The Challenge of Pluralism in India

India has been hailed as a region of significant diversity and pluralism for a long time. However, over the last decades, it has also been a hotbed of multiple forms of intolerance, such as religious, ethnic, linguistic chauvinisms and intolerance often manifested in sporadic as well as organised forms of violence. The violence in Gujarat in 2002, for instance, has brought home the concerns about the ease with which mobilisation could be done for genocidal politics.

Role of civil society
Civil society actors played an important role in the making of democratic transformation in the region. They have resisted tendencies of intolerance, ranging from totalising economic policies to communalism. The prominent strategy for many CSOs is human rights-based. This includes mobilising people to demand justice within the constitutional frame of values and institutions, strategic invocation of legal strategies to seek justice through courts, and conceptualising and articulating their policy within the discourse of rights.

Existing knowledge
Much has been written on symptoms and practices of intolerance, including documentation of the work done by civil society actors and academic writings on the nature and intensity of violence, riots and progroms, the historical and sociological reasons for such violent outbursts and deep-seated prejudices.
However, much of this documentation and analysis is premised upon the belief that once the experience is recorded and presented, the secular state will decisively act and do its constitutional duty. The experience in India unfortunately does not corrobate this belief. The state is more often than not found to be either ineffective or at times complicit in the organisation of violence.
There is also a growing sense of recognition and candid acknowledgement by civil society actors of the limitations of their existing strategies in resisting or containing intolerance and the need to develop innovative new strategies to reinvigorate the process.

What works, what doesn't?
The existing body of writing does not adequately address the issue of the effectiveness of different strategies (as by and large the implementation was left to the state). Besides, the rapidly changing socio-economic and cultural context, wherein significant attitudinal transformation is occuring, necessitates identification of newer ways to make the 'old' concerns like tolerance and pluralism appealing to the youth.

Role of the Pluralism Knowledge Programme
While the existing interventions do attempt to challenge the forces of intolerance and communal politics, the fact that intolerance is not on decline, and more crucially the faith in the neutral secular state has been dented significantly with the recent failures in adequately responding to riots, makes it imperative to critically reflect on the experiences so far. The Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme aims to enhance our understanding in this field and subsequently translate that knowledge into new strategies.