Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 Multiple Nationalisms, Linguistic Federalism and the Crisis of Border-States in India

Description

There are many reasons for the crisis of several so-called border-states in India. One factor is that the governing elite in India has continuously had a conceptual block about recognizing multiple nationalities in India. More specifically, given the complexity and size of India, it should have recognized and worked with what might be called a deeply asymmetrical federalism which recognized some societies within it as nations and some not. Over time, the governing elite in India did imagine an inclusive enough state in India, one that granted recognition to different cultural communities but it just fell short of grasping the precise form of recognition for which some societies increasingly yearned. This was a political as much as a conceptual failure. Moreover, the hold of some conceptions was so strong that these elites could not imagine an even more inclusive variety of federalism. Instead of responding even more democratically to multi-layered difference, the Indian state, responded to it with force. Furthermore, it could not imagine that the organizational principle of different states could itself be very different, that some regional units could be formed on the basis of language, others on the basis of religion and still others on the basis of traditional ways of living. Only then could groups with multilayered differences – difference in religion, language and a whole way of life – be accommodated within a single state. The crisis of border-states in India must be accounted also in terms of this deeper conceptual failure.

Rajeev Bhargava obtained his BA degree in Economics from the University of Delhi and M.Phil and D.Phil from Oxford University. He is currently Senior Fellow and Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, He is also the Director of the CSDS programme on Social and Political Theory. He has previously been Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and between 2001-2005 held the chair in Political theory and Indian political thought at the University of Delhi and was the Head of its Department of Political Science..

He has been a Senior fellow in Ethics at Harvard University, Visiting fellow of the British Academy, CR Parekh Fellow at the CSDS, Delhi, a Leverhulme fellow at the University of Bristol, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Jerusalem and Distinguished Resident scholar, Institute of Religion, Public life and Toleration, Columbia University, NY. . He has held the Asia Chair at Science Po, Paris in the summer of 2006. His publications include Individualism in Social Science, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992,) Secularism and its Critics ed. (OUP, New Delhi, 1998), Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, (ed. with A. Bagchi and R. Sudarshan, OUP 1999) and Transforming India, (ed. With Francine Frankel et. al, OUP 2000) and Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (ed.) OUP, 2008. He is currently working on a book on Secularism. He has contributed to several international books and journals including the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.and the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. He was a consultant to the UNDP report on Cultural Liberty.