Content area
Abstract
This research is about the shifting positions of the marginal citizens and the roles of the policy process and political practices in shaping and/or maintaining those positions. Instead of looking at the “minorities” as accepted categories, the focus is on the discursive, narrative, symbolic practices that influence these very categories and how these processes of becoming ‘marginal’ are interrelated with the various forms of space (“cultural,” “political,” “social”) the citizens inhabit. This project specifically aims to uncover how the identities of the ‘backward classes’ are formed in India in the context of the institutionalized social and cultural patterns.
This attempt to understand the formation of marginal identity begins from the historic formation of caste and journeys through the colonial and postcolonial struggles to modern day policies. The Mandal Commission report has been selected as the “policy” that helps to uncover how differences between self and other are constituted, how the social and political realities change meanings in different contexts and how all these “discourses” construct “identity.” The Mandal Commission is, perhaps, the most controversial policy in India, attempting to ensure social justice by reserving slots for higher education and government employment for certain castes of people. The concepts and thoughts of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, along with postcolonial theorists, have been applied to analyze the Mandal report as a discourse that relates back to and is shaped by its history.
As state policies affect the processes of identity formation by shaping the power relations between the self and the other , the underlying assumptions and associated norms of the “policy space” has been analyzed and compared with the growing fundamentalist powers as the latter are engaged and have been successful in creating a new “political space” for its participants. The findings indicate that the Mandal operates very differently from the social reality and volatile political environment in its assumptions and recommendations. While it strives to create provisions to assimilate the backward classes into mainstream public life, it also adheres to the system of categorization, which identify and influence the very backwardness.
