Yogendra Yadav: India is a State-Nation, Not a Nation-State https://www.forbesindia.com/article/independence-special-2013/yogendra-yadav-india-is-a-statenation-not-a-nationstate/35883/1 Aug 16, 2013
India has created a new model to democratically deal with deep diversities. It accepts that political boundaries do not and need not coincide with cultural boundaries
It was natural for some Indian nationalists to try the other option. Instead of stretching the interpretation, they wanted to bend the reality itself by trying to forge a unity that would conform to received standards. This is how the politics of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan was born. Guru Golwalkar, the iconic ideologue of the RSS, saw the challenge of nation building as requiring five unities: Geographical, racial, religious, cultural and linguistic. This project involved creating a uniform national community in the light of the cultural self-image of the dominant community. Thus their politics focussed on Hindi as the national language, Hindutva as the national way of life and the north Indian Hindi-speaking region as the heartland... This vision of nationhood is more European than Indian. It draws upon a model of the nation-state that emerged in Europe.
If there was one thing Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru shared, it was their rejection of the idea that India’s unity requires uniformity.
India’s ‘asymmetrical’ federalism recognises the unique situation of various states. The cultural policy of the state recognises and supports more than one cultural identity. The co-existence of Indian identity with other regional and religious identities is taken for granted. Political parties that raise regional and ethnic issues are not thrown out; they are brought within the pale of legitimate democratic negotiation of power. Quietly, but surely, India has created a new model of how to deal democratically with deep diversities.
India’s experience with diversities is not without its problems. The continuing alienation in Kashmir, and the ongoing slow-burning insurgencies in Nagaland and Manipur serve as a reminder of the failures of this experiment. But these are best seen as failures to implement the model of state-nation in its true spirit rather than the failures of this model itself.
From Nation-State to State-Nation MILAN VAISHNAV https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/12/18/from-nation-state-to-state-nation-pub-80642 DECEMBER 18, 2019 HINDUSTAN TIMES
Whereas a nation-state insists on alignment between the boundaries of the State and nation, a state-nation allows for a multiplicity of “imagined communities” to coexist beneath a single democratic roof. It recognises that citizens can have multiple, overlapping identities that need not detract from a larger sense of national unity.
Most of India’s social cleavages — caste, region, and language — do not pose an existential threat to democratic balancing, thanks to their cross-cutting nature. The only cleavage that can be reduced to a bipolar majority-minority contest is religion.