HVK Archives: Paradigm shift in India
Paradigm shift in India - The Hindustan Times
T. K. Oommen
()
10 May 1997
Title : Paradigm shift in India
Author : T. K. Oommen
Publication : The Hindustan Times
Date : May 10, 1997
The coalition governments led by Mr Deve Gowda and Mr I. K. Gujral are invariably
described as conglomerates of 'regional parties', while the Congress and the
Bharatiya Janata Party are referred to as 'national parties. Incidentally, the
Constitution qualifies India as a 'Union of States'. None of these usages accord
well with' accepted definitions of regions, nations or states. It is not only that
these usages create enormous conceptual confusions, they are also apt to
camouflage the content of the transformation that is taking place in India.
Broadly speaking, region is a geographical entity and one may distinguish between
folk, instituted and denoted regions. A folk region is a meaningful territorial
entity for the people who live there. Examples of folk regions in India are
Bojpur, Jammu, Mahakosal, Telengana, Vidarbha etc. Instituted regions are
distinctive and discrete units limiting the extent of operation for certain
functions. Thus one can speak of revenue or postal districts as regions. Denoted
regions are a consequence of purposeful delimitation by scholars and census
officials to seek solutions to some of the problems. One may thus speak of
cultural, linguistic, caste or physical regions.
The expression region in 'regional parties' does not answer any of these
descriptions. Similarly, the term national in 'national parties' simply allude to
their all-India spread. Finally, the term state in 'Union of States' does not
refer .to sovereign states; quite the contrary. In fact, Indian 'states' are
nations; speech communities in their respective homelands.
To clear the confusion one must unfold the relationship between citizenship and
nationality. Viewed historically there are three patterns of linking citizenship
and nationality. These may be referred to as hegemonic, uniformity pattern and
pluralist. The hegemonic model is. associated with feudal and empire states. In
these polities the culture of the dominant group is reckoned as the national
culture; others are accorded an inferior position within the polity.
The eclipse of the feudal and empire states and the emergence of the bourgeois
state resulted in a reformulation of the relationship between citizenship and
nationality. The new formulation maintained that each nation must have its own
state; national and political boundaries should coexist - the nation-state. There
was a variant of this formulation which maintained that national identity refers
to the urge to preserve one's language, culture and custom. But this does not
necessarily imply a separate sovereign state for each nation; several nations can
coexist under one political roof - the multinational state. Both these variants
did exist in the bourgeois and socialist states.
The pluralist model was launched by the socialists with the hope that (a)
'non-historic' nations will not aspire for their exclusive states, or (b) they are
destined to disappear, or (c) will acquiesce and assimilate. That is, the
socialist assumption was that several 'historic' nations can and will coexist
within one state; citizenship and nationality can be delinked. The problematic of
socialist praxis was the hierarchisation of nations - historic and non-historic -
and inequality among historic nations. In all the socialist multinational states
great nation chauvinism did emerge and contributed to the break-up of the state.
With the universal acceptance (not necessarily practice) of democracy, the
hegemonic model stands clearly delegitimised. The pluralist model as it was
practised became a failed experiment. On the other hand, the dictum "one-nation,
one-state" is abandoned even in West Europe, its birthplace. It is against this
background that one should search for a viable linkage between citizenship and
nationality for any polity, including India. The heterogeneity of contemporary-
polities thanks to constant population movements and their commitment to democracy
as a value call for the rejection of the old ideal - the nation-state. In fact,
citizenship was never conceptually tied to national identity.
It is true that in Europe the ideal was the nation-state. But even in Europe
before 1800 the demand for political autonomy in the name of cultural
distinctiveness was confined to two specific contexts. These were (a) when empires
imposed or tried to impose official religions on dissenting minorities and (b)
when empires attempted to increase central control through imperial
administration. In the last two centuries the demands for political autonomy based
on cultural specificity have increased. But only a tiny proportion of the world's
distinctive religious, linguistic, and cultural groupings have formed their own
states. And only a few of the world's existing states have approximated the
homogeneity and commitment implied in the label "nation-state". This is in spite
of the stupendous efforts at homogenisation of state populations. If so, the
nation-state as an aspiration and as an ideal ought to be abandoned.
Charles Tilly after undertaking an indepth analysis of the European situation for
500 years distinguished between state-led and state-seeking nationalisms. In the
case of state-led nationalism, the rulers demanded that citizens should
subordinate all other interests to those of the state, which hence led to the
subsequent emergence of 'nations'. In state-seeking nationalism, leaders sought to
create new states which could pursue the interests of distinct populations with a
specific cultural identity; nationalism created states. But there were nations and
national leaderships in Europe which renounced a separate state and preferred a
union within a larger polity.
Wales and Scotland were joined to England; they were not annexed. Catalonia, the
second most industrialised nation of Europe after England in the eighteenth
century, did not seek a separate state. The Catalonian elite did not perceive any
contradiction between maintaining a certain level of economic, political and
cultural autonomy for the nation and continuation in the Spanish state. Most
nations in the Indian Union did not ever aspire for their exclusive sovereign
states. The point is, nations do not always seek their states; some nations
consciously renounce exclusive states. Therefore state-renouncing nationalism is
an empirical fact and a conceptual possibility.
The 'nationalist' movements of the excolonial countries were explicitly political
and were oriented to state building. These movements had been efforts to transform
colonies into states and subjects into citizens. But at the height of the
anti-imperialist struggle it was often forgotten that colonies were multinational
entities. The primary objective of the anti-imperialist struggle was to liberate
the colonies from the foreign political yoke and establish self-governments.
Understandably, though unfortunately, nation and state came to be treated as
synonymous.
The Indian National Congress as successor to the anti-colonial movement was
instantly invested with enormous legitimacy. Even its most virulent critic at
that time, the Communist Party of India, suspended militant activities to provide
a chance to the new 'national' government. The coincidence of this euphoria with
the consensual leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru provided the fledgeling state with
the required political stability in the first two decades. The state-building
activity launched by the new govern-' merit was instantly labelled as
nation-building. Even the left which appropriately conceptualised India as a
multinational state did not interrogate this conflation for fear of being
stigmatised as 'anti-national', a great liability to a party which is a
participant in the electoral arena. But the articulation of national aspirations
got legitimised through the linguistic reorganisation of India in the 1950s. The
all-India character of the Congress Party gradually started eroding.
Today there is no political party which commands support from all parts of India.
Given its historical legacy the Congress still has an all-India spread but its
effective presence is confined to a few pockets. The CPI too has an all-India
presence, but its spread is too thin in most areas. The BJP's presence is largely
limited to three nations of India - the Hindi belt, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The
CPI-M is really effective only in two nations - Bengal and Kerala. Similarly, the
Janata Dal's anchorage is by and large limited to Bihar and Karnataka. The
explicitly nationalistic parties stigmatised as regional parties function within
their respective nations. This is the case with the Dravidian parties of Tamil
Nadu, the TDP of Andhra Pradesh, the AGP of Assam, the Akali: Dal of Punjab and
the Shiv Sena of Maharashtra.
There are thus three types of political parties in India based on their spread.
First, all-India parties. Second, multinational parties which do not have an
all-India presence. Third, national parties which are confined to their respective
nations. If national and multinational parties succeed in effectively tackling the
specific problems of their constituencies within the framework of the federal
polity, they are likely to improve their electoral prospects. In turn, the
possibility of nurturing political parties as all-India enterprises will suffer a
setback unless they attend to the specific problems of particular nations. It is
no longer feasible to reinvent the successor 'nation' to the colonial state.
The 1996 election verdict is not a fractured one and the coalition government is
not a transient phenomenon as are popularly pronounced; they are paradigm shifts
in Indian politics. They herald a new beginning, the emergence of a multinational
federal India.
Back
Top
|
