Dialectical democracy: Indian Muslims and the politics of resistance

Majoritarian regimes use perfectly legal and democratically uncensurable strategies to subordinate dissenters and unpopular minorities with the consent of their electorally significant mass of supporters. The anxieties ensuing from democratic subordination can be mitigated only through democratically workable participative cultural productions, the Hegelian concept of Bildung of the subordinated, recognised as legitimate by civil society and as uncensurable by the majoritarian state. Employing the illustrative case of Indian Muslims and Hegel’s master-servant dialectic, this paper argues that the fragile essence of democracy itself must be understood in terms of the dialectical relation between the citizen’s particularities and the state’s universality