Thursday, October 19, 2017

Minorities Who Are Trans-Nationalists

Regarding the piece Rajeev posted from Sanjeev Nayyar about India's courts, and just some of my broader thoughts on courts and minorityism - I wanted to note the following:

Courts/judiciaries want to protect minorities from oppression by the majority. Given the history of smaller groups being at a disadvantage to be crushed by larger majorities, there's reason to want some protections to exist. But there's also another history - a history of imperialism whereby larger/powerful groupings show up in a locality to subjugate it from outside. Laws regarding treatment of minorities have been framed without giving adequate consideration to the special type of minority who are trans-nationalists - ie. having an affinity to similar people living outside the country. In that case, the so-called "minority" is really just the tip of a larger iceberg - part of a larger whole, like the camel which has poked its nose inside a tent. Courts/judiciaries only see the nose, and think that's all there is to see. They don't see the larger camel attached to that nose, and its presence/effect.

There are genuine minorities who have no attachments outside of national borders - they are true minorities, in the truest sense of that word. But trans-nationalists who identify with a larger whole really aren't minorities at all. They continue to maintain and pursue their attachments with their larger whole, and it's the locals who aren't part of that who are at a relative disadvantage to that. It's for this reason that the minorities are able to dominate the narrative and portray local nationalists as a "big, bad majoritarians". The rise of trans-nationalism has continued to further this game.

Nationalists of different countries likewise then need to be able to reach out and coordinate with each other, in order to seize back the narrative and fend off the expansionist tendencies of trans-nationalist groups.

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