Pratap Bhanu Mehta > Quotes

“India has worked not because of ‘unity in diversity’, the presence of a locus of identity beneath differences, as the state is fond of telling us. We have flourished rather because we are ‘diverse in our unities’, each able to imagine the connection with others in his/ her own way.”
― Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Burden Of Democracy

“Is Indian democracy simply going to be an excuse for an unbridled and open competition, in which those who can raise their banner the highest, declaim in the loudest voices, and mobilize the maximum amount of muscle power, can make their writ run large? Will India's democracy sustain itself, if at all, not by even a dim sense of the values democracy is meant to honour, but by the sheer contingencies of power in Indian society?

While Indian democracy has been successful, we cannot take it for granted that the shifting balance of power may not produce forms of state action which jeopardize and put at risk every defensible ideal to which this republic was committed.”
― Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy