Guest post by RAVINDRA K. JAIN

ABSTRACT

The nation-state that is the Indian Union comprises a diversity of socio-cultural minorities and a ruling majority. The decoupling of nation and state highlights a contradiction rather than the integration of socio-cultural diversities and political functions of governance. This contradiction is marked by a double deficit of democracy, namely, authoritarianism and citizenship. A potted history of three phases of modern India explores the roots, symptoms and provenance of this democratic deficit in the present conjuncture.

Keywords Apologetic patriotism; nation state and state-nation; late colonial, early post colonial and Hindutva phases; nationalism and social polity; caste, class and power.

I analyse the Indian State sociologically in three phases of continuous chronological succession: A. The Late Colonial, B. The Paternal post-colonial and C. The current Hindutva. Each phase is characterized by a dual deficit: authoritarianism and citizenship. In order to elucidate the origin and perpetuation of this dual deficit, I would delve into the potted history of each phase.

Phase A: The Late Colonial Phase

To underscore the character of early nationalist leadership, I focus on Gandhi, Nehru and Savarkar. It seems more accurate to delineate this leadership as patriotism (rather than nationalism) in its incipient formation. In the case of Gandhi and Nehru this was an evolving process culminating into nationalism whereas in the type-case of Savarkar this was an involutionary process ossified into ‘Hindu’ nationalism. Implicit in my delineation of these two types of leadership is a nuanced distinction between ‘state’ and ‘nation’. In the incipient stages of both types of leadership—as patriotic—the reference is to the ‘state’ or the country homogenized under alien British rule. The referent ‘nation’ gains salience as unqualified nationalism and Hindu nationalism on account of [majoritarian and minoritarian] diversity of the former and majoritarian religious monologism of the latter.

It merits iteration that the early patriotism of both types of leadership was anchored in the state—the alien British-ruled Indian State. As such, this patriotism in both its manifestations was an apologetic patriotism. What I mean here is that vis-a-vis British rule this apologetic patriotism showed a blend of loyalty and patriotism/resistance. This was a carry-over of an even older Indian tradition epitomized in the popular saying “jus raja tus praja” (as the ruler so the subjects). It is also clearly articulated in the self-identification of “the problematic fluid and slippery categories of peasant and farmer in rural India. There one ‘does not find classes in fixed relationship of adversity or alliance; contentious and collaborative relations exist simultaneously'” (Harsh Mander, cited in Jain [2022]: 209). Anthropologists and sociologists of India have designated these relations as ‘hierarchic reciprocity’ or more broadly as ‘patron-client ties’. These can be generalized further in the late colonial context of India. Gandhi in his days of Satyagraha struggle in South Africa remained loyal to the British rulers; he shared the racialist view of an asymmetry between the Blacks and the Indians and used euphemisms, even later, ‘being against British rule in India but not against the British people’ and so on.

Without being either blatantly presentist or solely anachronistic, it can be argued that, the popular common-sense in the late colonial and early post-colonial phases remained apologetically colonial. Sample the nationalist romanticism of rural society as either depressively backward or authentically traditional. About Nehru there is a widely held view in India (and not only of the RSS) that he capitulated control over Kashmir and took the case of its accession to the U.N. under the influence of English Governor General Mountbatten. These are only intimations of the ‘stigma’ of apologetic patriotism of early Gandhi and Nehru leadership.

Apart from leadership, it has been plausibly argued that institutionally too there has been a carryover from the colonial to the post-colonial phases; the charge of neo-colonialism smacks of the same old mentality of an apologetic patriotism. There were striking continuities in administration, justice and defence across the colonial-postcolonial divide (Kamtekar, 1988). In the context of globalization, postcolonial empire makes the “colonial exception” and internal exceptions, thus ensuring the continuity with colonialism (Chatterjee 2011: 235-252).

As pointed out above, the transformation of Gandhi’s and Nehru’s kind of burdened (apologetic) patriotism into humanist nationalism should be explained. As several authors have remarked, Gandhi’s nationalist transformation is easily traced back to his mass contact with rural India following his return from South Africa. To take a striking single example, Gandhi’s personal—almost visceral—distance from the Blacks during his incarceration in South Africa (Gandhi 1950) stands in sharp contrast to his humanist embrace of the Muslim and the Harijan in India (though the latter must be qualified, in terms of its political consequences, as his ‘elusive’ non-violence (Sharma 2021; Aishwary Kumar 2022). Nehru’s shift from palpable apologetic patriotism to humanist nationalism has been the subject of much recent scholarship. (See, for example, Bhattacharjee 2022). The authors Sharma and Bhattacharjee on Gandhi and Nehru respectively delve deep into the philosophical bearings of their protagonists. It would be interesting indeed to include among these iconic figures Rabindranath Tagore whose critique of the European nationalism as fascism is well-known (Tagore 1917) and in whose scrutiny as a social philosopher Ashis Nandy draws a nuanced distinction between nationalism and patriotism (Nandy 1994).

While still delineating the Late Colonial (Phase A) configuration of the indigenous leadership’s interface with the foreign State, the Savarkar type Hindutva leadership needs elaboration. In his personal case Savarkar’s is the most blatant and widely publicized example of apologetic patriotism. It is also noteworthy that throughout the Indian National Congress’s nationalist struggle against British rule, the Savarkar-inspired RSS adopted a ‘hands-off’ posture. That this ossified patriotism of the Sangh Parivar was to later blossom into full-fledged cultural nationalism is a story that I shall recount as prelude to Phase C — the current Hindutva phase of the Indian State. Suffice here to note at this stage that both the Indian National Congress type of ‘secular’ nationalism and the RSS and the Sangh parivar’s cultural nationalism remained oblivious, if not actively contributed, to the double deficit of [counter-democratic] authoritarianism and citizenship.

Phase B : The paternal post-colonial Phase.

Here we consider the varieties of nationalist projects and the form the conception of a new national polity would take. As Mrinalini Sinha (2022) has argued the context of the Constitution-making exercise in independent and would-be republican India marked a shift from the discipline of the [imperial nationalizing] conjuncture to a national-popular collective against colonial rule. This collective, as seen in thought from Rabindranath Tagore to Gandhi, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, was aware of the dangers and inapplicability of the European model of the nation-state in the Indian context.

It has been argued that the constitution-makers in India too seemed to have recognized that a forged homogeneity, characteristic of the nation-state model where the political boundaries of the state aligned with the cultural boundaries of the nation was not suited for India. The Indian Constitution and post-independence politics created the institutional edifice for a new model which some political scientists have called a ‘state-nation’ which unlike the nation-state makes room for the recognition of multiple cultural identities within a shared political community. However, and this is important, “In the absence hitherto of a distinct conceptual category to characterize this experiment, the Indian experience was too quickly shoehorned into a European-derived framework of the nation-state.” (M. Sinha 2022: 188).

The failure of this experiment and the embedded adoption of the culturally-cliched State as the encompassing term in the Indian nation-state framework showed it had lasting structural consequences. The vacillation in the Indian Constitution between the diversity of the Nation (‘We the people of India’ in the Preamble) and the homogeneous authority of the State (as in the ‘Directive Principles of State policy’) provided the backdrop for paternalistic and authoritarian governance by the Nehruvian Congress party rule (‘The Congress System’ Kothari, 1964) in the early post-independence period. Secondly, this unresolved vacillation between the people and the state also caused constitutional amnesia regarding citizenship rights and obligations to be monitored by the State. This European derived model of the nation-state defined the cultural diversity of the Indian nation as ‘unity in diversity’ rather than (as Ambedkar thought in relation to the majority-minority relationship) ‘diversity in unity’.

Nehru as the Prime Minister (1947-1964) was the helmsman of the State dominated nation-state polity. On the question of citizenship, though, there were serious disagreements between Nehru and the other parliamentarians who participated in the Constitution-making debates. The major disagreement pivoted around the majoritarian Hindu nationalism of figures like Shyama Prasad Mukherji and Deshmukh on the one side and the liberal anti-colonial democratic collective on the other. Nehru was a spokesperson for the latter who clearly rejected the minority-appeasement and (pseudo) secularist charges of the conservative majoritarian nationalists. In vindication of Nehru’s stand on citizenship (pointedly of migrants and refugees) let me quote Bhattacharjee: 2022 “Nehru based the idea of asylum on free will and affectivity. The decision to belong comes from the feeling to belong, and it deserves to be respected … It is incredible that Nehru offered the right to citizenship to the people first, and not the State. Citizenship is primarily a matter of claim that people make, before it becomes a rule assigned by the State. It is not just the widest possible consideration, political or ethical, behind defining the citizen. It is also most conceivably democratic.” (p. 71). In his own words, Nehru said, “So far as the refugees are concerned … We accept as citizens anybody who calls himself a citizen of India.” (Cited by Bhattacharjee, p. 71.) Incidentally these debates of the 1940s – 1950s and particularly the Nehruvian stance on inclusive citizenship, have an uncanny resonance with and relevance to the CAA and NRC controversies of our own times.

The default fall-out of prioritizing the nation or the people over State had been that the citizens’ rights and obligations function of the latter receded to the background. And, the obverse of this process, as regards functions of the State, became paternal and authoritarian. The latter imperative is most manifest in Nehru’s adoption of the Soviet model of development. Such an analysis of the political process and governance in the immediate post-colonial era supports our contention of the continued vacillation between the nation and state framework of the European model of the nation-state adopted in post-independence India. The Emergency imposed by Nehru’s successor and daughter Indira Gandhi in 1975 represented the apogee of State authoritarianism. After a brief interregnum her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks of the Babri Masjid to allow forced/illegal worship by votaries of Hindu nationalism in a mythical Ram Janmabhoomi, though the contradictory appellation “Secular and Socialist” in the Preamble of Indian Constitution had been inserted by Indra Gandhi herself during the Emergency in 1976. As Rajeev Bhargava (2011) has argued the intention behind characterising the Indian State as “secular” seems to have been the warding off of the threat of annihilation of religious minorities by a majority. However, we agree with Bhattacharjee (p. 79) that “even though a ‘final solution’ was certainly averted by the formation of a secular state… a symptom of ‘solution’ remained.” The “final solution” refers to the expulsion or liquidation of all but the dominant religious group, (Bhargava 2011) to deal with the tension continuously generated by deep religious diversity. As evidence of the continuing symptom of this solution, Bhattacharjee cites several examples of ethno-cultural majoritarian nationalist onslaught on minorities — religious, linguistic, caste and gender — in different states and regions of India. (pp.79-82).

The State and social polity: The Ambedkarite Interlude

A deviation from both the majoritarian cultural nationalism and the Indian National Congress’s secular nationalism was the Ambedkarite investment in the state and the law. But it is crucial to point out that this deviation was further marked by radical social concern. To quote Aditya Nigam (2020) apropos contested nationalism, “…almost an inversion of this approach [the two brands of nationalism] was the position articulated by someone like Ambedkar, whose investment was in the State and Law, which he wanted to use, if need be, against the emergent Nation. The story of emergent nationalism is not a simple story given its hugely contested nature… and one of the prime expressions of this conflict occurs around the question of power, posed starkly as a choice between political power and social reform.” (p.146)

While the secular nationalists put their faith in political power, to wit, the political independence of India from foreign rule, Ambedkar underlined the significance of radical social reform and social transformation. The greatest danger that Ambedkar saw in nationalism was precisely that a new sense of a being-in-common was coming in view that was recreating the place of pre-eminence of the upper castes in the new political. The new nationalist political, in this sense, aimed at subsuming the social, the new being-in-common. And that was the danger, the real threat to the future emancipation of the Dalits and other lower castes. The challenge, therefore, had to be met at both levels — the state and society. Ambedkar’s understanding of the “social polity” that he sees distinct from the macro-political domain of law-making and parliamentary intervention lay at the heart of the question of social transformation. Social polity was intrinsically related to the question of micropower in society at large. Later theorists (like Sudipta Kaviraj 2010 for example) were to call this “social constitution” epitomized as the caste order that is kept in place through a series of rigid rules sanctioned by religion. It keeps political power in its place — in relative marginality.

Ambedkar’s conceptualization of caste as micropower was an early intimation of what later political analysts like Kaviraj and Ranajit Guha were to take up in their acute understanding of the constitution of local power under colonial rule and, further, precisely the reality of these formations of local power in the context of emerging nationalism. On the latter dynamic, speaking of the national swarajist movement, for example, Ranajit Guha demonstrates with empirical evidence how “social boycott set out to serve the interests of the Big Society that was the nation by insisting on procedures used by the little society of castes to resist innovation and change.” (Guha 1998: 114). Thus there existed “a fairly high correlation between nationalism and casteism.” (Ibid: 111).

That Ambedkar had early intimations of what authors like Aditya Nigam (after Datta’s pioneering usage) call “social polity” is clear from his delineation of caste system as one of “graded inequality” where any number of castes exist in a vertical hierarchy that is maintained through a rigorous system of prohibitions and allowances. The system is kept in place primarily through the grid of social power rather than through the direct intervention of political power which is why he is centrally concerned with the social question. That is why Ambedkar insists that the caste order does not merely embody a particular division of labour but rather of labourers. It fixes the social position of specific groups of labouring populations with little possibility of movement across occupations.

What the later political analysts have done is to conceptualize the dispersed focus of power in social polity beyond the circumscribed limits of localized social power of castes to institute it as another tier of power lodged between the micropowers of caste and the macropower of the State “which is what provides it a sort of ‘relative autonomy’ vis-a-vis the state and submerges the central state, often accounting for its inefficiency in many crucial matters.” (Nigam, ibid, 161). In the discussion of social polity in my narrative above its downside or darker face in the political process is emphasized. This is to counter-balance the usual optimistic or rose-tinted depiction of regionally dispersed caste associations as flexible and adaptive elements in the dispersed modern democratic national social polity (cf. Rudolph and Rudolph, 2010; Rajni Kothari, 1970).

Phase C: The Current Hindutva Phase and its denouement.

Ethnic nationalism is based on religion, race and territory. In India religion is the over-arching idea; Hindutva is the ideological rendering and socio-political weaponisation of Hinduism. Hinduism by itself is heterogeneous; its religiousness is individualistic though not opposed to social in the limited collective sense—family, lineage, kindred, and even micro-caste. It is in the collective sense implicated with rule, power and wealth and thus potentially with territory, race and migration. Hence though religion, qualitatively Hinduism, encompasses Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and various foreign influences (like the Hun and the Sakas in ancient times) and, later, Islam and Christianity thus incorporating within its spectrum many panth including diverse denominations of Hindu religiousness itself. But it becomes Hindutva in the modern period wearing religion on its sleeve—a process catalysed by the influence of declamatory Protestant Christianity (see Joel Lee 2021) — and the othering of Islam and Christianity. We must also factor in the import of nationalist ideologies from Germany and Italy (Hitler and Mussolini) where race and territory are emphasised. In India the transformation of this brand of religion and religiousness into ethnicity should be understood to characterize cultural nationalism. In this sense both the majoritarian monologic Hindutva and religiously pluralistic and the so-called “secular” nationalism tend to be communalist. All this is readily understood in the framework of the caste system when this “system” is comprehended through its ideology (not necessarily the historical origins) of untouchability as “the constitutive outside” (a part apart as Ambedkar put it) permeating it as graded inequality based on birth, endogamy and pollution. (Jaaware 2018). The system became rationalized par excellence by Brahmanism. That is the crux of the concatenation of religion, society and individual in the cocktail of Hindutva. Currently, the State (democratic, “bio-political”—pace Agamben 2005—and enumerative) imposed upon the social system of caste the classificatory grid of General Category, OBC, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe. In the present conjuncture the Hindutvadi Kamandal politics reinforces and is imbricated with the Mandal politics of Reservations

As already mentioned in the course of Phase B the majoritarian Hindu ethno-cultural nationalism gained ascendence to define State authority and citizenship in its closing years, The hardening and entrenchment of this phase can be conveniently traced back to the onset of liberal economic reforms of the 1990s. Both journalistic and some academic analyses have depicted the Hindutva orientation of the current regime and spectacular growth of “infrastructural development” as polarized binaries. However, as a recent study of the quick development of the mega-city of Ahmedabad within a span of few years shows dramatically, the two currents are inextricably bound and reinforce each other (Amrita Shah 2015, 2026). From the economist’s point of view, she calls Ahmedabad as the site of “place-marketing” where public space was commodified with a distinct bias toward the Hindu middle class, and Muslim ghettos on city’s margin swelled. The study suggests that the key to explaining Narendra Modi was through his ideological commitments. He is committed to the Hindutva ideology of the RSS. And he is committed to neo-liberalism. And he is committed to both at the same time. The combination creates socio-economic fractures in the citizenry, creating class fractions and exacerbating disparities.

This is a very strong but credible version for the present regime of the “bread and circus” argument emanating from the Roman emperors. The regime insists on peoples’ duties (never on rights) and thus inures their choice, volition and freedom as against the State-provided spectacle (circus) which is firmly in the hands of the powers-that-be. These powers in Modi’s case are the Niti Aayog (replacing the Planning Commission), the complaisant and conspiring bureaucracy and above all, the ubiquitous big corporates. Thus, we have the layouts of spectacles — the airports, highways, massive infrastructure, fast trains and the like. In other words, the aura, the spectacle, the optics of development — aided and abetted by the government – controlled media — to stun the common people into sleep-walking into dreamland of “development”. In caste, communal and gender terms the above stated trends have been conceptualized apropos “the common people” as “mandalization” combined with the masterstroke of “kamandalization”. Authoritarianism and denial of citizenship rights reveals itself in the Modi regime’s treatment of the poor majority of citizens as “labharthi”.

The labharthi are precisely those who are subject to the charity and bounty of the State – in the typical case, recipients of monthly free rations. The government becomes the patron and the master while the ordinary citizen is the client and the servant. This is a neat reversal of the roles of the citizen and the government through a caricatured facade of the “welfare” State. The nearer the state and central parliamentary elections, the greater the quantum and frequency of such bounty by the ruling regime, particularly by disbursement of cash incentives for women. This then is the almost literal “bread” counterpart of the “bread and circus” Roman paradigm.

Coda

My aim in this last section of the article is not so much a comprehensive critique of state governance in the current Hindutva phase but to highlight points of authoritarian and citizenship deficit in it; their continuance and, indeed, exacerbation from the earlier phases. It would now be our task, in the light of foregoing analysis, to outline a framework for the denouement of the predicament. Let me therefore focus on the societal dimension of politics which was detailed in Phase B and hinted at in the opening paragraph of this Phase.

My take off here is Balagopal’s contention that “Caste is constitutive of class formation, political mobilisation and state power” (See Teltumbde 2026). His position converges with Ambedkar’s critique that centres on the broad class division of society, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it, on the point of the inextricable linkage between caste and class. “The mistake of the social justice agenda was that it forgot Ambedkar’s lesson that to effectively attack caste you have to (for most part) strongly but indirectly attack the material deprivations that make its logic so insidious” (The Mirage of Social Justice, Indian Express, 22 April 2023). It is noteworthy that both Balagopal and Ambedkar saw caste and class not as discrete variables but as interwoven infrastructures of power. And yet both agreed that to counter this infrastructure with its built-in coercive power of State violence, the response to repression would not be revolutionary counterviolence (viz., the Naxalite solution) but social movements of fraternity (Ambedkar) and civil society resistance (Balagopal). Democratic solutions are hailed by both but what the leftist Balagopal offers is “not consolation but analytical precision: an account of how inequality is produced, reproduced, and politically weaponised at the very core of India’s so-called democratic institutions.” (Teltumbde, 2026)

Ravindra K. Jain, Former Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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