Corrosive consensus: Democracy and everyday ethnic conflict in India

This dissertation examines how a functioning democracy and a vibrant civil society can undermine the inclusive ideals of democracy. It offers an empirical and theoretical elucidation of the condition that Tocqueville warned democracies against--the "tyranny of the majority." It argues that a procedurally functioning democracy can help forge a popular consensus in favor of ethnic hostility and work to undermine substantive democratic ideals. This exclusionary consensus produced through the sites of democracy is called a "corrosive consensus" because it corrodes democratic procedures of their substantive content. The paradoxical relationship between democracy and everyday ethnic conflict is examined through an ethnographic focus on communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the state of Gujarat in western India. A corrosive consensus enforces the guidelines of acceptable political action, relegates dissent to the political margins and challenges the institutional checks and balances in a democracy. This research calls for a broader understanding of democracy as equally constitutive of formal procedures and substantive ideals--where procedure refers to formal and informal mechanisms such as elections, judicial inquiries, civil society and a free media, and substance refers to the realization of the inclusive ideals of equality and justice.