By Asis Mistry
The idea of India was imagined through structures that excluded its margins from the start, and to move forward, we must un-imagine the nation to reimagine belonging through justice and civilizational plurality.
There has been a
compelling and timely exchange of ideas on the meaning, memory, and crisis of
Indian nationalism — a conversation shaped by Yogendra Yadav (“The nationalism
we forgot,” Indian Express, May 27, and “The rediscovery of
nationalism,” IE, June 5), Suhas Palshikar (“Who stole my nationalism?”,
IE, May 31), Akeel Bilgrami (“An alternative nationalism,” IE,
June 16), and G. N. Devy (“Tale of Two Nationalisms,” IE, June 30).
These interventions attempt to recover what they see as a richer, more
inclusive tradition of Indian nationalism — one rooted in the freedom struggle,
constitutional morality, and cultural pluralism. Devy draws a sharp contrast
between constitutional nationalism and the Hindutva project, while Yadav and
Palshikar debate the historical omissions and contemporary distortions of the
nationalist ideal. Yet, taken together, these reflections remain tethered to a
foundational narrative — that Indian nationalism was, or could have been,
inherently integrative. What remains insufficiently examined is whether this
idea was ever structurally capable of delivering justice, or whether the
exclusions and silences that mark today’s authoritarian turn were always latent
within it.
Let us offer a critical
intervention in the ongoing debate on Indian nationalism. It contends that the
“idea of India,” long eulogised for its pluralist and democratic aspirations,
has always rested on a brittle foundation — one undergirded by caste
hierarchies, epistemic violence, and a statist rationality that was
fundamentally hostile to radical plurality. The present turn toward an
exclusionary, Hindutva-inflected nationalism is not simply a break from the
past; it is a brutal intensification of latent tendencies, if not structural,
in the postcolonial national project itself.
Yogendra Yadav retrieves
a vision of Indian nationalism that was distinctively integrative — one that
eschewed the homogenising impulses of European models and celebrated a
capacious unity-in-diversity. Suhas Palshikar, more cautiously, acknowledges
the aspirations of this tradition while confronting the silences and exclusions
embedded within it. Both thinkers attempt to reclaim an inclusive nationalism
from the wreckage of the present. Yet in doing so, they betray a nostalgia for
a pluralist nationalism that, arguably, never fully existed. Their recovery of
the past often obscures the deeper question: who was permitted to belong in the
first place?
For all its rhetorical
inclusivity, Indian nationalism has historically failed to include caste,
tribe, and indigeneity in any meaningful way. The frequently invoked ideal of
“belonging without othering” was never realised — not because of momentary lapses
or policy failures, but because it was structurally unviable within a
nation-state built on upper-caste consensus. As Ambedkar warned, political
democracy without social democracy is nothing but a shell. What the nationalist
movement achieved was not inclusion, but a fragile consensus curated by elites
— a consensus that depended on the suppression of deep-seated inequalities and
dissent. These exclusions were not accidental. They were foundational.
G. N. Devy’s distinction
between constitutional nationalism and Hindutva nationalism is helpful in
mapping the ideological terrain, but it ultimately flattens the complexity of
India’s civilizational past. Bharat, as a civilizational entity, cannot be
reduced to either of these poles. Unlike the modernist logic of nation-states
that seek homogeneity, Bharat’s coherence emerged from shared difference — a
continuity of layered identities, moral universes, and spiritual traditions.
The current nationalist crisis, then, is not simply the clash of two opposing
visions. It is the culmination of a longer historical dismemberment — a process
by which colonial and postcolonial elites steadily replaced a plural civilizational
consciousness with a narrow, bureaucratised, and homogenising model of
statehood.
In both its Nehruvian and
Hindutva iterations, the Indian state has failed to acknowledge this deeper
plurality. Where Nehruvian nationalism instrumentalised diversity under the
banner of unity, Hindutva nationalism weaponizes it under the banner of purity.
Both have relied on the coercive apparatus of the state to discipline
difference — through language policy, citizenship regimes, national security
laws, and the criminalisation of dissent. In this context, Benedict Anderson’s
theory of the nation as an “imagined community” requires reconsideration.
Bharat was not imagined into being through print capitalism or modernist
allegiances. It was lived, remembered, contested, and practised across
millennia. What has been imagined — and violently enforced — is the
nation-state itself: a bounded, majoritarian, and ultimately brittle political
form.
While Palshikar is right
to draw attention to the failures of nationalism before 2014, he still retains
faith in its redeemability — in the possibility of a democratic nationalism
that could correct its course. But what if that possibility was never structurally
feasible? Postcolonial theorists like Partha Chatterjee have framed Indian
nationalism as a derivative discourse, modelled on Western ideals. Yet this
critique often stops short of interrogating how caste and upper-caste modernity
shaped the very contours of nationalist imagination — in its pedagogy, its
vocabulary, and its exclusions.
The violences of the
present — the targeting of Muslims, the silencing of caste-based resistance,
the criminalisation of protest — are not a new aberrations. They are the logical
outcome of a state form that never accounted for the margins. From Kashmir to
Bastar, from Dalit student suicides to the disenfranchisement of Adivasi
communities, the postcolonial nation-state has failed to include. For too long,
nationalism in India has depended on forgetting — forgetting caste, forgetting
tribe, forgetting women, forgetting dissent.
If the nation as
currently imagined is exhausted, then what comes next? The answer does not lie
in recovering a lost golden age of pluralism or reinventing a softer version of
nationalism. Rather, it lies in reimagining the political community itself. The
civilizational idea of Bharat offers a different grammar — one that is not
reducible to statehood, territory, or majoritarian culture. It gestures toward
a space of overlapping moral frameworks, non-statist affiliations, and lived
pluralities. But such a turn must be made without mythologising or
romanticising the past. A civilizational politics is only meaningful if it is a
politics of justice — if it reckons honestly with structural exclusions, rather
than subsuming them under heritage or cultural pride.
This is not an academic
diversion. It is a moral and political reckoning. In an era where the state has
turned its power inward — criminalising citizenship, militarising campuses, and
transforming nationalism into an instrument of fear — rethinking the nation is
an urgent imperative. The challenge is not to rescue Indian nationalism from
its present distortions, but to un-imagine the very exclusions that enabled its
construction.
We must imagine anew — a
community grounded not in uniformity, but in solidarity; not in fear, but in
mutual recognition; not in myth, but in ethical co-existence. In that
reimagining may lie the possibility of a Bharat that was never fully realised,
but is still waiting to be claimed.
The author is a faculty of Political Science at the University of Calcutta
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