Introduction: Changing Demographic and Religious Landscapes in India and the Involvement of Islam and Muslims
This chapter argues that pluri-legal, polyphonic and polysemic principles of comparative law theorising and the practical navigation of legal orders are always needed as complementary balancing tools to keep sound theory and sustainable practice connected.
Failure to do this quickly turns into communal politics in the name of law and religion, especially when Muslims are involved, and not only in India. In our experience, comparative law approaches, and especially legal pluralist methodologies, preserve and strengthen the sensitivity and awareness of agile agency of various legal, social and religious stakeholders to allow situationspecific forms of law-related navigation. Clearly, this never mean, as opponents of pluralism often assert, that ‘anything goes’, but plurality consciousness demands respect for the fact that complex hybrid solutions may have to be sought that could never totally please everybody. This, then, is part of the human predicament generally, where we play different roles in synergetic relationships of give and take, such as marriage, or one’s family. It also reflects the well-known democratic dilemma, where minority perspectives can still claim respect, but have to accept majoritarian positions which, in turn, need to show consideration of the presence of significant ‘others’. Obviously, states must retain a right to determine responsibly how their respective national identity and legal order should develop in conditions, nowadays, of intense pluralist challenges posed by increasingly diverse demographic structures. Current Indian developments around citizenship law amendments are a very significant illustration of this point.Since we live in the age of globalisation and legal pluralism,1 it has become increasingly dangerous to insist that some kind of ‘law’ or ‘religion’ can simply operate as monist entities to the exclusion of other types of law. We do not
have one law for the whole world, nor would this seem to be a good idea. We can neither have theocracies, nor terror regimes of ‘secular’ laws based on any form of law-related power. For India, this necessity to be plurality-conscious in all respects manifestly means an immensely arduous duty to develop processes and structures that can help to manage sustainably how people of different religious and cultural backgrounds live together. It envisages a nation in which people with very different traditional and modern statuses, and diverse needs and capabilities, operate as a synergetic whole, ultimately in the public interest. All of this is to happen under the umbrella of a constitutional framework with a basic structure that is increasingly focused on the many aspects connected to Article 21 in India’s Constitution, the right to life. In this wider context, too, personal laws seem to remain a very important building block for good governance.
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