Nationalism

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: Nationalism is perennially relevant in India — touching questions about federalism, minority rights, sedition law, cultural policy, and foreign policy. UPSC Mains has asked about Tagore's critique of nationalism, Nehru's vision of secular nationalism, the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism, and whether nationalism is compatible with liberalism. Understanding the conceptual distinctions — nation vs state vs nation-state; civic vs ethnic nationalism — is essential for nuanced answers.

Contemporary hook: The tension between Indian constitutional nationalism (civic, secular, inclusive) and cultural nationalism (Hindutva, religious-civilisational) continues to shape India's political landscape. The distinction between patriotism and aggressive nationalism appears directly in UPSC GS4 questions. This chapter provides the theoretical vocabulary.

PART 1 — Quick Reference Tables

Nation, State, and Nation-State Distinguished

Types of Nationalism

Indian Nationalism — Major Visions Compared

PART 2 — Detailed Notes

1. What is a Nation?

A nation is a community of people who believe themselves to share a common identity and a common destiny. The NCERT identifies two ways of understanding nationhood:

Objective criteria: Shared territory, language, religion, race, history, or culture. These are observable features that distinguish one group from another. German Romantic nationalism (Fichte, Herder) emphasised these objective criteria — particularly shared language and blood.

Subjective criterion (Ernest Renan's definition): In his famous 1882 lecture "What is a Nation?", the French scholar Ernest Renan rejected the objective criteria as determinative. Nations are not defined by race, language, or territory but by a shared will — the desire to live together and continue the shared life. "A nation is a daily plebiscite" — its existence is continually renewed by the consent of its members.

Renan's approach is constitutionally important for India: India has no single language, race, or religion that could define a nation objectively. Indian nationhood is constituted by the shared political project of the Constitution — the daily choice to live by constitutional values of equality, liberty, and fraternity. This is precisely Nehru's and the Constituent Assembly's vision.

2. Emergence of the Nation-State

The modern nation-state emerged in Europe through three processes:

The Peace of Westphalia (1648): Ended the Thirty Years' War; established the modern international system of sovereign states whose internal affairs cannot be interfered with by external powers. This "Westphalian sovereignty" became the template for the state-centric international order.

French Revolution and nationalism: The Revolution (1789) transformed subjects into citoyens — citizens of the French Republic. The nation replaced the king as the source of sovereignty. French nationalism spread through Napoleonic conquests, triggering reactive nationalisms across Europe.

19th-century unification movements: German (1871) and Italian (1870) unification showed that nations without states would seek to create them — nation-building through state-building.

Decolonisation: The 20th century saw the dissolution of European empires and the creation of new nation-states in Asia and Africa. India (1947), Pakistan (1947), Indonesia (1945), Ghana (1957) — all navigated the tension between anti-colonial national unity and internal ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity.

3. Nationalism and Its Tensions

Nationalism vs liberalism: Nationalism asks for loyalty to a particular community; liberalism asks for universal rights and tolerance. These can conflict. If "India for Indians" means Indians of all communities, it is compatible with liberalism. If it means excluding minorities or repressing regional cultures, it is not.

Nationalism vs internationalism: Nationalism prioritises national interest and sovereignty; internationalism asks nations to subordinate interests to global norms (human rights, climate change, trade rules). Tagore was an early critic of aggressive nationalism on exactly these grounds.

Nationalism vs minorities: When the "nation" is identified with the majority cultural group, minorities are either pressured to assimilate or treated as less than full members. This is the central tension in Indian nationalism — between the constitutional vision of civic inclusiveness and majoritarian cultural nationalism.

4. Indian Nationalism — Major Streams

💡 Explainer: Tagore's Critique of Nationalism

Rabindranath Tagore's 1917 lectures in Japan and America (Nationalism) are a remarkable critique written during the First World War. Tagore was not a nationalist in the conventional sense; he was an internationalist who found nationalism spiritually and morally dangerous.

His argument: The nation is a political organisation optimised for commerce and power. It generates a collective ego — pride, exclusion, hostility to outsiders — that corrupts the spiritual and cultural values that make civilisations great. The nation-state demands loyalty that overrides individual conscience. "The nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mercenariness of its patriotic poets, is the exact opposite of the ideal of humanity."

India specifically: Tagore feared that importing European nationalism into India would reproduce the exclusionary, warlike, and mechanistic features that he found repugnant in Western modernity. He advocated instead a civilization that was deeply rooted in Indian cultural and spiritual traditions — inclusive, pluralist, and cosmopolitan.

Contemporary relevance: Tagore's critique applies with renewed force to contemporary majoritarian nationalism — when national identity is defined in ways that exclude minorities, marginalise dissenters, and suppress cultural diversity.

5. Nehru's Secular Nationalism

Jawaharlal Nehru's nationalism was simultaneously civic-secular and modernist-developmentalist.

Civic-secular: National belonging is based on citizenship, not religion or ethnicity. All Indians — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, atheist — are equally Indian. The state is neutral between religions. This is the vision encoded in the Constitution's secularism.

Modernist: India's national destiny is to overcome the legacies of colonialism, caste, and religious division through industrialisation, scientific development, and democratic self-governance. The state — through planned development — is the instrument of this national project.

Anti-communalism: Nehru regarded communalism (the organisation of politics around religious community) as the greatest danger to Indian nationalism. The Partition of 1947, which Nehru experienced as a catastrophic failure, confirmed his conviction that religious nationalism was incompatible with the democratic, plural India he envisioned.

6. Ambedkar's Constitutional Nationalism

Ambedkar's nationalism differed sharply from both Gandhi's civilisational nationalism and Nehru's Nehruvian secular nationalism in one crucial respect: fraternity.

Ambedkar's three-part nationalism:

1. Liberty — individual freedom, particularly freedom from caste oppression
2. Equality — substantive equality, not just formal; reservation as instrument
3. Fraternity — the sense of common brotherhood that makes social justice possible. "Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things."

Ambedkar was sceptical of Hindu nationalism because caste — the organising principle of Hindu social life — was incompatible with fraternity. A nation divided by caste cannot be truly unified. His vision of the nation was therefore constitutionally grounded, not culturally Hindu.

7. Savarkar's Hindutva

V.D. Savarkar's Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923) defines the Hindu nation through three criteria:

1. Pitru-bhumi (fatherland): India must be one's ancestral homeland
2. Punya-bhumi (holy land): India must be the land of one's religion's origin or sacred focus
3. Rashtra (nation): A common culture, language (Sanskrit), and civilisational heritage

Under this definition, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains qualify (their holy land is India). Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands are Arabia and Palestine respectively, do not fully qualify — they may be Indian citizens but are not, in Savarkar's view, full members of the Hindu nation (Hindustan).

Constitutional rejection: The Indian Constitution explicitly rejected this vision. The Preamble's "secular" descriptor (added 1976, but implicit from the beginning), Art. 15 (no discrimination on religious grounds), and Art. 25–28 (equal freedom of religion) together constitute a civic, non-Hindu-centric national identity.

8. Partition and Nationalism

The Partition of 1947 was the catastrophic product of two nationalisms — Indian and Pakistani — that proved incompatible. It resulted in the largest forced migration in history (approximately 14–18 million displaced), and between 200,000 and 2 million deaths.

Two-nation theory: Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League argued that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations with irreconcilable interests, requiring separate states. Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress rejected this — arguing that India was a multi-religious, plural civilisation and that religious difference did not constitute separate nationhood.

The lesson for Indian political theory: Partition demonstrated both the power of religious nationalism (it can create new states) and its human cost (it produced unprecedented violence and suffering). Independent India's constitutional commitment to secular, civic nationalism was partly a direct response to the failure of religious nationalism.

PART 3 — Frameworks and Analysis

Framework: Civic vs Ethnic Nationalism — Application

Framework: UPSC-Relevant Distinction — Patriotism vs Aggressive Nationalism

Exam Strategy

Prelims Traps

Mains Answer Framework: Nationalism Questions

For "Critically examine Indian nationalism in its multiple forms":

1. Define nationalism — objective vs subjective criteria; Renan's plebiscite model
2. Anti-colonial nationalism — the independence movement and its unity
3. Post-independence streams: Nehru (secular-civic), Gandhi (territorial-moral), Ambedkar (constitutional-fraternal), Savarkar (Hindu civilisational)
4. Constitutional resolution — civic nationalism in the Constitution
5. Contemporary tensions — majority-minority relations, sedition, flag nationalism
6. Conclusion — pluralist nationalism as India's distinctive contribution

Previous Year Questions

Prelims 2017: Which of the following best describes 'civic nationalism'? (a) Nationalism based on religious identity (b) Nationalism based on citizenship and shared political values (c) Nationalism based on racial purity (d) Nationalism based on linguistic identity Answer: (b)

Mains GS4 2021: "Patriotism and aggressive nationalism are not the same — distinguish between them with examples from Indian history and constitutional values." (150 words)

Mains GS1 2018: Discuss the main features of Tagore's critique of nationalism. Is his critique still relevant? (250 words)

Mains GS2 2020: "The Partition of 1947 was a failure of secular nationalism." Examine with reference to the two-nation theory and India's constitutional response. (250 words)