Defining minorities in India Dr. A. K. Sharma HSS Department, IIT Kanpur – 208016 arunk@iitk.ac.in Introduction India is a relatively younger democratic country but with a long history dating back to at least five thousand years. In the long history almost all types of more or less numerous and conceivably all types of states have existed in Indian territory. Just before the independence India was directly under the British rule and barring a few elite the Indians were excluded from state. After independence the Indian political elite adopted a democratic model of state aimed at creation of a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic”; the word, ‘socialist’ was, however, added much later. The credit for this goes to many people and many forces. Western educated political and legal elite, of course, played a major role in this and they developed a framework of Indian constitution based on experiences of diverse types of Western democracies, as well as Russian and Chinese experiences. In this framework Indian state adopted the model of parliamentary democracy and federalism though some visionaries like Gandhi were suspicious of this model from the beginning. Comparison with Canada There are many similarities as well as dissimilarities between India and Canada. Both are multicultural societies. In the past both have been dependent on United Kingdom (UK). Canada severed dependence on British Parliament completely in 1982 and India in 1947. Both have a large population of aboriginal people living for millennia. Both have parliamentary democracy