India is one of the few nations in the world that has resolved the problem of separatism in so many states

Over the decades, Gorkhas, Sikhs, Nagas, Manipuris and Kashmiris — to name only the most well-known — have declared their disaffection with the Indian state to be such as to merit breaking away. No one ever followed up on this intention. India is one of the few nations in the world that has successfully resolved the problem of separatism in so many states.

“Indians call themselves — and quite assertively — Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist, etc. But from this, it does not follow that there is no such thing as India. Those are ascriptive identities that do not rule out the overarching identity of being Indian.”

As electioneering in India becomes more strident and voters are wooed by a focus on the faultlines in society, it would do us good to recall the nature of our nationhood. Countries come into existence because we focus on what is common among us rather than what is different. The ‘moral spirit of combination’ holds a nation together, wrote Rabindranath Tagore in 1917, when he was worried about the war that was going on in Europe and soldiers being pulled from all over the world into the battleground. In an essay on India’s nationhood, he said it was quite evident that this was a war of nations rather than that of tribes or religions. After all, Tagore wondered, being a nation was a much more evolved state for a society, since it enabled a much larger number of people to come together and harmonize their actions for the common good. Then, he penned down his thoughts on how different nations had been formed and the positive and negative consequences of it. The most visible negative consequence was that since 1914, European nations had been at war with one another, and millions of young men from India and Africa had been sent to Europe to fight. On the positive side, nations had ensured that people from diverse backgrounds — different from each other in language, religion and ethnicity — had come together and created a society and polity that benefited everyone.

Tagore noted that nations were the highest form of social evolution. Thereby lies a very important insight for us to understand our own existence in the present times.

Overcoming the natural differences of ethnicity, language and religion, nations came into being when their people wished to live together. Diversity, faultlines due to ethnicity, religion and language — all these come with birth. The desire to live together does not; it is crafted by human beings. What makes India unique in the comity of nations is the perpetual desire of people to live together, which is manifested in the fact that not only do we survive, we also make constant efforts to stay together.

This has been so throughout history. There are ancient texts in which we referred to ourselves as the people of Jambudwipa, the land of the jamun tree. In the Kusa Jataka from the fourth century BC, Sakra, the king of the gods, gave the ugly Prince Kusha a necklace of pearls and told him to wear it, saying, “Tie this on you, then there will not be your equal for beauty in all Jambudvipa.” In later times, with an increasing contact with the outside world, those across the Sindhu river were referred to as Al-hind. Later, various East India companies came into being, not ‘South Asia companies’. India has been a singular civilization in history.

This continues to be the case even today. Statements made by leaders of various groups that have taken up arms against the Indian state in modern times are interesting.

Eno Rh Raising, the self-styled ‘home minister of the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim’, said in 2015 that the Nagas were a separate people with a history different from that of Indians. The occasion was the signing of a peace accord with the Indian Union. On August 3, 2015, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN)-IM, the largest of the seven Naga insurgent groups, announced a historic peace agreement with the Centre, agreeing to create mechanisms for greater autonomy for Naga tribes living in Manipur and decommissioning of arms held by the NSCN (IM). Neither the Nagas nor the media reporting these twin statements saw anything contradictory in the spectacle of the leader of a people with a history different from that of India signing a peace accord with the very entity they were fighting against, while at the same time asserting their separate identity.

Over the decades, Gorkhas, Sikhs, Nagas, Manipuris and Kashmiris — to name only the most well-known — have declared their disaffection with the Indian state to be such as to merit breaking away. No one ever followed up on this intention. India is one of the few nations in the world that has successfully resolved the problem of separatism in so many states.

Speaking at a public forum last year, Bipul Kalita, an ex-member of the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom), said they laid down arms when they realized that 98 per cent of the people of Assam did not support militancy.

The more simple-minded among intellectuals writing on India take these assertions of separateness literally to be a sign that the Indian Union barely exists, that it was brought into existence by the British; the presumption being that there was no entity called India before that.

For Westerners to see us like that makes sense to them. Perhaps they see nations as monolithic entities. For Indians to imbibe and regurgitate this merely shows a people unaware of their own strengths and their long civilizational memories. Abrahamic benchmarks of nation and religion are of little use to us. Unlike Europe — which was troubled by religious wars from the times of the Crusades right up to the 19th century, marked by mass killings every few years — Indians did not carry out large-scale slayings.

Exceptions prove the rule. The one fault line that resulted in the partition of the country expressed the one conflict that Indians were unable to resolve amicably. About this, the Congress Report on Communalism, published in 1931, mentioned that the so-called Muslim problem in India was entirely the creation of the British administration trying to divide India and Indians in ways that were not natural to the country. Subsequent events only substantiated the findings of the report. Even after Pakistan had been created as a country for Muslims, millions of them continued to live in India of their own volition. As a recent study by economist Shamika Ravi says, Muslims flourished in India. Their numbers went up from about 8 per cent in 1950 to around 14 per cent in the present times, even as the number of Hindus in Pakistan went down from 25 per cent to about 2 per cent in the same period.

Indians call themselves — and quite assertively — Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist, etc. But from this, it does not follow that there is no such thing as India. Those are ascriptive identities that do not rule out the overarching identity of being Indian.
(The author is a Historian)