Nation and Nationality

This is surely a long gap between two posts. I in fact thought I had stopped posting. But since I am the one who has to motivate myself to post and since I happen to be at office at the moment and since I shall have to spend a lot of time before I can eventually leave, I thought I should go ahead and post something.

The post today is about the concept of a nation. What is a nation? It is a very important question, considering the fact that today’s basic political organization is a nation state. The word nation can be employed in atleast two different senses.

The first of these is the subconscious feeling of togetherness that people would have towards each other in a society. This togetherness can be because of cultural similarity, linguistic similarity, religious similarity and so on. But the basic idea here is that people feel they form some sort of a cohesive unit. That sounds pretty simple at the moment. But it is really not so. Many people, once they get this basic idea, start dissecting people into nations. Someone called V D Savarkar once declared “Hindus and Muslims form separate nations” or we have another example in the now very popular muslim brotherhood. But is this that simple? What kind of model do we have when we see the way nations of this nature interact with each other? Did I say interaction? Are they well recognizable separate entities in the first place to interact? I don’t think they are. When we have a uni-dimensional world view, it really seems to be so. For a person who defines identities primarily based on language, linguistic units form nations. For him or her, Tamils form a separate nation. Malayalees similarly would be another separate nation. This is not wrong per se. Not that these people want men to fight with each other all the time. But the way they see the world is such.

People who are by nature divisive, would tend to see the world then as made of separate nations constantly at conflict for the shared resources. People who are by nature co-operative would on the other hand see the world as made of separate nations living together in symbiotic relationship. But the reality is that both these world views show only a uni-dimensional picture of the concept of a nation. If we decide to dissect the world into nations based on only one criteria, yes, we might have disparate nations. But we should realize that there are far too many things that define affinity among nations. Language is one. Religion can be one. Political Unity can be one. Cultural unity can be another. Economic union can be yet another. People who feel a sense of togetherness on one scale might be drastically different and belong to different nations when seen through a different prism. Tamils might be united by language. But a tamil hindu is united to a hindi speaking hindu by the bond called “hindu” and he might be closer to him than to say a “tamil muslim”. Thus, nations of different kinds do not have a separate existence. They overlap and the overlapping is far from simple.

This is where the second nation comes into picture. This concept of nation is the concept of a nation-state. When people form a single political entity. What binds the two nations more than anything else is that people who develop a strong sense of nationhood start demanding a separate nation state. This seems to be quite a common phenomenon in this age of nation states. So, what is the logic behind such a demand? Are such demands feasible and should they be encouraged? Firstly, to demand for a separate nation based on a nationhood that is not related to land can be dangerous. Consider for example that tamils want a separate nation and they fight bitterly with the government of India and with the rest of India and do become successful in breaking away. What happens? Will the tamils then be completely concentrated in the newly formed state? Not at all. Just as it happened during the partition in 1947, there will be tamils in the rest of India and non-tamils in tamil nadu. What is their status? People might say that the Indian Government will not discriminate. They need not. If the tamils had fought bitterly and had developed a bitter feeling in the minds of other Indians, after such a partition, a common Indian cannot see a tamil the way he sees other Indians. He will always be sucpicious and tamils would become second rate citizens in their own homeland. The same would hold good for non-tamils in tamil Nadu. I do not say that this would be the case in all such partitions. There can be cases like the India of 1947 where rules were made fair for hindus and muslims. But this is out of the ordinary and not the norm. It is very easy for such a nascent nation to remain unbiased. India was lucky to have had Mr. Nehru at the helm during such a crucial phase. India atleast maintains a semblance of neutrality in such issues.

Coming back to the topic, to demand a separate political nation based on a national identity is not feasible. But having said this, what about countries where the majority, in the name of democracy, frames rules that are going to make it difficult for a minor sub-nationality to lead a normal life? What if the constitution is going to be biased? The only possible solution in such cases would be to try and amend the constitution and if that fails internally, appeal in international forums. As long as the constitution and rules are not biased, people should always strive to look into internal ways to solve issues. And peaceful means of course. Violence is not going to help.

Guess I am done for today. Feeling sleepy but cant sleep. Will post soon. :-)