18 Nation, nationality and nation building in India

Chandan Kumar Sharma

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Defining the Concepts

2. Nation State and Nation Building

3. Nation and Nation Building in India

4. Conclusion

5. Summary

NATION, NATIONALITY AND NATION BUILDING IN INDIA

Introduction: Defining the Concepts

Defining Nation, nationality or nationalism is a complicated exercise. These terms are often used to imply a multiplicity of interrelated phenomena, leading to their ambivalence. One reason for such ambivalence is that they all have the etymological origin in the same Latin word ‘natio’ which implies birth or descent.

A dominant view in the past was that to become a nation, a people sharing common race, language, religion, etc must live together in a geographical area. However, this view does not have much currency now. The generally accepted view today holds that rather than sharing attributes like common race, language, religion, etc it is the sentiment of common consciousness that forms the basis of a nation. A nation has a political meaning which is distinct from a nationality. A nationality is transformed into a nation when it organises a state or at least cherishes a common will to live together in a state for the future.

When the territorial boundary of a state is co-terminus with the cultural, linguistic and ethnic division of the people (nation) within it, it becomes a nation state which is different from the state forms, for example, the empires, of the earlier times which constituted more than one, and often several, national groups. The concept of nation state based on the concept of ‘one nation, one state’ became a dominant mode of state forms in the Western Europe. This also subsequently came to form the nation building projects of the newly independent states in various parts of the world. But problems emerged as most of these countries were multi-national in nature, incorporating several nations or groups with near-nation status. Empirical experiences have shown that there rarely exists a country in the modern world where ‘one nation, one state’ model can be observed. On the contrary, one witnesses not only several nations within the territorial boundary of a single state but also a single nation spreading over more than one state. For example, the United Kingdom, Russian Federation, India, the United States of America, etc are examples of multi-national states while the Kurds, the Tamils, the Hazaras, etc are examples of trans-state nations implying they are spread over more than one state.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm writes that ‘nations’, contrary to popular belief, are not as old as history. “The modern sense of the word is no longer than the eighteenth century…” (1990: 3). He admits that what characteristics classify a group of human beings as a ‘nation’ is difficult to answer (ibid: 5). Nevertheless, he points out that attempts have been made to establish objective criteria for defining a ‘nation’ based “on single criteria such as language or ethnicity, or a combination of criteria such as language, common territory, common history, cultural traits or whatever else.” But all such objective definitions have failed because “only some members of the large class of entities which fit such definitions can at any time be described as ‘nations’” though exceptions are there. Hobsbawm also shows that “the criteria used for this purpose – language, ethnicity or whatever – are themselves fuzzy, shifting and ambiguous” (ibid: 6).

Sociologist T.K. Oommen offers what he calls, “some tentative definitional proposals of a nation/nationality, state/citizenship and ethnic/ethnicity” (1997: 19). In his definition the “nation is a territorial entity to which the nationals have an emotional attachment and in which they invest a moral meaning; it is a homeland – ancestral or adopted”.(ibid) The state, on the other hand, “is a legally constituted institution, which provides its residents with protection from internal insecurity and external aggression” (ibid). Making the distinction between the state and nation, he says that while territory is common to both, “there is a crucial difference between national territory and the state territory; the former is a moral, and the latter a legal entity…If the state and the nation are coterminous, we have a nation-state. But most states today are multi-national, poly-ethnic, or a combination of the two” (ibid).

He then goes on to say that for the sustenance of a nation, “the people should be in a position to communicate with one another, that is, they should have a common language…(however,) it is not the case that all those who communicate in the same language necessarily make a nation…It is the combination, the fusion of territory and language, that makes a nation; a nation is a community in communication in its homeland” (ibid). Thus, according to Oommen, “a common homeland and a common language (ancestral or adopted) are the critical minimum markers of a nation and national identity” (ibid: 20). On the other hand, Oommen defines nationality as “the collective identity that the people of a nation acquire by identifying with the nation” (1997: 19). This view equates nationality with citizenship. However, nationality is often used as a synonym for ethnicity. In this sense, various cultural groups constituting a nation are described as nationalities.

Anthony D. Smith defines nation as “named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths, and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members” (1991: 14). However, Smith’s definition of nation is criticized on the ground that it does not distinguish a nation from an ethnic group. Barrington points out that the idea of territory is central to all definitions of nation and is the distinguishing feature between nation and other social categories such as an ethnic group (Barrington 1997: 712). According to Barrington, nations are groups of people linked by unifying traits (myths, values, symbols, etc) and the desire to control a territory that is thought of as group’s national homeland. It is not necessary that they actually control any such territory (ibid: 713). He further points out that the word ‘nation’ is often mistakenly used as synonyms with ‘ethnic group’ or ‘ethnicity’. However, although a nation can evolve from an ethnic group it is more than an ethnic group because of its belief in its right to territorial control. More importantly, nations need not be based on certain ethnic identity. For example, the American nation is not based on any shared ethnic identity although the Americans share certain cultural features such as origin myths and symbols and language (ibid).

Emphasizing the difficulty in offering a stable definition of nation, historian Prasenjit Duara writes, “The instability of the concept of the nation is such that we are unable to even say whether it is in ascendancy or in decline” (1996: 4). The definitional ambiguities associated with the term ‘nation’ have its own impact on the conceptualization of the term ‘nationalism’. It is pointed out that the definitions of nationalism reveal more about the definers than about the defined (Aloysius 2000 [1997]: 11). Under such a situation, “to expect a consensus on contested political realities or a single, overarching paradigm explanatory of all manifestations of the national phenomena is illusory, at least for the time being” (ibid: 14).

Renowned theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson (1995 [1983]) contends that nationality, nation-ness as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind (ibid: 13). They are “notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyze” (ibid: 126). He argues that a nation is an act of imagination (ibid: 15) by underlining the fact that nations were not the determinate products of some given sociological conditions like language or race or religion— they had been imagined into existence. He also describes some of the major institutional forms through which this imagined community comes to acquire concrete shape. He further emphasizes that the “twentieth-century nationalisms and nation states have a profoundly modular character” (ibid: 123). Historical experience of nationalism in the west provided all subsequent nationalisms with a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they liked.

Etienne Balibar writes that he and Immanuel Wallerstein consider, “‘nation’ and ‘people’ as historical constructs, by means of which current institutions and antagonisms can be projected into the past to confer a relative stability on the communities on which the sense of individual ‘identity’ depends.”(Balibar and Wallerstein 1998: 10) According to them, No nation, that is, no national state, has an ethnic basis, which means that nationalism cannot be defined as an ethnocentrism except precisely in the sense of the product of a fictive ethnicity. To reason any other way would be to forget that ‘peoples’ do not exist naturally…either by virtue of their ancestry, a community of culture or pre-existing interests. But they have to institute in real (and therefore in historical) time their imaginary unity against other possible unities (ibid: 49).

Balibar further writes that the term ‘fiction’ should not be taken in the sense of a pure and simple illusion without historical effects. As he contends, No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized— that is represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions (ibid: 96).

According to Social anthropologist and political philosopher Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism is primarily a political principle,” Gellner emphasizes, “which holds that the political and the national units should be congruent.” (1983: 1). He further writes, “…nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity…” (1983: 6). Explaining the relationship between ‘nationality’ (or ‘ethnicity’) and ‘nationalism’, Gellner has this to say, Ethnicity or ‘nationality’ is simply the name for the condition which prevails when many of these boundaries converge and overlap, so that the boundaries of conversation, easy commensality, shared pastimes, etc., are the same, and when the community of the people delimited by these boundaries is endowed with an ethnonym, and is suffused with powerful feelings; ethnicity becomes ‘political’. It gives rise to ‘nationalism’, when the ‘ethnic’ group defined by these overlapping cultural boundaries is not merely acutely conscious of its own existence, but also imbued with the conviction that the ethnic boundary ought also to be a political one. The requirement is that the boundaries of ethnicity should also be the boundaries of the political unit, and, above all, that the rulers within that unit should be of the same ethnicity as the ruled (1994: 35).

In the ‘Preface’ to his Ethnicity and Nationalism (1991), Political theorist Paul Brass states that “ethnicity and nationalism are not ‘givens’, but are social and political constructions” (Ibid: 8). They are created by the elites of ethnic groups with the object of “protecting their well-being or existence or to gain political and economic advantage for their groups as well as themselves” (Ibid: 8). He further argues that ethnicity and nationalism are modern phenomena inseparably connected with the activities of the modern centralizing state arising out of specific types of interactions between the leadership of centralizing states and elites from non-dominant ethnic groups, especially but not exclusively on the peripheries of those states” (Ibid: 8-9).

Brass argues that when an ethnic group demands “a major say for the group in the political system as a whole or control over a piece of territory within the country, or they demand a country of their own with full sovereignty” with an aspiration to “national status and recognition” and achieves “any one of these goals either within an existing state or in a state of its own” it becomes “a nationality or a nation” (1991: 20). From this viewpoint, a nation “may be seen as a particular type of ethnic community, or, rather, as an ethnic community politicized, with recognised group rights in the political system” (ibid). It follows from this that “nations may be created by the transformation of an ethnic group in a multiethnic state into a self-conscious political entity or by the amalgamation of diverse groups and the formation of an inter-ethnic, composite or homogeneous national culture through the agency of the modern state” (ibid).

Nation State and Nation Building

When modern nation states came into being especially in Western Europe, the ethnic identities of many of the constituent groups within the nation states were lying dormant so much so that their ‘distinct’ identities were almost ignored. The concept of the nation state subscribed to a definition of nation that accords a central place to the idea of state in which the term ‘nation’ was held synonymous with the most dominant group within the so-called nation state. The idea working behind this concept of nation was that the smaller or marginal communities living within a particular nation state in course of time would assimilate with the dominant group or else over a period of time would move toward the formation of their own nation states.

It is this perception that has inspired the dominant group within the nation state to assimilate the other smaller constituents in the name of the nation-building exercise. In some cases, this exercise achieved relative success depending on the “effectiveness of their projects of cultural standardization” (Baruah 1999: 4). But in most of the cases this project faced serious problems. The dominant groups in these cases carried out their agenda of nation construction through the exercise of their influence in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic spheres without taking into consideration the ethos and aspirations of the smaller communities. The concept of nation-building thus comes to be metaphorically described by McCloskey as a “handsome neo-classical building in which political prisoners scream in the basement” (cited in Baruah 1999: 1) which treats people, as Bauer puts, as “lifeless bricks, to be moved by some master builder”(Ibid: 1).

At this stage, it is worthwhile to take note of Wallerstein’s observation on the phenomenon of nation-building. Addressing the question as to why should the establishment of any particular sovereign state within the interstate system create a corresponding ‘nation’, ‘a people’, he states that this happens as states in this system have problems of cohesion as they often face threat of both internal disintegration and external aggression. The creation of a ‘national’ sentiment reduces such a threat (Balibar and Wal1erstein 1998: 81). He writes, “(T)he government in power has an interest in promoting the sentiment, as do all sorts of subgroups within the state. Any group who sees advantage in using the state’s legal powers to advance its interests against groups outside the state or in any sub-region of the state has an interest in promoting nationalist sentiment as a legitimation of its claims. States furthermore have an interest in administrative uniformity that increases the efficacy of their policies. Nationalism is the expression, the promoter and the consequence of such state-level uniformities”(ibid: 2).

The attempt at creating such uniformities, however, leads to politico-economic and cultural suppression and marginalization of the smaller nationalities within these states. This eventually reinforces a sense of separate identity among the latter vis-à-vis the dominant community/communities as being deprived and repressed. In an attempt to politically mobilize this new identity consciousness, against the hegemonic designs of the centralizing state, the elites of the smaller nationalities take recourse to a project of cultural hegemony rooted in their history— partly real, but largely imagined — much after the model of the modern state. It is through this process that the nationality movements emerge in the modern nation state. Led by their elites, these movements mobilize themselves asking for more political, economic, and cultural rights from the state. The latter naturally attempts to subvert the aspirations of the smaller groups in order to maintain its existing status. This intensifies the political expression of the smaller groups even farther. However, the struggle of a nationality group demanding more rights and privileges for itself and its simultaneous interaction with the State, does not necessarily lead to the consolidation of its identity, it also often leads to the growth of fissiparous tendencies underscoring the existence of cleavages within it.

Nation and Nation Building in India

It has been pointed out that the post-independence Indian state despite its multi-ethnic character has been engaged in a project of nation building which subscribes to the western notions of nation-state in which, ideally speaking, language, religion, and political sovereignty have co-terminus boundaries. Dwelling on the overall nation-building experience in India and other parts of South Asia, Phadnis and Ganguly write, “post colonial nation-building approaches (in the region) focused almost exclusively on creating a unified ‘national identity’ based around either common political values and citizenship or a putative majoritarian ‘ethnic’ identity. The aim of both approaches, on the whole, has been to produce a pulverized and uniform sense of national identity to coincide with the state boundaries that seldom reflect ethnic divisions on the ground. This type of outlook towards nation-building, as promoted vigorously by the modernization school of thought, refused to accept the notion that states incorporating more than one ‘ethnic nation’ could be both stable and harmonious” (2001: 13).

Political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed commenting on the nation-building enterprise in the South Asian elites argues, “(T)he elites which took over power at the time of British withdrawal were compelled by a host of internal and external pressures to reduce or eliminate the incongruence between state and society…the nation-building process in all…(the) countries have been confronted by serious separatist challenge. Each case of separatism constitutes a unique specimen of state-society contradiction…” (1996: 15).

This nation-building exercise that the post-independence Indian state adopted with the objective of the construction of a pan-Indian identity stood in the way of the fulfilment of economic, political, and cultural aspirations of various ethnic groups located within its territory fuelling protest movements among them. As Krishna says, “(W)henever state elites in the region (South Asia) have attempted to ride roughshod over the rights and aspirations of so-called peripheral minorities (religious, linguistic, regional, or other), the result has been either a violent partition/secession or that emergence of ethnonationalist movements that have attempted to achieve those ends.” (Ibid: 13-14).

This point finds support in other scholars too. Ghose and Chakrabarti, for example, point out that despite the recognition of the fact that the future survival of the nation-state in India would depend on acceptance of the plurality of nationalities, there continued to be a strong strain of thought that sought to do away with group identities in the name of national integration generating a lot of resistance in areas like the northeastern region of the country (cited in Misra 2000: 155).

On the other hand, these groups are also not homogenous identities. They are often constituted by a number of other smaller ethnic configurations living in geo-social proximity. This process of the formation of a crystallized ethnic identity by incorporating such smaller groups is still operative in several parts of India, especially its north-eastern region. It is to be recognized that prior to the establishment of the colonial rule, India did not exist as an integrated politico-territorial entity. There existed various nationality groups with different, if not conflicting, territorial and political loyalties. Quite a few of them emerged simultaneously with the pan-Indian identity and some even predated it. Some of these nationalities were engaged in their own project of cultural hegemony (Baruah 1999: 8).

The colonial regime, besides making India into an integrated politico-territorial entity, also created new regional politico-territorial units incorporating willy-nilly more than one, in most cases several, such nationalities. This integration, however, was impelled by the administrative and economic motives with the total exclusion of attempts to bind the territory with the feelings and emotions of nationalism. On the contrary, in order to continue its exploitation unabated, the colonial administration took full recourse to the policy of ‘divide and rule’, thereby also hindering the ongoing process of nationality formation among the above-mentioned nationality groups.

But colonial exploitation and repression, so universal throughout the British India, had instilled in various communities within it a common sense of bondage, as being deprived and marginalized. This in turn inspired them to fight united against the colonial regime. The fact that India long existed as a cultural and social entity, despite all its internal variations, helped. Although, the constitution of leadership of the Indian freedom movement was not exactly all Indian in character in that it did not have any noteworthy representation from the smaller or peripheral communities, not much opposition was raised against the former in view of the ultimate objective of the movement.

Eric Hobsbawm (1990: 164), thus, very aptly describes India as a polity that grew out of anti-colonial movement. It is in the wake of this movement that the Indian nationalist leadership woke up to the idea of one Indian nation by incorporating the various ethnic and linguistic entities within the colonial state. The Indian nationalist leadership tried to carry out this objective after independence in the name of the policy of nation-building, through its own project of cultural hegemony. However, some scholars point out that treating the Indian response to the British colonial rule under the unified title of the nationalist movement is nothing but a rarefied reading of the movement which is insensitive to the regional variations and is ideological in intent and character (Aloysius 1999: 6).

Regional Nationalist Identities and Linguistic States

Nevertheless, almost simultaneously to the independence of the country, demands came from various nationalities from its regions for a greater recognition of their identity within the new dispensation of the state. Language became the mainstay of this new identity aspiration. It posed a new challenge to the nation building exercise of the recently-independent Indian state.

The colonial state created territorial units that were not based on any obvious principle, except administrative convenience, and the quite accidental timing of conquests (Kaviraj 1999: 224). This practice gave, “…sub-colonial advantages for some linguistic groups, simply because those were the first to receive colonial education and formed the natural reservoir for personnel for colonial administrative expansion…Resentment against this kind of sub-colonial dominance was bound to find expression after independence…(M)ovements for regional autonomy began soon after independence with the demand for the recognition of an Andhra state (Ibid: 224-5).

The post-independence Indian State was initially unsympathetic to the demand for statehood based on distinct linguistic identity. Jawaharlal Nehru opposed such a scenario for fear of creating inward-looking states that would imperil the consolidation of Indian nationhood, and even encourage separatism (Tillin 2013). Political scientist Sudipta Kaviraj also holds that Nehru’s opposition to the linguistic states was due to the “anxiety that more homogeneous regional units might lead to the weakening of the political imagination of the Indian nation” (Kaviraj 1999: 225).

However, in the face of pressing demands, the States Reorganization Commission (1956), recommended the reorganization of states on linguistic lines and a number of new states were created staring with the creation of a separate Andhra state from the erstwhile Madras state as a result of a very strong campaign launched in the Andhra region in the early 1950s for the reorganisation of state boundaries around linguistic communities – rather than administrative histories. In the subsequent years, more linguistic states were created in south and west India. States were created for speakers of Kannada (present-day Karnataka), Malayalam (Kerala), Marathi (Maharashtra) and Gujarati (Gujarat); and later Punjab and Haryana were divided too (although religion, as well as language – Punjabi and Hindi – was at stake in the latter instance) (Tillin 2013).

Although the cultural foundation of India’s regionally based sub-nationalism was the languages of the region, the problem with the north-east region of the country arises from the fact that the region has so many linguistic groups that it is not realistically possible to reorganize it on linguistic lines. Assam, the home of the largest linguistic community in the region, viz., the Assamese, was for long a separate British province which incorporated many areas like the districts of Naga Hills (present Nagaland), Khasi and Jaintia Hills (present Meghalaya), and Lushai Hills (present Mizoram). These areas, after independence, have been made into separate provinces not on the basis of the linguistic principle. Rather, the guiding principle(s), singularly or collectively, that led to the making of these provinces were religion, race, geographical and physical distinctiveness, etc. beginning with the formation of separate province of Nagaland in 1963. Subsequently, states of Meghalaya and Mizoram were also created.

However, the demands for separate states from different regions did not stop. Creation of Jharkhand (bifurcating Bihar), Uttarakhand (from Uttar Pradesh) and Chhattisgarh (from Madhya Pradesh) in the year 2000 was in response to such demands. Statehood demands for Vidarbha (from Maharashtra), Budelkhand (from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) have been continuing for quite long. There has been demand for further division of Uttar Pradesh. Statehood demands for separate Gorkhaland (bifurcating West Bengal), Bodoland (from Assam), etc also have been there for quite some time now. A number of the statehood movements mentioned above, however, moved away from the language-based identity assertion and made regional inequality as the basis of their demand. The most recent example of this is the creation of the new state of Telangana by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh in 2014 although this demand can be traced back to late 1960s. Further, some scholars argue that such demands for creation of new states have to be understood in the context of the decentralization of political life and economic change in India (Tillin 2013).

Rise in the Politics of Regionalism

Politics of regionalism in India can be traced back to the Dravidian identity assertion in Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) of Tamil Nadu at an early stage asserted its aim for an independent state for the Dravidians. Although they dropped this idea afterwards, they vehemently opposed the move of the Central Government to introduce Hindi as the official language of Government of India in 1965 and it was mainly their opposition which prompted the Central government to continue with both Hindi and English as official languages of the Government of India. In April 1974, the DMK government brought in a resolution in the state assembly urging the Centre to accept the Rajamannar Committee

(http://interstatecouncil.nic.in/rajamannar.html) recommendations on state autonomy and amend the Constitution of India to pave the way for a true federal system.

Similarly, the Shiromani Akali in Punjab articulated their political, economic and cultural views in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution in 1973

(http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/punjab/document/papers/anantpur_sahib_re solution.htm). It clearly underscored that India is a federal and republican geographical entity of different languages, religions and cultures. It stated that in order to safeguard the fundamental rights of the religious and linguistic minorities, to fulfill the demands of the democratic traditions and to pave the way for economic progress, it was imperative that the Indian constitutional infrastructure should be given a real federal shape by redefining the Central and State relations.

Early 1980s witnessed the emergence of some new political parties such as the Telegu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and Asom Gana Parishad in Assam asserting regional aspirations against the alleged domination of the Central government. Gradually, the country also saw the emergence of political parties like Shiv Sena in Maharashtra founded on anti-immigrant ideology. As Indians from one region have moved in far more greater numbers to another region in the last couple of decades, such anti-immigrant ideology has spread into various other parts of India in recent times posing questions about one Indian identity for all its citizens and the nation building exercise of the Indian state. As Aloysius puts, Indian “(N)ationalism, instead of giving birth to one national society, seems to have delivered a whole litter of communities divided from one another in terms of language, religion, region and caste” (1997 (2000): 1).

Secessionist Challenges

The regional nationalist assertion in India has not been confined only to the demand for creation of linguistic states or for fulfilment of other regional aspirations within the Indian nation state. The latter has had to face the challenges of secessionism from its various regions. Starting with the Naga insurgency in the northeastern region immediately after the independence, such secessionist movements had spread to other groups in the region such as the Mizos, the Manipuri Meteis, the tribal groups in Tripura and the Assamese. Since the early 1980s, the Khalistani insurgency in the state of Punjab assumed a serious turn. Similarly, separatist movement in Kashmir has been a continuous source of challenge to the Indian nation state. Although, Indian state has been negotiating with these movements by various means, sometimes with success, questions have also been raised about the faultlines that using of some of such means, especially military force and repressive laws, have unfolded.

Conclusion

It is, however, to be noted that the Indian state has tried to address the question of diversity of the country in terms of various constitutional provisions for a number of groups and states. In fact, much before the independence of the country, the leadership of the anti-colonial freedom movement acknowledged its staggering diversity which makes it impossible to imagine India in the frame of the western nation states. Therefore, they adopted an inclusive approach to the future nation building in India which was embedded in the phrase “unity in diversity” emphasizing an underlying unity of the people of India despite the differences in language, culture, history, and so on.

After the independence of the country, the leadership of the freedom movement got this understanding enshrined in various provisions of the constitutions. For example, backward groups and communities within the country have been accorded with various provisions to safeguard their political, cultural and economic interests. While the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim majority state, was given a special constitutional status under article 370, several states in the northeastern India, inhabited by a majority of tribal population, have also been given special constitutional status where the traditional customary laws of the tribal groups often get precedence over provisions of the Indian constitution. Similarly, many tribal communities which have not been given separate states have been given special status under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the constitution. This is how Indian state has accommodated not only regional aspirations but also the aspirations of the minorities and disadvantaged groups.

Despite a more inclusive constitutional mandate, critics point out that the Indian state often shows a tendency to engage in a project of cultural homogenization in the mold of the dominant Hindi-Hindu culture (Jaffrelot 1993; Hansen 1998) seeking to establish a culturally more uniform nation state. Oommen also contends, “the central issues of nation building in India revolve around the persistent tension between the Hindi-speaking twice born Hindus, who define themselves as the norm-setters and value-givers, the cultural mainstream, and a multiplicity of other primordial collectivities occupying the periphery of the system, depending upon their positioning in the socio-cultural space of India (1993: 473).

Such a tendency of privileging one set of language, culture and religion, mainly belonging to the politically and demographically dominant north India, over others pose to marginalize language, culture and religions of other regions as well as minority communities. In fact, within the followers of Hinduism too there are many and serious regional variations in terms of their rituals, customs and food habits. In a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-religious society like India, such attempts at homogenization have thus generated apprehensions among the communities which are at the receiving end of such homogenization projects. The attempt of the Government of India to introduce Hindi as the official language of India, for example, has faced repeated resistance time and again. The Anti-Hindi agitations of 1965 forced the central government to abandon its efforts to introduce Hindi as the only official language of the country and to continue with English as the other official language.

Further, the Indian Centre is enormously strong. In constitutional terms itself, India is a union of states. The Indian polity was so designed professedly to keep the newly independent nation with a large number of ethnic identities politically/territorially intact. But the power of the Centre vis-à-vis the states kept on growing far exceeding the original constitutional sanction. Such centralizing tendencies have given rise to rise of politics of regionalism in different parts of India.

Nevertheless, it is to be noted that many of these regional or sub-national articulations and movements, often steered by the interest of the regional elites, have been addressed by the Indian state within the broader framework of the Indian nation state. However, for a long term solution to the conflict between the nation building project of the Indian nation state and the aspirations of smaller nationalities and communities, scholars have argued for a creation of a federal state sensitive to the identities and aspirations of various groups within it. Misra, for example, advocates for “greater decentralization of powers and a radical restructuring of Centre-state relations” (2000: 161) as a solution to the problem.

Sanjib Baruah argues for a shift in the policy of the Indian State from nation building to that of federation building. Referring to the recurrent secessionist movements in the northeastern region of India, he says, “(O)nly a bold new project of genuine federation–building that takes our complex multinational history seriously — and framed as an alternative to nation-building — can become a viable alternative to independentist thought that captures the hearts and minds of so many young people in India’s troubled northeast” (2002: 37). Similar recommendations were made by the Sarkaria Commission (http://interstatecouncil.nic.in/Sarkaria_Commission.html), constituted by the Government of India, which submitted its report on the centre-state relationship in India in 1988. But these recommendations are yet to see implementation. There is no gainsaying that how Indian state negotiates between its concerns about the unity and security of the Indian nation and the rising aspirations of a large number of nationalities within its territorial boundary will largely shape the nature of the Indian nation and nationalism in the times to come.

Summary

In the above, we have discussed about the concepts of nation and the other related concepts such as nation state, nationality, nationalism and nation building. A nation is often confused with ethnic group and state. While a people sharing common myths, language, customs, history, religion, etc may constitute an ethnic group, to become a nation it must have an association with a homeland, real or imagined. The state, on the other hand, is a legally constituted institution. While, territory is common to both, there is a crucial difference between national territory and the state territory in that the former is a moral and the latter a legal entity. When the territorial boundary of a state is co-terminus with the cultural, linguistic and ethnic division of the people (nation) within it, it becomes a nation state. The concept of nation state based on the concept of ‘one nation, one state’ became a dominant mode of state forms in the Western Europe and subsequently came to inform the nation building projects of the newly independent states in various parts of the world including India.

The Indian state is constituted by many groups and nationalities. Some of these preceded and some emerged simultaneous to the Indian nation which grew out of the colonial rule in India. The anti-colonial rule gave rise to the idea of Indian nation and nationalism which went on to inform the nation building exercise of the post-independence Indian state. Although the Indian constitution offers a more inclusive mandate with regard to the Indian nation building, critics argue that the Indian state have been engaged in a project of cultural homogenization in the mold of the dominant culture seeking to establish a culturally more uniform nation state. This has stood in the way of political, economic and cultural aspirations of the smaller nationalities and other minorities prompting different kinds of protest and assertions among them. While the Indian state has achieved some success in addressing some of these issues and concerns, problems remain calling for a more inclusive nation building in India.

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