Nationalism in South Asia: From State Building to Nationality Assertions

Pramod Kumar
Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh (India)

The specific historical conditions in the countries of South Asia are shaping up nationality discourse in interaction with the developments in politics, culture, region and socio-economic formations. These nationality assertions have their basis in the quest for identity, re-allocation of scarce resources and competition for power.

The post-colonial states of South Asia pursued the project of nation-building around monocultural and hegemonic nationality constructions. Its interaction with a multi-cultural social reality produced conflicts which often took a violent turn. For the post-colonial South Asian region, if the mid twentieth century was a period of consolidation of nationalism into nation states, the last decade of the past century witnessed an assertion of nationality identities. It seems that in post-colonial countries these assertions are either being substituted by re defined (not organic) sub nationalities or by an aggressive state-controlled nation.

The South Asian countries in interaction with the ‘new’ globalised reality, representing a complex nature of politics carefully nurtured by colonial constructs, economies if scarcities, culture enmeshed in communal, religious and ethnic aspirations, have made visible in an aggressive form the tensions produced by the nation building project.

The globalisation syndrome, as manifesting in South Asia represents a kind of dualism. On the one hand, there is globalisation of capital and, on the other, there is localisation of human capital (labour) their aspirations, culture, history, language, etc. This phenomenon has provided impetus to the “sons of the soil” movements. It is, therefore, hypothesised that the new reality of capitalism does not want racialism and religious fundamentalism but needs them. These redefined and reformulated national identities sometimes acquired monotheistic fundamentalist overtones. They reinforced the ‘traditional’ purity of culture and project the perceived dominant culture as a threat.

The quest of the post-colonial states to emerge as nations by melting diverse interests into a monolithic entity has led to the subversion of, for instance, the rights of cultural and linguistic identities. The process of homogenisation by undermining multi-cultural realities and disparate aspirations and identities has led to the negation of the rights of many collectivities.

In this context there is need for examining how far the multi cultural character of societies in South Asia could find corresponding expression in the practice of politics and state structure. The denial of access to different cultural groups to their own language, culture and other resources due to the interactive relationship between the structural conditions and state apparatus has alienated a large section from their cultural and language and their own physical and material resource base.

In other words, the denial of access to diverse linguistic and cultural groups to their own resources, culture and language may have caused conflicts based on identity assertion. The most obvious examples are the ULFA assertion in the North-East, the JKLF movement in Jammu & Kashmir, Khalistan in Punjab in India, the ripples of ethnic Tamil struggle in Sri Lanka and Pathan separatism and Sindhi identity assertion in Pakistan. There are channels such as cultural, economic and political which connect South Asian societies and which transcend the territorial conception of sovereignty and nationalism. Implicitly cross-border linkages with the population having similar cultural and ethnic basis resulting in divisive cultural identities and apportionment of material resources rather than drawing on collated advantages.

It has been argued that the interactive relationship between the structural reality, the state and the path of development has shaped the nationality assertions in South Asia. The centrality of post-colonial state and its quest to emerge as a nation by co-opting sectional interests, or communal and/or cultural and linguistic aspirations has defined the nature of state in opposition to the ‘nation’. This has led to the ‘dwarfed’ articulations of the competing national identities.