State and Nation: Shall the Twain Ever Meet?

The State

Unlike countries where national liberation was won through violent revolutionary struggle against European colonial rule, India achieved independence by means of a negotiated transfer of power. This meant that the institutions of the state were largely inherited from the colonial period and, in many respects, retained the same shape. This gave rise to the body of scholarship called the constitutional history of India, covering a period from the early East India Company administration to the Indian Constitution of 1950 and after, which was taught in Political Science departments in Indian universities well into the 1970s. ³ This scholarship emphasized the features of rule of law, rational bureaucracy and responsible government that were, it was claimed, gradually established in course of the supervision by the British Parliament of the government of its Indian empire.

Much of the architecture of the 1950 Constitution was carried over from the structure created by the 1935 constitutional reforms. The apparatus of governmental administration retained the same form, with a small elite cadre belonging to the all-India services supervising a much larger corps of functionaries of the provincial services. The Indian members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the much acclaimed ‘steel frame’ of the British Raj, were retained, even as a new Indian Administrative Service, modelled on the ICS, was created as its successor. The crucial unit of the apparatus was the district administration which, under the charge of the district officer, continued as in colonial times to be responsible for maintaining law and order, even as it also became the agency for development work. The basic structure of civil and criminal law as well as of its administration was also inherited from the colonial period. The working of the high courts and district courts maintained an unbroken history from colonial times, continuing the same practices of legal precedent. The Indian armed forces also maintained a continuous history from the colonial period. Even today, Indian regiments display battle honours and trophies from British colonial wars fought within and outside the subcontinent. The British tradition of a professional army strictly under the control of the political leadership was successfully maintained in the period after independence, unlike in India’s neighbouring countries. There was not even a joint command of the army, navy and air forces except in the office of the political head of government, until the tradition was broken in 2021.

While there were all of these continuities, there were important discontinuities too. The inauguration of the constitutional republic in 1950 meant that there was now a sovereign legislature elected by direct universal suffrage without communal representation, but with reservations for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. There was a parliamentary system of government of the British type with an executive responsible to Parliament, but with an indirectly elected President as head of state. Moreover, there was a constitutionally guaranteed set of fundamental rights of all citizens which did not exist before. There was an independent judiciary with certain powers of judicial review of laws made by Parliament. The constitution was federal, with state governments responsible to directly elected state legislatures, but with a distribution of powers between the Union and the states that was heavily inclined towards the Union. As a federal state, the Indian state was more centralized than most federations elsewhere.

Even though the constitutional histories literally embodied this truth in their thick volumes, the fact that the inherited state structure was fundamentally imperial in character was blissfully forgotten. This accounts for the remarkable amnesia today about how the present boundaries of India were consolidated by bringing in territories outside British India—the princely states (which accounted for nearly one-third of the present area of India), the French and Portuguese colonies, and Sikkim. These areas were, over a period of time, integrated into the rest of India by a political-administrative process that was essentially imperial, using a combination of diplomatic negotiation backed by the threat, and sometimes the use, of force, followed by agreements and treaties. Princes were first promised autonomy in all matters except foreign relations, defence and communications, then encouraged to convene their own constituent assemblies, then given generous privy purses as a reward for accepting the Indian constitution, and, finally, offered the positions of Rajpramukh, that is, constitutional head, of their integrated states. Similar techniques had to be applied to integrate into the federal system the erstwhile hill districts of Assam which had been left out of the 1935 constitutional arrangements; they were given a large measure of autonomy from laws made by the Indian Parliament. Traces of this history of imperial-style politics were left in the body of the Indian Constitution in the form of Articles 370 and 371 as well as the Sixth Schedule. ⁴

The present borders of the country have been so naturalized in public discourse in India today that even specialists fail to recall how an imperial state structure had come in handy to consolidate the territories of what is now described as the Indian nation state. The negotiated transfer of power from the colonial regime created the myth that the state was both historically and conceptually prior to the nation. It was not. The constitution that the people gave to themselves in 1950 was for a republic with new boundaries in which the people were sovereign. Nothing like it existed before.

Important academic works have emphasized the novelty of the new republican state. ⁵ While recognizing the continuity of legal-constitutional history, they point to the future-oriented promise of republican citizenship characterized by guaranteed rights of liberty and equality. But they do not consider the novelty of the body of citizens brought together by national borders that did not exist before. What were the social and emotional bonds that would unite the people into the new nation and make them, for the first time in Indian history, the sovereign foundation of the state?

The Nation

The word rashtra which is now the term for ‘nation’ in Hindi and several other Indian languages collapses, in its normal usage, the concept of nation with that of the state. In other words, rashtra has come to stand for the nation state. Indeed, the word rajya is commonly used to mean the constituent states of the Indian Union and seldom the Indian state. This is not surprising since the latter, on attaining independence from British rule, is widely perceived to have found its historical fulfilment by becoming identical with the Indian nation. But this reasoning is seriously flawed. Even academic historians and political scientists have been victims of this nationalist ideological snare.

If one were to look at a map of India from the early 1950s, one would find a veritable jigsaw puzzle of states which has been thoroughly rearranged since then. This indicates that the legal-administrative structure of the Indian state continues to seek a proper alignment with the political conception of the Indian nation. After all, Telangana was separated from Andhra Pradesh only a few years ago in 2014 and Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir as recently as 2019. Demands for the redrawing of state boundaries and creation of new states continue to be made.

It could be argued that these are merely geographical rearrangements within the boundaries of the nation state that have nothing to do with the conception of the Indian nation itself. A look at the cultural history that lies behind these geographical redefinitions will show that this claim is incorrect. A crucial watershed was the reorganization of states in 1956 before which national leaders such as Nehru and Patel, advised by senior members of the civil service and the legal profession, insisted on retaining the multilingual and multi-ethnic provinces inherited from the colonial period because they felt it was risky to disturb the state structure too much. This position was entirely contradictory to the Congress policy, followed since 1921, of organizing its provincial committees on linguistic lines because mass nationalist mobilization could be best carried out in the major regional languages. But the democratic demand for linguistic states proved to be unstoppable. Beginning with the creation of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh in 1953 and the recommendations of the States Reorganization Commission in 1956, boundaries were redrawn over the next several decades to produce states with a single major language. What was the source of this more or less common demand all across the country for monolingual states and how was it related to the imagination of the Indian nation?

Earlier analyses by political scientists of this phenomenon tended to emphasize the compulsions of electoral mobilization and factional power conflicts within the ruling Congress Party or the masking of communal or ethnic demands by those of language (Brass, 1974; Dasgupta, 1970). A spate of recent research on the emergence of reading publics in different regions of India as a result of the proliferation of printed literature in the modern Indian languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has given us an entirely new perspective for understanding the cultural foundations of mass nationalism. ⁶ We can now see that the imagination of the nation as a community of millions of people unrelated by kin or face-to-face proximity was enabled by the circulation of printed texts in newspapers, magazines, novels, government circulars and textbooks. Poets, novelists and playwrights performed a crucial role in creating the emotional attachment of masses of people to something they learnt to call their nation. The printed text was supplemented by the performance of songs and plays as well as the circulation of printed images. ⁷ This was possible only through the medium of the standardized print vernaculars. Consequently, the consciousness of large democratic solidarities was grounded in the regional languages. This was the reason why the Congress, at the moment of its transformation into a mass movement of nationalism, realised the importance of organizing itself into monolingual provincial organizations. The same force was active after independence in the demand for linguistic states.

But if the proximate community of national solidarity was built around the regional languages, how could there be the sense of Indian nationhood? This is where the Indian experience has produced a unique historical example. In a recent publication (Chatterjee, 2020), I have proposed the argument that the description of the Indian nation varies according to the language formation in which one is positioned. The nation is imagined and contested in different ways in Tamil, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese or Bengali, and different genres of prose and verse literature, music, art and theatre participate in this project of imagination. But even when the entity may be called the Indian nation, it actually looks different from each regional perspective. This is reflected in the fact that the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ often have different equivalents in the regional languages. Thus, Assamese and Oriya use desh, and Telugu and Tamil desam and tecam, to mean nation, while in Bengali the word is jati. The word for state in Bengali is rashtra and in Telugu rashtram, which are completely different from the way the word is used in Hindi. Tamil uses arasu or maanilam. These differences are not merely nominal, because each of these words have different conceptual and affective histories in each language. My argument, therefore, is that we can only, and necessarily, get a relativist view of the Indian nation—relative to the linguistic region from which one is looking—since there is no available linguistic perspective from which we can obtain an invariant view of the object. Academic histories produced in English by professional historians only give us the history of the Indian nation state built around an imperial state apparatus. The history of the Indian nation as a solidarity of the people can only be imagined in a vernacular print language: of these there are several and each produces a different description of the Indian nation. Consequently, only a relativist view can reconcile the history of the state with that of the people.

Regional Views of the Nation

If one looks at the findings of this new body of research, one will discover important differences in the way the nation has been imagined in the various regional language communities of India. Thus, in Maharashtra, the memory of the Maratha Empire frames the imagination of a sovereign people, united by Maharashtra Dharma, fighting a prolonged war against the Mughals under the leadership of the warrior-king Shivaji. This nation, portrayed mainly by Brahmin writers, is male, militant and imperial, in which Maharashtra leads the rest of India. But this vision was challenged by anti-Brahmin intellectuals who rejected the inheritance of the Peshwa-dominated Maratha Empire and instead held up the devotional congregation of the Varkari sect of Pandharpur as the living soul of Maharashtra Dharma (Deshpande, 2007; Guha, 2013; Kosambi, 2014; Naregal, 2001; Wakankar, 2008).

By contrast, the imagination of the nation in Bengal is that of a mother, insulted and injured by foreign rulers, seeking protection and sacrifice from her children. The image of the mother goddess came to dominate this representation of the nation, iconically symbolized in the song Vande mataram. Soon this representation of Mother Bengal was transformed into the image of Bharat Mata and circulated all over India (Ramaswamy, 2010). This showed that signifiers of the nation could be used interchangeably for the regional as well as the pan-Indian community, depending on the context. But this vision of the nation in Bengal, constructed mainly by Hindu upper-caste writers, with its strong association with the iconography of the warrior mother-goddess, was contested by Muslim intellectuals (Bhattacharya, 2003; Bose, 2014). Interestingly, when Bangladesh was created in 1971, it adopted as its national anthem a song by Rabindranath Tagore that represented Bengal as a homely mother who loves, shelters, feeds and plays with her children—yet another transformation of the same signifier familiar in Bengal’s literary imagination.

In the Tamil region, the language itself was deified as the iconic maternal image of Tamil Tai. Tamil acquired the status of a classical but living language that rivalled Sanskrit. When the first generation of Brahmin nationalists identified the Indian nation with Aryan Hinduism, they were challenged by the non-Brahmin movement in the mid-twentieth century. The public register of the Tamil language in the theatre, cinema and political oratory was classicized by replacing Sanskrit with pure Tamil words (Bate, 2009; Ramaswamy, 1997). This was the reverse of what happened with most North Indian languages which produced a modern vocabulary for public use by adopting or coining neologisms out of Sanskrit words. Further, the historical imagination of the state was stoked in Tamil Nadu by memories of the glory of the Pallava, Chola and Pandyan kingdoms, rivals to the empires of the north. The Dravidian movement, launched by the Justice Party which was anti-Congress and pro-British, did not deny the Indian nation but insisted that there was no normative Indian who was unmarked by ethnicity, language and caste. In particular, E. V. Ramasamy sustained this critique of mainstream Indian nationalism by pointing to a series of real and imagined overlaps between the Hindu religion, the Brahmin caste, the Sanskrit language, the Aryan race, the valorization of unproductive occupations and the patriarchal subordination of women. This reached a critical point in the anti-Hindi agitations of 1937–1940 and the early 1950s when the Dravidian movement demanded freedom from Hindi imperialism by separating from India (Pandian, 2007). The legacy of Dravidianism and the anti-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu continues to this day, even though there is no separatist political demand any more. The imagination of the Indian nation in Tamil is thus quite distinct.

The role that secondary education plays in grounding the imagination of the nation in a language is dramatically shown in the large swathe of north India where Urdu was the language of bureaucracy and education in the colonial period. In Punjab, the modern high literary culture of the province was built through the medium of Urdu. But the regional and cultural identity signified by Urdu was much larger than Punjab. When the Arya Samaj tried to build a reformed Hindu identity in Punjab, it preferred to use Hindi as its chosen language since Hindi too occupied an equally large cultural space. Ironically, therefore, Punjabi, which was the ordinary spoken language of most Punjabis, did not acquire the full dimensions of a modern print vernacular before the partition of the province in 1947 (Malhotra, 2002). Instead of the novel or romantic poetry or drama or newspaper editorials, Punjabi lived on in older popular narratives and medieval ballads in their unreconstructed shapes (Mir, 2010). The imagination of the nation in Punjab, split between three languages—Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi—finally acquired three distinct forms tied to three religious groups—Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. These divisions were resolved politically not merely by the bloody partition of Punjab between India and Pakistan, but also by the later separation of Haryana from Punjab. Nevertheless, the relation between the regional solidarity and the pan-Indian remains problematic because of the continued resonance of a distinct Sikh nationalism.

In the United Provinces, on the other hand, the use of Urdu in schools and law courts was challenged in the early twentieth century by a group of Brahmin intellectuals who claimed that Hindi was an entirely separate language from Urdu. Through journals, publishing houses and dramatic performances, they crafted a new Sanskritized language in the Nagari script, shorn of Arabic-Persian words, and made it the vehicle of the national imagination (Dalmia, 2006; Orsini, 2012; Rai, 2001). By contrast, Urdu became identified as the language of Muslims and, following Partition, was no longer a medium of instruction in schools and colleges or a language of bureaucracy in UP. Hindi, with its status as official language spoken by 40 per cent of the people of India, has now become the dominant language for the propagation of pan-Indian nationalism.

Examples of the distinct imagination of the national community in the different language regions of India can be multiplied. What they show is that the consciousness of national solidarity is deeply rooted in cultural traditions and idioms expressed in the regional language, while at the same time it also defines the particular relation of the regional to the pan-Indian community. Further, there are contestations over these cultural constructions within each regional political formation which may or may not have been resolved. It is crucial to bear this in mind when considering the evolving political process determining the relation between the state and the nation in the last 75 years.

The Political Process

The dominance of the Congress Party in most of the country played a crucial role in the political management of the reorganized units of the federation in the first two decades after independence. Where this dominance did not exist, as in the hill districts of Assam or Jammu and Kashmir, there was open resistance. Rajni Kothari (1970) provided the classic description of this ‘Congress system’ which consisted of a dominant Congress Party divided into several organizational levels from the national to the provincial to the local, each level enjoying a considerable degree of autonomy, providing political direction to the corresponding level of the administrative and developmental bureaucracy. Adopting the then fashionable structural-functional framework, Kothari’s model explained the logic of linguistic reorganization of provinces and the political integration of the princely states as one that allowed enough room for adjustments according to regional and local particularities which did not threaten the viability of the state apparatus. Supposedly traditional identities such as caste, religion and ethnicity were mobilized to produce larger solidarities at the provincial level—all under the political umbrella of the Congress organization.

This Congress system did not last. Following the 1967 elections, Congress dominance was challenged in several states, leading ultimately to a split in the party and its reorganization under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The unprecedented centralization of the Congress Party and Mrs. Gandhi’s authoritarian leadership style required a reappraisal of the Indian state’s relation to underlying social forces. An influential set of studies in the 1980s used Marxist categories to argue that India was ruled by a dominant class coalition of capitalists (stratified into all-India and regional strata) and rich farmers, with the bureaucracy and political elite holding the balance (Bardhan, 1984; Vanaik, 1990). Neither of the two propertied classes had the power to dominate the other, and the upper middle class that comprised the bureaucratic elite had a decisive voice because of the significant weight of the public sector in the economy. Maintaining this ruling class coalition was not easy, since there was constant pressure to tilt the balance in favour of one or the other dominant class. Using Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the passive revolution of capital, Sudipta Kaviraj (1988) offered an analysis of Indira Gandhi’s role as a leader standing above the contending classes to reach out directly to the people as a benevolent protector and provider of welfare. The centralization of power in the hands of a small ruling circle in New Delhi continued into the period of Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership, leading to severe tensions in centre–state relations and, in particular, complaints about the governor’s role in appointing and dismissing state governments.

During this entire period, the ideological content of national identity was officially portrayed as a diverse people united under a state that was leading the country along the path of planned economic development. While particularistic identities such as language, caste and religion could be politically negotiated at provincial and local levels, especially in the field of electoral competition, they were to be subordinated to the demands of the Indian nation state. On the sensitive matter of religion which had caused the partition of the country, the Indian state could not remain entirely aloof from religious institutions, given the numerous traditional connections between religious and political authorities, but, in a specifically Indian version of the doctrine of secularism, it promised to treat all religions equally (Bhargava, 2010).

The liberalization of the economy in 1991 once again transformed the relation of the state to the underlying social forces. The all-India strata of corporate business houses grew rapidly, both in the established manufacturing sectors as well as in new areas such as information technology. The political strength of rich farmers declined considerably, reducing them to the role of pressure groups in state politics. The end of the licensing regime meant that corporate groups could now negotiate with state governments for better access to land and tax benefits. The urban middle class lost its earlier commitment to government service and the public sector and instead aspired to enter the glittering world of corporate business and plentiful consumption. At the same time, the rapid growth of the private corporate sector led to evictions from the land and impoverishment of small farmers who flocked to cities and small towns to find a precarious livelihood in the burgeoning informal sector. A new phase began of the passive revolution of capital in India (Chatterjee, 2008).

The political process from the last years of the Rajiv Gandhi government to the BJP victory under Narendra Modi in 2014 was marked by considerable flux, with no party securing dominance all over India, several regional parties gaining power in the states and a series of coalition governments at the centre. The ideological credibility of secularism and pluralist democracy also came under severe stress. The Supreme Court verdict in 1985 in the Shah Bano divorce case confirming the priority of fundamental rights over Muslim personal law was opposed by conservative Muslim clerics, responding to which the Rajiv Gandhi government passed a law to dilute the effect of the judgment. As a countermove, Hindu organizations aligned to the BJP mobilized a movement to declare the Babri mosque at Ayodhya the birthplace of Ramachandra. This led to a balancing act by the Congress government allowing the opening of a shrine to Ram Lala inside the precincts of the mosque. The defeat of Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1989 was followed by an unstable coalition led by V. P. Singh who, to shore up support from the regional parties, decided to implement the recommendations of the B. P. Mandal Commission to extend reservation benefits to the Other Backward Castes (OBCs). In reaction, the BJP and its allied organizations withdrew support from the V. P. Singh government and launched the Ram Janmabhumi movement which culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 (Jaffrelot, 1996). The Indian nation state entered an entirely new phase of defining its identity.

The Bid for Ideological Hegemony

The successful BJP election campaign of 2014 under Modi’s leadership did not emphasize the Hindutva agenda at all. Instead, it focused on the widespread discontent among the urban middle classes caused by allegations of corruption in the Congress-led UPA ministry and the aspiration of a wide section of the people, especially the young, for upward social mobility. Modi’s campaign received unstinted support from India’s business circles which expected him to bring in quick reforms of tax and labour laws and curtail populist spending. But following the financial crash of 2008–2009, global economic conditions were no longer favourable for maintaining the dizzy growth rates that Indian corporate houses enjoyed in the first decade of the new millennium. The Modi government, in its first term, was unable to carry out any significant pro-business reforms. Instead, it put in place a dense network of data gathering, commercial penetration and state surveillance through mobile phone services, electronic bank transfers and mandatory biometric identification. Faced with fierce agitation by farmers and disaffected dominant caste groups, it was also forced to resort to the familiar tactic of making concessions to significant electoral support groups.

But the Hindu nationalist outfits affiliated with the BJP were hardly inactive. They were intent on bringing within the Hindu congregation the smaller OBC groups, Dalits and tribal peoples, especially in northern India. At the same time, they kept up a hate campaign against Pakistan, and by extension, Indian Muslims. Following its victory in the 2019 elections, the BJP, now under the dual charge of Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, turned to an aggressive pursuit of its Hindutva agenda. It fulfilled a long-time Jana Sangh-BJP promise by ending the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370, separating Ladakh and demoting both parts of the erstwhile state to the rank of Union Territory. It then passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) by which only non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries could be given a fast track to Indian citizenship. This was accompanied by the announcement that the National Register of Citizens exercise, carried out in Assam, would be repeated in every state so that anyone whose residence in the country was called into question would have to prove with acceptable documents his or her nationality. When the anti-CAA protests became widespread and the BJP was routed by the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections of 2020, local BJP leaders engineered communal riots in the capital in which more than 50 people were killed. The ideological tirade that Muslims were inherently anti-national and untrustworthy became so virulent that isolated Muslim individuals were attacked and beaten to death by vigilante groups which proudly displayed their achievement on social media without any fear of punishment.

Fomenting such blatant anti-Muslim emotions by the topmost leaders of the central government, as seen, for instance, in election campaigns in Delhi, Assam, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, is unprecedented. It marks a clear departure from earlier attempts to present the Indian nation state as a pluralist unity of diverse social groups in which all religions had a place. Instead, it seeks to follow the populist strategy, described by Ernesto Laclau (2005), of drawing an internal border between the authentic people and its enemy and suggesting that all of the heterogeneous demands of different groups were being frustrated by that single enemy. The Congress and regional opposition parties are castigated for having dynastic leaders and sympathizing with Muslims in order to get their votes. The result, the BJP hopes, would be to unify a single Hindu consolidation, cutting across caste and class divisions, which is compelled to come together in the face of the perceived Muslim threat (80% vs 20%, as Yogi Adityanath repeatedly claimed during the UP elections of 2022). Indeed, the UP elections showed how the BJP has combined the common tactic of distributing government benefits to specific target groups with its Hindutva strategy by creating what may be called the idea of beneficiary (labharthi) citizenship: Hindus get benefits by virtue of being citizens of the country, while Muslims are given benefits by a benevolent BJP but cannot claim any rights. This concretizes the concept of Hindu Rashtra that Hindu nationalist ideologues have put forward over several decades. It is a new strategy of passive revolution, one that seeks ideological hegemony over an overwhelming part of the people of the country while demonizing and excluding a minority (Chatterjee, 2019).

This ideological move has required corresponding changes in the state apparatus as well as the political process. The most obvious change is the huge centralization of the federal system. Leaders of the RSS always believed that India should have a unitary, not federal, constitution, with Hindi as the sole national language (Golwalkar, 1960). Given the compulsions of electoral politics, the BJP does not espouse that position any longer. But the Hindu Rashtra idea has an inbuilt propensity to seek imperial bureaucratic domination over the whole country. In recent years, especially during the unusual conditions created by the Covid pandemic, the central government, and especially the Prime Minister’s office, has sought to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the central services. The armed forces have been given a prominent place in the political arena that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. State governors have acted to further the political interests of the BJP in ways rarely seen before. Even within the BJP itself, organizational power is centralized in a small circle and every election campaign, whether national or state or local, is fought in the name of Modi. Such is the reliance on a presidential-type contest that there have been serious proposals to amend the constitution in order to have simultaneous elections to Parliament and the state assemblies.

The Contrary Ideological View

This attempt to seek hegemonic power has met its limits. The BJP’s electoral support is actually restricted to northern and western India. This is a region where the ideological sway of Hindutva, expressed principally in the Hindi language, is the strongest. The Hindu upper-caste male voter of this region stands forth as the normative citizen of India, claiming to be the original and most authentic member of the nation and custodian of its civilizational heritage. All other inhabitants of India must prove their authenticity and loyalty before being admitted into the nation state. This is the hegemonic pretension of the Hindutva variety of nationalism.

The claim has been opposed in recent times. The BJP has been defeated in several state elections, despite strenuous campaigns by its central leaders. The anti-CAA protests spread spontaneously in cities and towns across the country before the Covid lockdowns put a stop to them. The centralizing effort has also been resolutely opposed in the language regions of southern and eastern India where regional parties are strong. Even more interesting was the year-long farmers’ movement against the controversial farm laws of the Modi government: it was kept alive largely by Jat farmers of Punjab, Haryana and western UP who drew upon the reserves of the oral vernacular culture of the region.

If one recalls the relativist character of the national imagination I described earlier, this should not come as a surprise. The centralizing thrust of the Hindu nationalist project, seeking imperial domination over the entire country of what is only a particular, regionally limited, cultural-historical construct, is meeting with opposition from forces that represent other linguistic communities. Just as there is an unprecedented attempt to centralize the federal polity, there is an equally unprecedented assertion of the cultural distinctness and historical pride of different states. This is being seen not only in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and West Bengal, but in the rediscovery of its Marathi roots by the Shiv Sena.

Among political scientists who have examined the evolution of the state–nation relation in India, Stepan et al. (2011) correctly perceived the problem. In their comparative study of multinational democracies, they pointed out that, like Belgium or Canada, the Indian state was formed not by a nation but by histories of conquest and treaty-making and contained within its boundaries several national groups. They called such formations state-nations rather than nation states. The peculiarity of the Indian case lay in the fact that the official ideology refused to accept that India was a multinational state and instead resolutely sought to replicate the nation-state model. Leaders like Gandhi and Nehru propagated an inclusive ideology that promised to find a place for every culturally distinct group within the nation state. Examining the empirical data from survey research, Stepan, Linz and Yadav found varying, and only moderate, degrees of popular trust and inclusiveness in the institutions of the nation state. But Stepan, Linz and Yadav did not pursue the question of what might be the normative basis for a state-nation rather than a nation-state foundation for India. As we now see, both competing political ideologies—the Congress variety of pluralist secularism as well as the Hindu Rashtra project of the BJP—are firmly grounded in the idea of India as a singular nation state. Yet the tension between the two views has culminated in a deepening crisis that only emphasizes the unviability of a singular idea of the Indian nation.

In which direction is this tension likely to be resolved? At the moment, the contrary forces that seek greater power for the states are still mired in immediate electoral calculations. Opposition parties find it hard to reconcile state-level competition with all-India cooperation or decide who should lead them in challenging Modi. These tactical considerations prevent them from developing a more comprehensive strategic vision that demands the equal participation of and equal respect for each constituent part of the federation. Such a normative vision implies the recognition that a coalitional, not majoritarian, form of national politics is the only one compatible with the democratic process in India. It is by no means insignificant that the BJP, even though it has had an outright majority in the Lok Sabha, has taken on coalition partners because otherwise several regions would not be represented at all in the cabinet.

But this alternative normative vision is regarded with great suspicion by the all-India classes—corporate business, the upper middle class and the English-language media. But if the opposition forces are unable to effectively project such a vision, it can only approach the leadership problem in an ad hoc and unprincipled manner. Consequently, it is likely once more to fall into the trap of having to answer the question ‘Modi vs. who?’ That is the presidential-type contest, utterly foreign to the Indian constitutional system, which the BJP is counting on.

The attempt to make the trajectory of the state converge with that of the nation has, as I have argued here, floundered. The formulae of ‘unity in diversity’ and pluralist secularism have little substance left in them. The BJP under Modi is seeking to impose, by means of a centralized state structure, the ideological dominance of a particular, regionally localized and majoritarian view of the nation on the entire people. If the scattered opposition to this aggressive project has to find its own ideological coherence, it must reimagine a federal polity based on the equal participation of every regional cultural formation and insist on the legitimacy and desirability of a coalitional form of government (Chatterjee, 2021). ⁸ Nothing else will suffice.