ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political background of the failure of existing liberal and communitarian ideas against which the demands for newer arrangements for autonomy at every level arise. It also examines in the mirror of the imperatives of a dialogic order the limited success and failure stories of existing arrangements for autonomy in South Asia and in other parts of the world through a broad and rapid survey. Forms of autonomy are judged by requirements of minimal justice. The chapter shows how a new dialogic order can propose fresh forms of accommodation on the basis of the principle/s of minimal justice. It is concerned with the ethical argument of moral cosmopolitanism, which is equally non-relational in its approach to the political question of accommodation, and is consequently blind to the insurgent reality. Geo-political frontiers have been bolstered by ethnic frontiers and ethnic peripheries, in the process creating landscapes of inequality.
