In politics, it’s very important that the people are given the choice to have, and to exercise, these multiple and complementary identities. For me, the best sites to study this phenomenon have been countries like Spain and India. The political process can also be constructed in a way that leads to polarised and singular identities as in Yugoslavia.

But once you have a war, as in Sri Lanka, and there are war leaders on both sides, it’s hard though not impossible to reconstruct multiple and complementary identities. More than a problem of designing new political institutions, the challenge is to craft informal social arrangements that give breathing space to several identities. Well before the formal creed of secularism, people in many countries had arrived at “rituals of respect” for each other, where they would attend the other person’s ceremonies, investing in a shared harmony.

•What challenge does terrorism pose for democracy seen in this way?

One of the challenges is purely empirical. Many Americans think Arabs are the dominant community in Islam. But Arabs are only 21 per cent of the world’s Muslims.

India, which has the third or fourth largest Muslim population in the world, has — with the exception of the Emergency — the longest period of sustained democracy of all developing countries.

We have to look at the achievements of India, and Indonesia and Senegal. And recognise that more than half of the Muslim population lives in countries that are or are close to being democracies. But there is zero democracy in the Arab world. Obviously, the variable they have in common — Islam — cannot explain this. Something else is happening.

... contd.