By Jaimine Vaishnav

The “status” of socioreligious minorities in India is substandard, thanks to their structurally-imposed, so-called scientific belief in the legal system which is purely responsible for debauching their sociological rank. Albeit there are privileges and benefits to “affirmatively” uplift their existence in the society, but still they are unable to objectively express their economic predicament in “secular” India because the established instruments of the Indian government (since 1947) are pathologically engrossed with the liberal attitude of constitutionally transforming the “subverts into submits.” Pleading the need for a “democratic” government and their cultural mobs to acknowledge their “minority rights” is like seeing fire create wood.

Here, I attempt to: 1) apply deductive reasoning to the said issues, 2) philosophically endeavor to inform the prominence of property rights, 3) calculate the economical costs of sustaining minority rights, and 4) revisit Dr. Ambedkar’s approach towards free-market capitalism. The need of the hour is for said minorities to critically embrace heterodoxical thinking rather than greasing the palms of conventional thinking.

To begin with, minority rights are collective rights. Minority rights are human rights “too” and are also “constitutionally” acknowledged. Political populism is born out of this legal action and the game is sacredly over. The game actually ends with the conceptualization, because they are not done without rent-seeking. It is conclusively destroyed when minority rights are privileged with special benefits instead of are backed by property rights. The crux of this passage is to question: “Are human rights ‘humane’ without property rights?” If yes, then are they generated without expropriating “others”? If no, then it is the right time to change the wrong by tranquilly clamoring for the right to practice self-association or social-association by seceding away from the “mainstream democracy.”

If the proponents of associationism are violently/legally intimidated, then we are at the point where one must understand that their own government (which vociferously talks about equality or justice) is displaying anti-democractic motives. Why, in a democratic nation like India, must politicians remind their own people about democracy? If still unconvinced by my questions, take your time to economically calculate the management of legal rights against natural rights.

Natural rights are “inherent in nature” and also “inalienable.” Natural rights assist one to consciously recognize the salience of property rights, the right to associate or secede, and the right to homestead. Whereas, legal rights suggest that it is unjust to grant human beings volition and liberty because human beings are selfish and brutish. If all human beings are “bad,” according to advocates of legal rights, then what makes them conclude that it is moral to block the freedom of people and yet unblock the whims of a few authorities? Remember that these “few” authorities are considered the “guarantors” of people’s liberty as well as minority rights. I am not proposing any unscientific argument against minorities’ beliefs, but seeking to provoke thought beyond the realm of the status quo within the so-called active discussions.

The only minority on our planet is an individual. The socioreligious communities in India who are repeatedly told or reminded about their social rank in society must undo what they believe and walk the path of individuation because it is naturally moral to associate on their own. Government interventionism is the problem to all solutions only because its health is dependent upon a belief in “unification” at gun-point. Unification at gun-point doesn’t make allowance for minorities’ considerations because this action is driven by the animal spirit of “greater good” and ends up considering minorities as a political basket of utilities.

Other than sociocultural identities, in India even LGBT community requires permission. What people do with their private lives is their own business. It is immoral when government steps in to decide who should sleep with whom. We must remember that pleading for government to govern the society doesn’t come for free, as it is accompanied by “empowered” statism and ends up accomplishing the opposite of what one imagines it will. Asking for more privileges for “minority rights” does more harm than good because this mobilization process does nothing but catalyze statism. The predicament grows when rights are divided and classified without individual consent. Proponents of minority rights hold so-called “objective” objectives like equality for all, etc. but it is logically inconsistent since, here, government intervenes to allocate the privileges and ultimately pauperizes the aim for which they all primarily stand to fight.

Socially alienated minorities must stop seeking political recognition. They must simply act freely and disobediently against the mainstream “democratic” syntax. That is, their lives must become an expression of their natural human liberties so their very actions serve as a sign of revolution.

I live in an anti-liberal era in which “individual choice” is highly suspected. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. Isn’t it true? We can’t even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have traveled from the Age of Reason to our own times.

How a person uses the right to associate (which necessarily means the right not to associate) is a matter of individual choice profoundly influenced by the cultural context. That a person has the right to make these choices on his or her own cannot be denied by anyone who believes in liberty. The right to exclude is not something incidental but is actually core to the functioning of civilization. If I use proprietary software, I can’t download it without signing a contractual agreement. If I refuse to sign, the company doesn’t have to sell it to me. We exercise the right to exclude every day. If you go to lunch, some people come and some people do not. When you have a dinner party, you are careful to include some people and necessarily exclude others. Some restaurants expect and demand shoes and shirts and even coats and ties. This website includes some articles and excludes others, includes some people in its editorial meetings and excludes others. When a business hires, some people make the cut and others do not. It is the same with college admissions, church membership, fraternities, civic clubs, and nearly every other association. They all exercise the right to exclude. It is central to the organization of every aspect of life.

If this right is denied, what do we get in its place? Coercion and compulsion. People are forced together by the state, with one group required at the point of a gun to serve another group.

As Thomas Paine explained: “In those associations which men promiscuously form for the purpose of trade or of any concern, in which government is totally out of the question, and in which they act merely on the principles of society, we see how naturally the various parties unite; and this shows, by comparison, that governments, so far from always being the cause or means of order, are often the destruction of it.”

I am not insulting the efforts and rational sacrifices of minorities, but trying my best to show the error of their ways. How can we improve and succeed without recognizing and correcting our failures and missteps. At last, readers are free to make up their own minds after evaluating all rational evidences.

Now, minorities mustn’t reckon with the Indian system of socialism any longer. It has failed humanity. What minorities and all others really need is capital. What is lacking (and untried) in India is capitalism. The anti-capitalistic mentality in India is, however, an accepted norm.

I won’t discuss here what went wrong, but I hope that I don’t cause any unscientific disgruntlement to my readers or followers of India’s (so-called, as he later rejected the document) constitutional father Dr. B. R. Ambedkar by informing them that he was a staunch supporter of free-market capitalism. Minorities in India, as per my observation, grimace when they hear about “capitalism.” This should not be the case, because capitalism has not been practiced yet. To date, only crony-capitalism (known also as fascism) has dominated the podium.

Dr. Ambedkar, in his magnum opus The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origins and Solutions (1923), holds:

“Trade is an important apparatus in a society, based on private property and pursuit of individual gain; without it, it would be difficult for its members to distribute the specialized products of their labour…. But a trading society is unavoidably a pecuniary society, a society which of necessity carries on its transactions in terms of money. In fact, the distribution is not primarily an exchange of products against products, but products against money. In such a society, money therefore necessarily becomes the pivot on which everything revolves. With money as the focusing-point of all human efforts, interests, desires, and ambitions, a trading society is bound to function in a regime of price, where successes and failures are results of nice calculations of price-outlay as against price-product.”

Dr. Ambedkar was also a critic of the gold exchange standard and fiat currency, especially when the currency printing press remained in the hands of the government, noting:

“One of the evils of the Exchange Standard is that it is subject to management. Now a convertible system is also a managed system. Therefore, by adopting the convertible system we do not get rid of the evil of management, which is really the bane of the present system. Besides, a managed currency is to be altogether avoided when the management is to be in the hands of the Government. When the management is by a bank there is less chance of mismanagement. For the penalty for imprudent issue, or mismanagement is visited by disaster directly upon the property of the issuer. But the chance of mismanagement is greater when it is issued by Government because the issue of government money is authorized and conducted by men who are never under any present responsibility for private loss in case of bad judgment or mismanagement.”

In his PhD thesis, he also took aim at centralization (which we could also term “collectivism”), noting:

“By centralization all progress tends to be retarded, all initiative liable to be checked and the sense of responsibility of Local Authorities greatly impaired… centralization conflicts with what may be regarded as a cardinal principle of good government. Thus, centralization, unless greatly circumscribed, must lead to inefficiency. This was sure to occur even in homogeneous states, and above all in a country like India where there are to be found more diversities of race, language, religion, customs and economic conditions. In such circumstances there must come a point at which the higher authority must be less competent than the lower because it cannot by any possibility posses the requisite knowledge of all local conditions. It was therefore obvious that a Central Government for the whole of India could not be said to posses knowledge and experience of all various conditions prevailing in the different Provinces under it. It, therefore, necessarily becomes an authority less competent to deal with matters of provincial administration than the Provisional Governments, the members of which could not be said to be markedly inferior, and must generally be equal in ability to those of the Central Government, while necessarily superior as a body in point of knowledge.”

To conclude, I ratiocinate that “minorities” adopt the economy of capitalism because it guarantees voluntary actions, responsibility, and accountability. Asking government to look out for them is not only costly but devilish since it empowers tyranny in society. To commence my final word, I refer to Aleksandar Pavkovic, associate professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Macquarie University in Australia and author of several books on secession, who describes five justifications for a general right of secession within liberal political theory:

– Anarcho-Capitalism: the individual liberty to form political associations and private property rights together justify the right to secede and to create a “viable political order” with like-minded individuals.

– Democratic Secessionism: the right of secession, as a variant of the right of self-determination, is vested in a “territorial community” which wishes to secede from “their existing political community”; the group wishing to secede then proceeds to delimit “its” territory from the majority.

– Communitarian Secessionism: any group with a particular “participation-enhancing” identity, concentrated in a particular territory, which desires to improve its members’ political participation has a prima facie right to secede.

– Cultural Secessionism: any group which was previously in a minority has a right to protect and develop its own culture and distinct national identity through seceding into an independent state.

– The Secessionism of Threatened Cultures: if a minority culture is threatened within a state that has a majority culture, the minority has a right to form a state of its own which can protect its culture.

It is then more advisable to end allegiance to the government (which, as the root of the word “allegiance” betrays, implies a feudal relationship between a sovereign and a liege, or a master and a servant, or a Brahmin and a Shudra) rather than begging for more privileges.

When the government objectively fails on first sight, how do you subjectively guarantee the second chance?

Mr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a professor of journalism, economics, sociology, and psychology who is based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.