The crisis in Maharashtra cannot be handled by making diversity a bedrock value. Rather the bedrock value of our society ought to be freedom: the freedom to call any place in the country home, the freedom to alter culture, the freedom subject to practical constraints, to speak any language, the freedom to break out of the fetter of compulsory identities. Out of this freedom new diversities and cultural forms will emerge. But at the moment the discourse on diversity fails in significant ways: it is too compatible with the imposition and preservation of compulsory identities, and too compatible with the idea that each Indian has his appropriate place whether by virtue of geography or kinship. Tocqueville once defined democracy as being a society to the effect that where you are going matters more than where you came from. In this sense identity talk of the kind we are seeing in Maharashtra and the responses to it are deeply anti-democratic.

We should also recognise that we are creating institutions that encourage parochialism rather than counter it. One of the great unwritten tragedies of modern India is the way in which our universities, for instance, are far more parochial in their composition than they were 30 years ago, all products of an ideology that was committed to the proposition that institutions be held hostage to the imperatives of identity politics. Indeed, it is time we gave up the comforting illusion that dangerous forms of identity politics are simply instrumental in their objectives: a form of vote- bank politics, or a resentful expression of underlying economic dynamics. Neither of these explanations is very convincing. Instead, we should confront the more radical thought that these ideological tendencies may indeed be becoming a cultural common sense; the prison house of collective identities a more secure place than the uncertainties of freedom.

... contd.