Edn of the nation-state?

Is India unique in politically managaing ethnic conflicts? This book claims to evaluate, critically, conventional wisdom which argues that it is. But, says C.P. BHAMBHRI, it reveals the real face of western academic colonialism.

PUNJAB was burning in the 1980s and upto the mid-1990s because a section of the Sikh community had launched an armed attack against the State. The Punjab problem became complicated because Pakistan was directly involved in supporting a mini civil war in the border state. While the Sikh community was sharply divided on the path of violence followed by Bhindranwale, the Army action, known as "Operation Blue Star", on the holiest of the Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple, completely shocked the community. It developed a strong feeling of alienation because of this.

Many scholars, both Indian and foreigners, have analysed the genesis of the Punjab problem and the response of the State under the leadership of Indira Gandhi.

Gurharpal Singh, the author of the book under review, is a scholar settled in England. This fact is essential to note because the dominant western scholarship has started questioning the viability of a sovereign nation-state in the age of globalisation. It has been claimed by these scholars that the age of nation-state has ended with the phase of emergence of new ethnic states emerging.

The empirical base of "ethno-nationalism" is provided by the disintegration of the Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and India is also a candidate, like Sri Lanka or Pakistan, where ethno-nationalist movements are demanding and will demand separate ethnicity based states like a Sikh state of Punjab or a Sindh state of Sindhi in Pakistan or a Tamilian state in Sri Lanka because the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century is the century of ethno- nationalism. A. D. Smith published in 1981 an important book, The Ethnic Revival and Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobbsbawn have all come to this conclusion in their definitive and monumental studies on nationalism. Moynihan in his book Pandaemonium, published in 1993, has suggested that in the decades to come, the world will have more than 175 ethnic-national states.

This dominant piece of social science writing on ethnic nationalism is blindly accepted by Gurharpal Singh and his narrative is around the rationale behind an ethno-religious Sikh state. The main thesis of Singh is that India is an ethno (Hindu) democracy and Sikh ethno-nationalism has been crushed by State power exercised by a pseudo-secularist, Jawaharlal Nehru, and an authoritarian tyrant, Indira Gandhi.

The Congress or Communist Sikhs are the legitimisers of the Hindu democratic state of India and authentic representatives of Sikh nationalism are the Akalis and Jat Sikhs who have made great sacrifices for the Sikh cause during colonial rule and its successor, the independent Hindu democratic state. He builds a story where the Sikhs have been discriminated against by the British on the eve of Partition and later on when they are betrayed by Nehru and his successors. The author picks up a few books by western scholars and makes an attempt to define a distinct ethno-religious identity and applies it to the Sikh community which cannot be accommodated under the present ethnic (Hindu) democratic state because Sikhs are separate from the 82 per cent Hindus.

All champions of ethnic or religious identity ignore fundamental inner differentiation of every community, and artificially construct the community as an undivided and undifferentiated monolith. The author follows the same path because for him all Sikhs are just one socio-cultural group. A few words of wisdom by the author reveals the style of his narration in the book. He observes: "In a country where the intellectual discussion of separatism is forbidden by a Constitutional amendment, the prospects of state recognising such segmentary realities are more than remote". Further, "The argument that the Sikh question is a legacy of partition, a clear blot on nation building since 1947, is hardly developed. Congealed within the application of Nehruvian secularism has been implicit ethnic domination which has set clear limits to the articulation of a Sikh political identity". He tells us: "the main argument is quite simple: India is unexceptional in managing ethnic conflicts since 1947 and the process of nation-state-building has created a sharp divide between the core and peripheral regions. This division is better understood if India is seen as an ethnic democracy where hegemonic and violent control is exercised over minorities, especially in the peripheral regions thereby creating the conditions for the resilience of ethno-nationalist separatist movements in the latter regions".

The author constructs a history of separate and brave Sikhs beginning from Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the "Anandpur Sahib Resolution (ASR 1973) which has since become the "Magna Carta" of Sikh demands ..." The author's basic premise or assumption is that India is a formal ethnic (Hindu) democracy, its secularism is pseudo, and it violently oppresses and represses authentic entho-nationalist movements and any attempt by the Indian state to "accommodate" the aspirations of multi-identity groups of India is rejected as "cooptation".

This book must bring great comfort to the Sangh Parivar because the author tells us that India was always a Hindu state beginning with Nehru, and the remaining agenda of the Swadeshi Christian church and Indianisation of Islam has to be completed by the State power held by the Sangh Parivar. K. S. Sundarshan, Sar Sanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has taken it upon himself to complete the "unfinished agenda" of Hindu Rashtra by making all minorities accept their Hindu ancestory. K. S. Sundarshan thunders that "After Independence, however, the foreign churches began to act to further the cause of the western powers".

It is a sad commentary on the dominant Indian social science scholarship which, parrot-like, accepts and applies dominant social science fashions of western scholars, and the latest fashionable intellectual trend among Indians, like their western counterparts, that India is ethnically diverse and a total restructuring of the State on the basis of ethnic boundaries of various multiple groups will bring peace. The opposite of this is the hegemonic agenda of the Sangh Parivar which is involved in an effort to establish a state of the Hindus, by the Hindus and for the Hindus in this country. We completely reject the intellectual understanding about the concrete, complex and contradictory reality of India either by Gurharpal Singh on the one hand and K. S. Sundarshan and the Parivar on the other.

India is involved in a basic and fundamental struggle to build a democratic secular, federal and culturally pluralist state which has institutional capabilities to accommodate religious, cultural and linguistic diversities so that diverse social groups can celebrate their ethos of life. Such a struggle in India has not been and cannot be smooth. The social dialectics of Indian nation-making and state-making is quite complex and during the last 53 years, we have witnessed success stories of ethnic accommodation (Laldenga of Mizoram) and failure stories like the ongoing Kashmir dispute. Will secession of Sikh majority Punjab resolve inter-community problems with the Hindus? The real social mosaic of India is the North-East and it is witnessing tribe versus tribe and sub-tribe versus sub-tribe competition and conflicts. Is there any pure ethno-religious region in the country where secession can resolve inter-ethnic problems? Finally, Indian society is not constituted around "we" and "they" or "I" and "You" because Indians, for centuries, have lived together on the basis of their multiple identities and overlapping ways of life.

Indians are not only characterised by pure and different identity groups, we are also living in social complimentaries and multiple fraternities and the real enemies of India are pure religion- ethnicity propagandists and the forces represented by the Sangh Parivar. Unity in diversity with a strong belief of cultural pluralism is the goal of Indian society and state and the struggle for this goal is on. Its failure shall lead to ethnic cleansing in every district of India. Everyone in India should read this book to understand the real face of western academic colonialism and their "agents" in India universities.

Ethnic Conflict In India: A Case-Study Of Punjab, Gurharpal Singh, Macmillan Press Limited, London, p. 231, price not mentioned.

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