Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s recent observation in a conversation with Prof Shruti Kapila at Cambridge University that India is a “Union of States” provoked strong responses from the critics of Gandhi as well as from followers of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The critics talked of India as a “nation” and not just a “Union of States”. The underlying motives on each side are clear. Mr Gandhi was indirectly criticising the tendency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to treat the whole country as a single unit, politically, administratively, and culturally. Hence the Modi government’s themes of One Nation One Election, One Nation One Ration Card and so on. This has been the tendency of the Congress party when it was in power at the Centre. The leaders at the Centre felt that the states are an obstacle instead of recognising that the states reflected the democratic diversity. There was also a sense of fear on both sides. Gandhi seems to have felt, and he did not elaborate and it would have been if he did, that Prime Minister Modi was undermining of India being a diverse polity by harping on the theme of “One Country”. On the other hand, Gandhi’s critics, mainly those from the BJP and its ideological affiliates, carped that Gandhi was undermining the unity of India by talking about the “Union of States”, implying that the states could walk away from the Union if they wanted to. Gandhi was not preaching secession or the freedom to secede because Congress, like the BJP, believes in the imperial imperative of ruling India as a single unit, where the states are merely administrative units. This should have led to an interesting debate between the ideas of “Union of States” and “nation”, two distinct ideas in political philosophy. But it only ended up in each side shouting the other down.
It is interesting that both the phrases are to be found in the text of the Constitution. The word “nation” is part of the phrase “[unity and integrity of the nation], and it was inserted in the Preamble through the 42 nd Amendment passed in 1976 during the Emergency. The phrase “Union of States” occurs in Article 1 (1) of the Constitution: “Name and territory of the Union: India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.”
Union of States is the democratic mechanism of how “India, that is Bharat” is constituted. India is a federation, because without the constituent States there would be no federation. So, one of the critics argued India was not a federation like the United States, where a civil war had to be fought to preserve the “nation”. There is an interesting historical background to the American constitutional history of federalism. Initially the 13 colonies were a confederation in 1776 when they fought against England, on the issue of “No taxation without representation”. That was the basis of America’s war of independence against Britain. America became a federation with closer ties when they adopted the Constitution in 1787.
The constitutional crisis that Abraham Lincoln faced in 1861 was this: The northern states did not have the slavery system that the southern states had. Slavery was legally sanctioned in the south. But when the new states were formed, the number of non-slave-owning states were on the increase, and that raised the alarm among in the south, and they wanted to break away. Lincoln was clear in his mind that he will go to war against the south to defend the constitution because that was his obligation as a president. He did not use the slavery issue as the basis for the war against the south, though at the end of the war, he did announce the emancipation of slaves in a proclamation ate the end of the war. The Civil War, for Lincoln became necessary to defend the American federation.
What then is the nation? It is the key concept of the Romantic movement in Europe that came towards the end of the 18 th century, almost marking the end of the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason of the earlier part of the 18 th century. Its origins are to be traced back to a tribe or to a group of tribes, who shared or did not share bloodlines. In late 18 th century, some of the German literary historians like Johann Gottfried von Herder clung to the word “nation” to make sense of Germany because it was then a congeries of states with a common language and common culture. Germany was a hopelessly outdated country politically in the face of France and England which had become states with constitutional and administrative frameworks. Right-wing German theorists of the 19 th century in post-1789 French Revolution era of new political ideas, saw in the idea of “nation” a superior cultural construct in the face of well-established states like France.
But nation was a powerful idea in the politics of Europe in the 19 th century, and it was the driving force in the shaping of movements like the unification of Germany and Italy, the freedom struggle of Greece from the Ottomans and even the constitution-making in Spain in 1812. A common criticism of Karl Marx was that he missed out on the importance of nations in his exclusive focus on class struggles and class solidarity. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War, the working call in each European country stood with its own country and this was based on national sentiment.
But the idea of “nation” took a different turn, and many sensible people in the early 20th century saw nationalism as a destructive force, even as many Asian and African countries were fighting against colonialism in the name of nationalism, including India. It is the wrong turn in the thinking about the idea of nation that has raised alarm in Europe, and it is same kind of the idea of the nation that is surfacing in India right now. Mr Gandhi wants to fight this wrong idea of the nation with his thesis of India being a “Union of States”, but he did not take the trouble to explain.
In the latter period of the development of the idea, nation implied a single race with a collective memory. This German notion of the nation was the seed of the National Socialist (Nazi) idea the “Volk”. The nation or the Volk did not need constitutional framework based on democracy and rule of law. It depended on bloodlines. Historian Heinrich von Treitschke expounded the irrational theory of the German nation, and it is the source of anti-Semitism that Adolf Hitler unleashed against the Jews in the 1930s. The right-wing Hindu nationalists were embraced this anti-democratic and anti-legal notion of nation as developed by German theorists, which is a form of racism in other words. As defined by the rightists, nation is a tribe related by blood, and those who do not belong to the tribe are aliens who should be denied membership in a nation, and even eliminated as Hitler tried to do through the Final Solution.
Nation in this sense becomes a dangerous concept. But the idea of nation in the liberal sense is a community with a shared political and cultural history and values, which can have language, religion, and even kinship as a bond. But it is not a closed society. The membership of a nation is not denied on grounds of religion, language, and ethnicity. In the liberal definition, the national is an opened-ended community.
There is then a clash between two ideas of the nation, the right-wing one which can turn ugly and diabolical and the liberal one which retains the positive ideas of shared memories and values implied in the idea of the nation, while at the same time expanding its contours.
The need to debate nationalism has never been more important than it is now because the idea of the nation as conceived by the right-wing groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP carries within it elements of intolerance and hatred, which needs to be combated and refuted.
(The writer is a New Delhi-based political commentator)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.