12 Kolkata: The nation has withdrawn support to anyone who has tried to convert cultural sense of belonging to toxic majoritarianism. The nation is ready to celebrate cultural nationalism but not at the cost of pushing out those in the minority.
This was advocated on Saturday in an online lecture by Ajay Gudavarty, associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies at JNU while speaking on India’s Unicorn Democracy.The session was moderated by Pradip Basu, former dean of arts, Presidency University.
Gudavarty argued that the right wing understanding of all talks of equality, essentially read as a western concept, toppling cultural ethos was as much flawed as a section of liberals and leftists believing all of culture to be conservative.
Calling it the era of culturist constitutionalism, he argued: “Many scholars like Amartya Sen and Romila Thapar have argued that India had several deeply subversive cultural movements. We are looking at the Hindu Indic culture where morality and equality too have enough space.”