Democracy is a funny thing. It is the only system which partially gives power to people and yet most of us are discontent about how the government works. People have more power than ever before yet people feel powerless. This powerless feeling is due to the malleability of democracy, system, and people can be molded to fit the agenda of politicians. Today we will explore the Minority Politics, how they work and how they affect you, me and the nation. I will be speaking on objective terms and will not be diving into emotional territory, I will postulate my thoughts on the subject and I encourage you all to take part in this discussion. Now let’s get started.
What is Minority Politics?
Minority Politics is a relatively new term, It means the appeasement of minorities over the majority for political gain. Where Minorities are the socio-backward groups or simply have less percentage of the population. They can share culture, religion, language, ethnicity, skin color, gender, castes or everything. Only factual difference between minority and majority is their percentage in the total population, Majority is obviously majority in total population and minority is a minority. Now that is out of the way we can focus on how this all works.
How Minority Politics Work?
The inner working of minority politics is simple to understand and to understand that we need to understand how minorities functions. Now imagine yourself as a minority if you are not when you go to public places you are surrounded by the people who you do not understand on the basis of being different from them. We human’s fear anything that is different or anything that does not agree with our beliefs, This fear exists simply because lack of understanding which can be overcome with exposure. However, politicians use this indifference to invoke the fear of majority in the minds of the minority, whenever it is needed or not and these politicians project themselves as the savior of the minorities which brings them vote and the fear of majority keeps minorities votes united. This forms the vote blocks, from their politicians preaching about minorities get their maximum fixed votes and because minorities stick together these votes comes in masses.
On the other hand, the majority does not feel threatened by anyone and vote based on their issues and political ideology rather than race, religion, caste or ethnicity, which in turns dived their vote and their votes never comes in mass. Now how does that work in the election?
Let us assume that out of 100 people 20 are the minority and remaining are the majority. Now all minority will always vote against the majority and they will vote in masses while the majority will vote on what they expect from government and they will not vote in masses. Now let’s get few candidates rolling shall we, let us assume there are three candidates usually there are more. One who use minority politics and other two who are fighting on the basis of other issues. Every one of them will have a base of 15 votes that they will get for all other votes they will have to fight. As minority votes come in masses our minority candidate will surely receive 18 of 20 minority votes, he will also receive 15 of his base vote and he also wins 5 more votes just because these 5 people like him enough which makes his total votes 38. While other two candidates get their 15 base votes and win remaining votes each by half just for easy calculation, meaning each of them will get 31 votes they would have won 16 of those by giving actual promises to citizens and both of them will lose to minority candidate even when they fought harder on actual practical issue. This is how Minority Politics works, this was a simple example however as in real life scenario there will be more candidates chipping each other’s vote base and minority party will also sway larger amount of vote’s form majority and not to mention large number majority doesn’t vote. This is the basis of minority politics. Now let us analyze how this affects both majority and minority, in a sense people in general.
Effect of Minority Politics on Society.
Effect of these type of politics is far-reaching. It becomes necessary for political parties to appease minorities if they want to win, the election becomes about who can appease more rather than who has the vision for the nation. Most of the time these appeasement comes in the form of special privileges for the minority community. to maintain their grips on the minority politicians usually spreads the fleam of hatred towards majority which makes controlling their vote bank easy. Discrimination against minorities exists in some cases but this fear of majority create inauthentic fear in the mind of minority’s which becomes an obstacle to their development and empowerment, not to mention that minority become’s attracted to some of their outdated and regressive customers because of fear of losing their identity. Minority lose the capacity of fixing their Social problems and because of that loose, the opportunity to progress and this lack of progression creates more backlash form majority.
Majority also sufferers, due to over appeasement of minority. The majority feels cheated, no one talks about their problems and their issue. This appeasement what makes majority hate minority hence it starts to discriminate against minorities which in turn creates a cycle of hate. Let’s take an example of politicians using media to create a gap between both sides. Politicians making a fuss if A person belonging to a minority is murdered by a person belonging to the majority while no one talks about vice-versa situations which are many if not more. This kind of sensitization make minority even more fearful and they feel more oppressed even when they are not and slowly majority also sees the hole in the argument and the appeasement of minority which again reduces the image of the minority in their mind. Soon majority to unite in a radical way against a minority which is what I call reverse polarization, this is why Trump won the election. This kind of politics only brakes person form person nothing more.
That is all.
Happy new year guys and let me know your thoughts on this subject, as always if you liked this post then like, share and follow.
Animeindianphilosopher 