Writing Sample

(THIS PIECE, ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AS AN ACADEMIC PAPER IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF THE AUTHOR AND IS MEANT AS A WRITING SAMPLE ONLY.)

 CITIZENSHIP AND GROUP DIFFERENCE

This essay looks into the notion of a universal citizenship granted in a liberal democratic and multicultural society.  It aims to unravel the extent to which institutions in such a society are able to impart justice and equality to all its citizens universally. Universal citizenship is by far the most widely accepted ideal of democratic nation states of the twentieth century. Though it is fairly possible for a state to not be liberal and still be democratic or vice-versa but the essay limits its scope to a liberal democratic state like India. When such a state brings into practice the ideal of universal rights, complications occur in the notion of universal equality especially in a multicultural stratified society like that of India. The basic reason behind this anomaly is that diversity and differences often come together with inequality. The main questions that this essay tries to answer are: A). How and when does difference bring along Inequality?  B.) What are the demands of Group Difference? C).Is affirmative action justified?

Before going further ahead it is an imperative to understand the undiluted notion of ‘Citizenship’, as it evolved and as it is held today. The Citizen  in Greek ‘Polites’ is defined as a member of Athenian ‘Polis’ or Roman ‘Respublica’ and is recognized as a form of human association. The classical ideal of a citizen was that of the human as a cognitive, moral, social, intellectual and political being. Aristotle further added to it that the human being cognitive, active and purposive could be fully human if he ruled himself." [J.G.A Pocock, pp. 29-33]. The individual thus became a citizen and the word ‘Citizen’ diverged increasingly from its Aristotelian version. It came to mean someone free by the act of law, free to ask and expect the law's protection, a citizen of such and such standing in the political community [cf. Pocock, p.36]. It has now transformed into a status that further confers on people a kind of legal status carrying with it rights to certain things viz. possessions, immunities as well as certain expectations. Today, the status of a citizen denotes a membership in a community of shared common law. The ideal of a citizen as a social being involved in social actions and much more than that,  it's a result of innumerable incidents that took place gradually over a couple of millennia since Plato and Aristotle. To mention the biggest revolution of the modern world-the French revolution; it was an affirmation of an active citizenship and its classical virtue i.e. The Declaration of Rights of a Man. When Aristotle defined man as truly political animal in politics, he also assumed that political discussion was an exercise in the rational choice for the public good and that the only people fit for such an exercise were those capable of rational choice.  Thus, from its very inception, citizenship has been an 'exclusionary' category, justifying the coercive rule of inclusion of some over the exclusion of others. Thinkers like Michael Ignatieff point to the myth in the conception of citizenship and maintain that it has sustained itself through time. Whereas, others such as George Armstrong Kelly uphold the demise of the concept of the State in the twentieth century as the factor responsible for the problematic nature of Citizenship in today's Democracy. According to him this demise was brought about by factors such as a revulsion against the notion of the state which emerged from the brutalization of people by the state action during the two world wars, the idealism associated with the 'State’ getting dispelled upon an empirical analysis and lastly, the development of such theories as the Marxist theory and on the other hand, that of the liberal theory that aided in the development of profit making corporations. [cf. Kelly, pp.79-80].

It would be apt to say at this point that political concepts are never static but undergo several modifications. So much so that they often get so stretched out and diluted that their definitions come on the brink of extinction.

 In today's era of globalization every developed and developing country is experiencing an influx of population from other states. These states besides having their own pluralistic societies have to make space for these additional groups that have acquired the state's citizenship through naturalization.  The pluralistic canvas of such societies keeps getting bigger and this simultaneously creates pressure on the existing principles of citizenship to make further space for everyone in the society……