India, Feb. 1 -- There is a unique feature of our republican democracy, which is mostly ignored in our public debates. The Constitution, which recognises the cultural rights of minority groups and protects the freedom of religion of its citizens as a fundamental right, does not define the term minority. This open-ended approach is based on the premise that the state should evolve a context-specific definition of the category called minority. Accordingly, the political class is expected to defend the dignity, culture, and religious distinctiveness of the many numerically inferior social groups in different contexts. In this sense, the makers of the Indian Constitution (particularly BR Ambedkar) tried to conceptualise a multifaceted idea of republicanism to get rid of the popular conception that the majority-minority distinction is only about Hindus and Muslims....