Opinion The multi-individual society

attempt to rescue liberalism from its counterfeit cousin,multiculturalism. Others see an enactment of the same narrow politics that produced a crisis in many liberal societies in the first place. Whether the speech will turn out to be a clear statement of liberal principles or a provocative salvo in the culture wars will be determined more by the course of Cameron’s politics than the speech itself. But it is important to be clear about the different issues at stake in the ideological polemics over multiculturalism.

The contest between liberalism and multiculturalism was about the relationship between freedom and diversity. Multiculturalism often fell into three traps in the context of this relationship. First,it ignored the fact that equal freedom for all indivi-

duals is the core value.

If a group can make the argument that no values and laws should be

imposed on it,if it has not consented to them,so can any individual within a group. So the rights of individuals are paramount; no collective identity can override them. The burden of justification has to be met at the

individual level. If the range of freedom expands,all kinds of diversity will flourish anyway. But this will not necessarily be the diversity of well-defined cultural groups. It will be something that both draws upon culture and subverts it at the same time.

From a distant,aestheticised,point of view,cultures and practices form an extraordinary mosaic. From the practical point of view of individuals living within any of these cultures,these cultures and practices are horizons within which they operate. Even when not oppressive,these horizons might appear to them as constraints.

It would be morally obtuse to say to these individuals that they should go on living their cultures,just because their not doing so might diminish the forms of diversity in the world. In practice,the imperatives of diversity cannot,at least prima facie,trump the free choices of individuals.

Second,instead of saying that your identity should be irrelevant to citizenship and to the goods that the state distributes,multiculturalism made identities the axis of distribution. The more identities become an axis of distribution,the greater the chance of destructive group politics.

Third,looking at individuals through their group identity also

diminishes them. We are always more than who we are; we can

always be different from what we are. But to excessively focus on individuals as being of interest because they represent some group is to

devalue individuals. Identity is a fact about us,but it should not define

the horizon of our possibilities.

The critique of multiculturalism is welcome if it moves the discourse back from diversity to freedom,

rescues distributive justice from being hostage to identity politics,and

liberates us from the tyranny of

compulsory identities. But to make this project politically compelling will require a much more sophisticated politics than was evident in Cameron’s speech.

Cameron was compelling in pointing out that “terror” has been linked with more religions than

Islam. He was compelling in making the distinction between religion and extremist political projects associated with religion. What many critics missed was his defence of conservative expressions of religious piety,his veiled critique of things like headscarf bans,something becoming anathema in France and Switzerland. In that sense,he was being more genuinely liberal than many of his European counterparts.

But liberal politics globally has been curiously susceptible to being taken over by right-wing nationalists.

This is often because defenders of liberal values end up aligning them with a particular way of life or national identity. In India,for example,the debate over reforming personal laws was often framed as being about “national integration” rather than about values of individuality and freedom.

In the British context,also,immigrants were asked not just to espouse certain values,but to meet the burden of being “British”. Here liberal values were used instrumentally to project a single,larger,collective identity. It is important that defenders of liberal values do not get entangled in debates over benchmarking

national identity as they have done in places like France and Germany. Liberals should be worried about any attempt to benchmark national identity; such benchmarking diminishes the force of liberalism.

The second trap is lack of vigilance over double standards. There was an institutional context to the state’s

entanglement in group identities in Britain. Britain had an established Church and had blasphemy laws on the books. So the state could not,on principled grounds,deny forms of state recognition to other religions.

Another issue on double standards is this. Cameron was entirely right in pointing out two things. The first is that extremist Islamic ideology and the right-wing reaction to it in Britain are joined at the hip,as they are in India,too. The second is that there is often partisanship in which groups are denounced more or are considered “greater threats”.

The aspect of the speech that was potentially vague was the use of state power to clamp down on extremist groups. When state power should be used for clamping down is always a challenging question for liberals; a liberal society has to put up with a lot of offensive speech. But the challenge that liberal states face is over their credibility in being impartial. Do prejudgments and prejudice make these states more assiduously pursue groups belonging to some communities than others?

In short,the future of liberalism will depend not upon a philosophical statement that all groups engaging in extremist speech be condemned; it will depend upon the impartiality of state practice towards all citizens.

The truth is that we still don’t fully understand the circumstances under which there is a turn to extremism. In that sense,Cameron’s implicit diagnosis that the turn to extremism was fuelled by state multiculturalism seems quite premature. Multiculturalism has its flaws. But it would be foolish for liberals to suppose that

simply because state multiculturalism failed,the answer must lie in a more “muscular” liberalism.

Liberal values are eminently

defensible. But their realisation in practice involves sensibly dealing with complex layers of history,psychology and a sense of self. Multiculturalism had its greatest resonance,not as a doctrine of justice or a state policy,but because it could,in principle,open up spaces for the sort of

dialogue that would make us less fearful of one another.

Cameron is right in thinking that forms of identity politics are a dead-end; whether we can create an alternative politics that is credible is still an open question.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi

express@expressindia.com