(a) How do religious communities contribute to the cultural diversity of India? (20 marks) (b) What do you understand by…

(a) Religious Communities and Cultural Diversity

• Religious diversity: Census 2011 recorded Hindus (79.8%), Muslims (14.2%), Christians (2.3%), Sikhs (1.7%), Buddhists (0.7%) and Jains (0.4%), besides Parsis, Jews, Bahá'ís and tribal faiths such as Sarna. Each community is itself internally diverse by sect, region, language and caste.

How religious communities contribute to cultural diversity:

• Architecture and art: temple styles (Nagara, Dravida), Buddhist stupas and cave art (Ajanta), Jain temples (Dilwara), Indo-Islamic monuments, Sikh gurdwaras (the Golden Temple) and Goa's churches;
• Music and performance: Hindustani music grew from temple, court and Sufi traditions; qawwali, bhajan, kirtan, gurbani, Christian choral music and tribal songs;
• Language and literature: Sanskrit and Tamil devotional literature, Pali and Prakrit texts of Buddhists and Jains, Urdu and Persian poetry, the Gurmukhi script of the Guru Granth Sahib;
• Festivals and food: Diwali, Eid, Christmas, Gurpurab, Buddha Purnima, Paryushan and Navroz fill a shared public calendar; langar, iftar and festival foods enrich regional cuisines;
• Ethics and philosophy: ahimsa from Jain and Buddhist thought shaped Gandhi's politics; Sikh and Bhakti egalitarianism (Kabir, Ravidas, Basavanna) questioned caste;
• Social institutions: Christian missions pioneered schools and hospitals; Parsi philanthropy built industry and institutions; waqf boards and gurdwara committees run social services;
• Syncretism: Sufi dargahs like Ajmer Sharif draw followers of all faiths; Basant is celebrated at the Nizamuddin dargah; shrines such as Velankanni and Sabarimala's Vavar shrine are visited across communities. This is the "composite culture" celebrated in the Bhakti–Sufi traditions.

Qualifications:

• diversity is also a site of contestation: communal violence and disputes over conversion and sacred sites;
• caste divides exist within religions (Dalit Christians, Pasmanda Muslims);
• the Constitution protects this diversity through Articles 25–30, and the Supreme Court held secularism to be part of the basic structure (S.R. Bommai, 1994).
• Conclusion: religious communities are central producers of India's plural culture; this pluralism survives best when constitutional secularism and everyday shared practices are protected.

(b) Decentralisation of Power and Democracy

Decentralisation of power: the transfer of authority, resources and responsibility from central and state governments to local, elected institutions. It has three dimensions:

• political: elected local bodies;
• administrative: control over functionaries and schemes;
• fiscal: own revenues and grants. True devolution differs from mere deconcentration of officials.

Evolution in India:

• Gandhi's ideal of gram swaraj;
• the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957) proposed three-tier Panchayati Raj, and the Ashok Mehta Committee followed (1978);
• the 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) gave constitutional status to panchayats and municipalities:
• regular elections through State Election Commissions;
• State Finance Commissions;
• the Gram Sabha;
• reservation for SCs, STs and one-third for women;
• lists of functions in the 11th and 12th Schedules;
• PESA (1996) extended self-rule to Scheduled Areas, and the Sixth Schedule provides autonomous councils in the North-East;
• Finance Commission grants to local bodies (about ₹4.36 lakh crore recommended by the 15th Finance Commission for 2021–26).

Role in strengthening the roots of democracy:

• Participation: about 30 lakh elected representatives, with over 14 lakh women, bring ordinary citizens into governance;
• Inclusion and leadership: reservations bring Dalits, Adivasis and women into power and train new leaders. Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) found women-led panchayats invested more in drinking water;
• Accountability and transparency: Gram Sabha meetings and social audits of public works under MGNREGA (now succeeded by the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025); the jan sunwai (public hearings) of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan helped produce the Right to Information Act (2005);
• Responsiveness: local planning, as in Kerala's People's Plan Campaign (1996), which devolved about a third of plan funds to local bodies;
• Recognition of diversity: PESA and autonomous councils let tribal communities govern according to custom;
• Political education: local democracy is a school of citizenship (Tocqueville).

Limitations:

• weak devolution of funds, functions and functionaries;
• dependence on state grants, and bureaucratic control;
• elite capture by dominant castes and proxy representation ("sarpanch-pati");
• low Gram Sabha participation and delayed elections;
• PESA rules diluted or delayed in many states.
• Conclusion: decentralisation has widened and deepened Indian democracy by making it local and inclusive, but its promise depends on genuine devolution and on breaking local hierarchies.

(c) Forms of Untouchability Still Practised

• Untouchability: exclusion and humiliation of Dalits based on notions of ritual pollution. It is abolished by Article 17 and punishable under the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955) and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989, amended 2015 and 2018). Yet it persists: in the India Human Development Survey (2011–12), about 27% of households admitted practising it in some form (Thorat and Joshi), and Shah, Mander, Thorat, Deshpande and Baviskar (Untouchability in Rural India, 2006) found it in some form in most of the villages they surveyed.

Forms still practised:

• Social and physical:
• the "two-glass" system and separate utensils in tea shops and eateries;
• denial of entry into non-Dalit homes;
• separate seating in mid-day meals and in public functions;
• Access to common resources: denial of access to village wells, taps and ponds; separate cremation and burial grounds;
• Religious: barring Dalits from temples and processions; attacks on Dalit grooms riding horses in wedding processions;
• Occupational: manual scavenging and sewer cleaning, almost wholly done by Dalits despite the Manual Scavengers Act (2013), with regular deaths in sewers; refusal of barber and washer services;
• Spatial: Dalit hamlets on the edges of villages; housing discrimination in cities, where landlords refuse tenants by caste;
• Economic and market: Thorat and Attewell (2007) found that job applicants with Dalit names received fewer calls for interviews; boycott of Dalit sellers of milk or food;
• Institutional and educational: discrimination in schools and higher education;
• Digital: casteist abuse and slurs online;
• Violence as enforcement: atrocities punish Dalits who assert rights, as in Khairlanji (2006) and the Una flogging (2016); NCRB recorded about 57,500 crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2022.
• Conclusion: untouchability has shifted from open ritual exclusion to subtler, everyday and urban forms, and continues to express caste hierarchy despite being illegal.