‘majority rule’. Invoked in this way, it appears to be straightforwardly about numbers – the many are better than the few in the sense that they have a stronger moral claim, and this claim should prevail wherever it is in conflict with the claims of the few. It is hardly necessary to underline the power and reach of this popular ideology, which is deployed in countless situations ranging from children choosing games to nations choosing governments. Ruthlessly reduced to its Orwellian essence, the republican precept yields the slogan: ‘many is better’, and by implication, ‘few is worse’.

But the excellence precept appears to be something entirely different – not only does it explicitly refuse the logic of numbers, it also seems to be acknowledging a law of nature rather than instituting a social principle. It consists of the seemingly self-evident fact that, as the exception to the rule of mediocrity, excellence must necessarily be, well, exceptional. This is a tautology: since excellence is defined as the extraordinary. And since the ordinary must be common rather than uncommon, it follows that the extraordinary must be rare, or at least much less numerous than the ordinary. Thus the excellence precept reduces to the Orwellian mantra: ‘the best are few’, and by implication, ‘the rest are many’.

Whether at a conscious or unconscious level these precepts guide our moral evaluation of majorities and minorities, thus determining the weight we attach to the claims made in their name. It is instructive, even at this elementary level, to reflect upon the selective invocation of the moral worth of majorities (or minorities) in everyday life.

An obvious example is the communal question, specially the Hindu-Muslim binary, which is generally seen as a majority-minority question in India. The logic of numbers is invariably deployed in this context, albeit often in contradictory ways (eg: a small minority should know its place; but also, minorities are unfairly outbreeding the majority and will soon replace them). By contrast, the use of numbers is remarkably recent in contemporary popular discourse on caste, having begun in earnest only in the 1990s after the Mandal controversy. Although the upper castes have always been and continue to be a minority, it is only very recently that they have been named as such. In fact, upper caste discourse has not only occupied the vantage point of the mainstream moral majority, it has done so with unthinking ease, and has – for the most part – been allowed to do so even by opponents.

 

Somewhere between community and caste (but perhaps closer to the latter) is class. As a popular self-description, the wonderfully elastic term ‘middle class’ exaggerates its size everywhere, and the disease is endemic in India as well. Groups described as ‘middle class’ in the media and in dominant discourse are far from the middle of the economic pyramid and close to its top. Groups that are actually in the middle – a wide band around the median level of living – are too poor to be of interest to the mainstream media, and not poor enough for the occasional ‘human interest’ story on starvation deaths or the like. Thus, what is generally referred to as the middle class in India constitutes a fairly small minority, even though it succeeds in casting a much larger ideological shadow.

The case of ‘the poor’ is roughly the opposite. On the one hand, in poor countries like India, it is hardly surprising that they are believed to be a very large number; in fact, we find it hard to imagine a future when this will no longer be true. But on the other hand, despite their permanent presence in populist rhetoric, in political terms ‘the poor’ in India have generally been a ‘cold’ rather than a ‘hot’ majority (unlike, say, ‘Hindus’). They have cooled off even more in the ideological climate dominated by neo-liberalism, which is why their alleged impact on the last two general elections is seen as an aberration and has attracted so much attention.

There are other social groups and categories whose public and political importance seems to be relatively autonomous of their number. Though very small and sometimes tiny in numerical terms, they are usually not named as such, and while their minority status certainly does not limit their social salience or the amount of public attention they receive, it does not necessarily enhance them either. Examples include: car owners, the physically challenged, criminals, HIV positive persons, government servants, illegal immigrants, tax payers, and terrorists.

While each of these groups can become ‘hot’ under specific conditions, the reasons vary widely. Some of these groups are seen (or presented) as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’, but this moral valuation is largely independent of size. By contrast, for the groups discussed earlier – Hindus, Muslims, the middle classes, the poor – claims about number provide the moral backing for subsequent political or social demands. These variations serve to underline the fact that the ethical-moral worth of majorities and minorities is never a matter of number alone – rather, it depends on the ideological labour that establishes the link between number and moral worth, and simultaneously renders it self-evident.

 

If the republican precept takes this link in one direction, namely the subordination of (the claims of) minorities, the excellence precept takes it in the opposite direction by not only delegitimizing majorities but also installing minority status as the defining condition for membership in the ‘superior’ group. Just as the democratic election is the paradigm for the republican precept, the model for the excellence precept is that of a sporting contest or competitive examination. The game or examination is structured to identify ‘the best’ – out of the large number of competitors, only a tiny minority will ‘win’ (or achieve high ranks) while the rest will ‘lose’.

As in the simple majority electoral system, winners take all here even when they win by a hundredth of a second or a thousandth of a mark, and losers are merely losers. Although the format of the race or examination is presented as the inevitable consequence of a prior ‘natural’ fact – namely, that excellence is rare – it is actually designed to prove this fact. By offering only a few places (or ranks) to be filled by the winners, and by refusing to distinguish among the many losers, the race format stages a tautological defence of the excellence precept.

 

Thus, despite its rejection of the logic of numbers in principle, the excellence precept is in practice a device for marginalizing the many in a socially legitimate and fair manner. It may rightly insist that it identifies losers and winners by relative merit and not by relative number, but the fact stands that losers are always in the majority and the winners in the minority. It is in this sense that the excellence precept can be placed on the same plane as the republican precept as another way of defining the moral worth of majorities and minorities. Given their ideological strength and embed-dedness, it is hardly surprising that both precepts anchor a variety of institutional mechanisms for the distribution of power, resources and opportunities. However, their practical invocation involves specific forms of transference or transposition, sleights of hand that deserve detailed scrutiny.

 

How and why did the majority become the rightful bearer of political virtue in western liberalism? While a proper answer to this question requires a long trek along well-trodden trails in the history of liberal democratic thought, let me take a drastic shortcut to highlight a few points of interest.

To begin with, it is interesting to note that the legitimation of the inequality between majority and minority is the product of the establishment (or assumption) of equality. It is because liberalism is predicated on the fundamental equality of all participants in the public sphere that the intrinsically merit-less principle of number can be allowed to adjudicate differences of opinion. Which brings us to the all important point, namely, that the specific kinds of majorities originally privileged by liberal democracy were communities of opinion, not communities of social or cultural ascription. It is to allow for and protect the right to dissent – while at the same time incorporating a mechanism to overcome stalemates – that the principle of majority rule is invented.

Liberalism allows majorities to rule because they are seen as temporary formations based on opinion or preference. The liberal notion of majority did not refer to ascriptive communities based on identity-markers like race, ethnicity, religion, or caste because such communities are not formed by choice or opinion, nor are they temporary. It is precisely because liberal democracy assumes that the contestations among such groups have been settled in some fashion that it is able to institute as simple a principle as majority rule.

Considered from another angle, the virtue invested in the majority reflects liberal antipathy towards minorities. Before the post-World War II United Nations era of human rights legislation for the protection of vulnerable minorities, the primary referents for the term were oligarchies and aristocracies of various kinds. It is against such powerful elites that liberalism waged its well-known ideological struggles. But its middle class orientation makes liberalism distrustful of the masses as well. It is as a compromise between mass anarchy and elite cabals that the ‘majority of opinion’ finds its place as a ubiquitous component of modern commonsense.

 

As is now well-known, the colonial and post-colonial versions of western majoritarianism follow a different path. Thanks to the accumulated scholarship of the last three decades, we are now well-versed in the details of the journey that conveys the colonial polity from fuzzy communities to majority rule through the governmental technologies of enumeration and the institution of the vote. However, the specifically ethical-moral aspects of this transformation are yet to be clearly delineated. In an important intervention towards this end, David Scott argues that the origins of electoral majoritarianism in colonial South Asia are to be found in Sri Lanka in the 1930s.¹

A Royal Commission of Enquiry (named after its chair, Lord Donoughmore) recommended constitutional reforms for Ceylon (as it was then known), the most dramatic of which was the introduction of universal adult franchise. This was not only an unprecedented step in the history of colonialism, but came barely two years after universal suffrage was introduced in Britain. The older system of ‘communal representation’ was also discontinued, thus completely transforming Sri Lankan politics. In brief, the ‘Donoughmore Period’ (1931-1947) converted a polity consisting of two major communities – the Tamils and the Sinhalese – into one where the Sinhalese became a ‘majority’ and the Tamils (and other groups) became ‘minorities’.

The Donoughmore Commission was responding to ‘the paradox of the colonial liberal-democratic project’² exemplified by the stance of western-educated Sri Lankan nationalists, specially the Tamils, who were demanding greater political representation for native elites, but were also vehemently opposed to universal franchise. Given that this opportunistic attitude to democracy existed in a context where religious and ethnic communities (rather than individuals) were recognized as political subjects, the commission believed that the existing system of communal representation would perpetuate elite dominance.

 

From the point of view of the colonial reformers, India was an ancient society where communalism had deep roots and had to be recognized, whereas Ceylon’s communal politics was relatively new. Therefore, there existed on the island (unlike on the subcontinent) the possibility of a rapid transition to modern liberal-democratic politics. As an experiment in enlightened colonial rule, universal suffrage was expected to have ‘an educative, or rather, a governing, effect on the conduct of political elites… By making the elite dependent upon a mass electorate, colonial power intended to deploy universal suffrage as a tactic... to refashion their political sensibilities in the direction of acquiring a more democratic and more egalitarian ethos’.³ (emphasis original)

 

The crucial development here is the normalization of number as a self-evidently modern, secular and progressive principle for the distribution of political power. However, when the ethical value acquired by number in western liberal-democratic theory is transferred to the very different context of the non-western colony, it enables a new form of ‘modernized’ communal-politics-by-other-means. Tamil opposition to universal franchise was not just elitist – it was also designed to protect the parity between the Tamil and Sinhala communities in the colonial polity. The introduction of the majoritarian principle seriously disables Tamil elite politicians relative to Sinhala elite politicians; although both are elites, one can claim to represent the majority and therefore the nation at large, whereas the other is confined to representing the minority.

The de-legitimization and subordination of the minority restricts the nature of the politics that it can henceforth produce. Once it is explicitly defined as such, a minority standpoint can only articulate a defensive politics centred on the safeguarding of minority rights from encroachment by the majority; it can no longer stake a positive claim to a ‘full’ share in the nation, as Tamil politicians routinely did in the pre-Donoughmore era of restricted franchise and communal representation. The tragic trajectories of Tamil-Sinhala conflict set in motion by the majority principle are now a part of subcontinental history, but a fuller understanding requires us to look at the majority side as well.

As Arjun Appadurai reminds us, the tension between majority identities and national identities has often produced a perverse ‘fear of small numbers’. ‘[T]he strange inner reciprocity of the categories of "majority" and "minority" in liberal social thought... produces... the anxiety of incompleteness. Numerical majorities can become predatory and ethnocidal with regard to small numbers precisely when some minorities (and their small numbers) remind these majorities of the small gap which lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethnos.’ (emphasis original)⁴

 

Incited by the ironic yet irresistible logic of number as a secular-modern principle of ethnic-traditional power, and haunted by its own sense of insufficient sovereignty, communal majoritarianism and its violent agendas are among the most momentous products of globalization.

But the effects of ascriptive majoritarianism are not limited to such recent developments alone. Writing from within the context of the race problem in the United States, the legal scholar and activist Lani Guinier stresses the need to devise alternative modalities to redress the natural ‘tyranny of the majority.’ She begins by delineating the problems that arise when the procedural majorities of liberal thought – which she labels Madisonian majorities – are replaced by substantive or permanent majorities based on race. Since the self-corrective mechanisms associated with temporary majorities are absent, extra effort is required to ensure that permanent majorities do not perpetually exclude minorities.⁵

Guinier aims to broaden the spectrum of institutional solutions within the basic framework of liberal democratic politics. Backed by a comprehensive critique of the winner-takes-all electoral systems, she advocates variants of consociationalism (or proportional power-sharing), ‘turn taking’ and cumulative voting. Minorities can be given a more effective share in the nation through turn taking (where power alternates between majority and minority groups) or cumulative voting (where each voter gets multiple votes to be divided among the available electoral options). Her overall framework is definitely of interest for India, particularly her critique of spatially delimited constituencies, where she argues that we must overcome tradition and bureaucratic inertia in order to experiment with non-spatial constituencies that can more effectively represent permanent minorities.

 

If the transposition of procedural into substantive majorities involves a misrecognition of sorts, a comparable sleight of hand is involved in the unthinking or motivated invocation of excellence (or maximum merit) where what is actually required is competence (or sufficient merit). The model of the competitive race is fundamentally unsuited for the distribution of most social resources and opportunities because of its indexicality and unidimensional nature.

With sporting contests, winning does not perform an indexical function, that is, it does not allow the winner to (directly) claim other opportunities or resources. However, in its examination variant, the race model does perform an indexical function – it regulates access to many kinds of resources and opportunities, such as a good job, or entry into a coveted training or educational programme, etcetera. This is particularly true of scarce resources that are in high demand, which are typically sought to be rationed in a merit-based manner, with rank in a competitive examination acting as an index of relative merit. Here rank performs the same moral-ideological function as number in the political context – it is the modern, secular-rational principle that trumps ascriptive identity. But what if these trumps are disproportionately concentrated in ascriptively-defined hands like, for example, the upper castes?

 

This is where the equivocation of liberal meritocracy becomes visible. The insistence on being blind to all criteria other than merit is egalitarian only where there is equal access to the processes by which merit itself is acquired. Where this is not true, meritocracy becomes a means for the advantaged group to perpetuate its traditional dominance in secular-modern garb, much like the predatory ethnic majority. Moreover, meritocratic principles are typically invoked in an exclusive and all-or-nothing fashion, rather like simple majority elections. Exclusive appeal to merit means that it is the one and only criterion, no others being permitted. The all-or-nothing principle means that the winners (according to the merit-rank criterion) take ‘all’ of the resource or opportunity that is being distributed – losers get nothing. Finally, merit ranking in particular and the notion of excellence in general are predicated on ‘maximum’ or highest merit.

Most of these conventions and principles are misplaced. To begin with, it is only in very rare situations that maximum merit is a necessary criterion for rationing; most situations are perfectly amenable to adequate merit or competence. Given that it is only an indirect and imperfect indicator of the merit that is actually being measured (like the probability of being a good doctor, engineer or administrator for example), the competitive examination cannot afford to claim that it should be the only criterion, or that winners should take all.

Strong arguments exist for the use of multiple criteria, with threshold levels of competence as the qualifying condition. Once this condition is met, other principles of equitable distribution can very well be brought into play. If such arguments have merit (so to speak), the fact that they are rarely considered, or the fact that there is so much opposition to them should alert us to the presence of manipulative mechanisms.

 

Put bluntly, the ideological function of the excellence precept is to delegitimize the ‘sufficient’ competence of large numbers in favour of the ‘greater’ competence of the very small numbers who occupy the top of a forcibly generated merit ranking hierarchy. Just as the numerical majority acquires a volatile and potentially violent edge when it coincides with predatory identities, the use of the principle of excellence to justify the domination of particular caste or ascriptive groups is bound to be socially incendiary. The unwarranted intrusion of strict relative ranking into contexts where it is neither functionally nor ethically required, indicates that the rhetoric of excellence may be functioning as an anti-majoritarian mirror image of the majority rule principle.

The excellence of the majority, and a full share of the nation for minorities – these ideas seem unthinkable and unspeakable today because of the moral meanings we have unthinkingly invested in majorities and minorities of different kinds. Divestment and self-conscious re-investment are therefore the unavoidable items on the agendas of tomorrow.

 

Footnotes:

1. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999. Ch. 7, pp. 158-89.

2. Ibid., p. 168.

3. Ibid., p. 168.

4. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006, p. 8. See also Ch.4, pp. 49-86.

5. Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy, The Free Press, New York, 1995.