Recently, in Kerala, an incident unfolded that serves as a stark reminder of the challenges faced by individuals from marginalized communities. Two women police officers went to the apartment of a film star, Vinayakan, one evening in connection with a police inquiry. The police officers, who were not ready to disclose their identity, started asking questions to Vinayakan. Vinayakan reported this at the police station. The station officer retaliated with a pointed question, “Who are you to ask the police officers to show their identity proof?” He replied he was an Indian citizen and had the right to ask such questions.

Vinayakan, a Dalit, argues that it is because of his marginal identity that the police officer questioned his authority and right to challenge police officers. This exchange, seemingly innocuous, highlighted the intersection of authority, identity, and the right to question. Today, we examine this incident not merely as a localized episode but as a microcosm of the larger societal issues that persist beneath the veneer of our democratic ideals.

As we reflect on our journey as a nation over the 75 years since Independence, it becomes clear that those at the margins still cannot claim their rights and social power. Those occupying the seats of power and privilege of the state are not convinced about the equal rights of the marginalized sections of this country. Despite India’s transformation from a colonized state to a free nation in 1947, the status of the minorities—religious, regional, linguistic, and sexual minorities—leaves much to be desired. The increasing number of human-rights violence against Dalits/Tribals and other weaker sections testify to the fact that we have not yet reached a position to claim our nationality as inclusive and just. In this context, Partha Chatterjee’s question “Whose imagined community” becomes pertinent when we talk about our nationhood (Chatterjee, 2010).

^{VINAYAKAN | PHOTO: FACEBOOK}
Benedict Andersons’ idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ (1983) marked a modern affirmation of becoming a political community, influenced by the values of the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Anderson was offering a theory of a modern nation-state that is different from the pre-modern theocratic notion of state. It was a departure from ‘fuzzy communities’ (Kaviraj, 2010) to right-oriented citizens in a modern context. However, critiquing Andersons’ idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, Partha Chatterjee tried to unveil the inherent colonial imaginations embodied in the cultural and political tradition of the colonized. Locating the idea of nation in a postcolonial sensibility, Chatterjee wanted to urge us to look at the margins of the nation which exposes the dilemma of becoming one essential national community in India. For him, the modern notion of nation is a closed imagination unless and until it opens itself to its fragments—women, subalterns, and the minorities (Chatterjee, 1993).

This essay takes a tour of the historical trajectories of the formation of the nation-state in India and analyses how it has created and treated its margins in its political process of nation-building. Engaging with the political discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar, representing the two different streams of Indian political thought, this essay embarks on an inclusive nationalism that even lodges the voices of dissent within.

India as a Nation-State

Nation-state is a modern concept of a sovereign polity. It is a modern understanding of state that emerged after the Westphalian Treaty (1648) and the French Revolution (1787-99). The Westphalian Treaty marked the shift from a theocratic state to a modern state by which it assumed self-determination and sovereignty of a state. The French Revolution extended it to a state of liberty, equality, and fraternity by which citizens were rendered as liberal citizens entitled to certain rights. However, the European nationalist movement that offered the ideological ground for the formation of a modern nation-sate eulogized a core national essential identity to which all are expected to be incorporated. This sense of nationalism or the core essential identity, in fact, creates its borders and margins which is termed as the “state of exception” by Gorgio Agamben (2003). According to Agamben, sovereignty exercises its power by creating its exceptions, exclusions, and borders. The margins are accommodated within the system as its exceptions. They are neither ousted by the political power; nor included within.  That is why Judith Butler once said: “To have the nation-state is to have statelessness” (Butler, 2010). Nation-state, though it is indispensable in modern times, is an exclusive idea as it legitimizes its discontents, fragments, and margins.


^{GORGIO AGAMBEN | WIKI COMMONS}
Nation always follows the notion of nationalism There is no nation before nationalism (Spivak, 2025:17).  Nationalism is foundational for a nation-state, which is a product of a collective imagination constructed through rememoration. This collective rememoration is nurtured by both the political and cultural practices of an ‘imagined community.’ Culture plays a vital role in fostering nationalism in terms of a common language, a common flag, and a common feeling of oneness. The problem with the modern notion of nationalism is that it revolves around a common memory, essence, or identity consciousness which may not be conducive for marginal communities. The modern idea of nationalism fosters a notion of centrality of cultures but not the multiplicity of cultures. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak thus argues that nationalism is nothing but a deceptive category (2015:45). It is deceptive in the sense that it accommodates diversity but not as a state of multiple nationhood but as variant forms that are to be incorporated into a central core or essence. Nationalism as a metanarrative may organize differences; a kind of unity in diversity; but not in a sense of accepting the “politics of differences”. Indian nationalism is still suffering from its exclusive content and practice even though it is decolonized and de-orientalized.
As Partha Chatterjee rightly points out, Indian nationalism is a product of colonial modernity. No one can deny the contribution of British imperialism in constructing a politically unitarian concept of India (Aloysius, 1997). However, Nivedita Menon affirms that we were not just consumers of modernity; rather we were producers of modernity. Being the producers of modernity, the Indian national movement envisaged the anti-imperial struggle as well as the counter-imaginations of a modern national state (Menon, 2010) altogether. The anti-imperial national movement and the freedom movement in India were able to challenge both the material and the spiritual aspects of modern nationalism which was quite different from the colonial imaginations of a nation-state. Reimagination of secularism not as a rejection of religions but as an equal treatment of religions is the best example of this. At the same time, Chatterjee agrees that both the material and the spiritual aspects of Indian nationalism was not fully useful to create a common civil society in India irrespective of its different social, cultural, and political locations. According to him, it fostered a cultural nationalism that further legitimized and reinstated the exclusion of the discontents—Dalits, Tribals, women, and minorities (Chatterjee, 2020). Expecting the decline of the nation-state, Hannah Arendt and latter Spivak look at the metamorphosis that is happening to the nation-state in the era of globalization and exhorts us to nurture new imaginations of the collective belongingness—an inclusive nationhood in India (Butler & Spivak, 2010). Of course, it is not an easy task, especially in the era of the neo-capitalist culture and the politics of exclusionary homogenizations.

Towards an Inclusive Nationalism

One of the most important critics of the Indian national movement was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar exposed the exclusive nature of Indian nationalism as it neglects the history and politics of the marginalized sections—the former untouchables in India.  According to Ambedkar, there is an inherent problem within the idea of the Indian nation-state. The problem was there even before the construction of Indian independence. For him, Indian society is founded in the notions of caste which has been legitimized by the culture religion of Brahminic-Hinduism. According to him, there has been a core-essence in the Indian social life even before the coming of modern Western imperialism. The British never tried to disturb this foundational casteist social fabric since their intention was mainly to initiate economic and political governance and therefore did not want to annoy the higher caste people in India (Gaikward, 1998:515). Ambedkar made it clear that there is no political democracy without social democracy. Unless and until we settle the internal divisions in society in terms of caste, color, gender and class, a feeling of nationalism is alien and impossible. He was a staunch critic of the nationalist discourses on Swaraj even in the colonial making of the Indian nation, explaining that “swaraj without the annihilation of caste has no significance.” In his Lahore speech in 1927, Ambedkar made it clear that “there is no utilization of swaraj on the off chance that it can’t safeguard the interest of discouraged classes.” Responding to Tilak who claimed ‘swaraj as his inheritance’, Ambedkar said: “Annihilation of untouchability is my inheritance” (Kunte, 1982:250).  Ambedkar criticised the idea of nationalism of the Indian national movement, especially the Indian National Congress, which was elitist in content and practice.

 ^{Dr. B. R. AMBEDKAR | PHOTO: FACEBOOK}
Ambedkar critiqued the Gandhian ideology of nationalism which never destabilized the Brahminic-Hindu social and political authority and power. Gandhi, of course, talked about the need for the destruction of untouchability, but not on political ground. Gandhian Swaraj was mainly an anti-imperialist ideology and practice which was inherently impotent to challenge the caste system legitimized by the Brahminic-Hindu religious teachings and practices. Challenging Ambedkar’s notion of distributive justice, Gandhi believed in the subsequent changes in the hearts and minds of the higher caste people and it was enacted in the fasting struggle connected with the Poona pact (1932) (Nandu, 2006). G. Aloysius is of the opinion that it was Gandhi who offered a bogus national consciousness in terms of an anti-colonial consciousness during the time of the freedom movement, consciously neglecting the anti-caste movement all over the country (Aloysius, 1997). Ambedkar also upheld the view that Gandhian ideology cannot destabilize the caste-based Indian social foundation. He said: “[Gandhi] stands for freedom from foreign domination and at the same time it seeks to maintain intact social structure which permits the domination of one class by another on the hereditary basis which means perpetual domination of one class by another” (Gregg, 1934). However, after Poona Pact, Gandhi was very keen to participate in the process of challenging caste and worked for the structural reconstructions of caste relations.

Nation for Ambedkar is a state of freedom and respect which is absent in Indian social and political imaginations. Unity of the nation cannot be achieved if there are social and economic divisions and discrimination within. It is not the state of equality of castes but annihilation of castes that creates a nation (Ambedkar, 1990). It does not happen through the change of mind in the elites as imagined by Gandhi. It is possible only through structural changes. For him, the political practices of a nation should ensure equality and rights of the untouchables who have no participation in the social and political power of the nation. The graded inequality and the descending scale of contempt should be replaced with the modern democratic values of equality, liberty and fraternity. The unity of a nation should proceed with a social and political fraternity within communities. There cannot be a nation if there is no notion of fraternity and respect. This internal freedom is more important than external freedom. Ambedkar never devalued the struggle for national freedom from imperialism. On the other hand, he was convinced that external freedom without internal freedom is useless. Without the annihilation of untouchability and inequality, there is no real freedom in the lives of the majority servile classes in India. Ambedkar upheld the view that majoritarianism never fulfill the desires of real nationalism. He was envisaging a strong social basis for a political democracy in India.

^{POONA PACT (1932) | PHOTO: WIKI COMMONS}
Ambedkar’s vision of nationalism is integrally connected with social democracy, which gives equal respect and dignity to all without discrimination. Democracy is to ensure representation of all stakeholders in polity. Ambedkar envisaged a representative democracy, which is reflected in our constitution. Ambedkar opted for constitutional democracy rather social imaginations proposed by age-old religious texts like Manusmriti. He preferred a constitutional morality, rather than a religious morality legitimized by Brahminic Hinduism. According to him, Brahminic Hinduism and its feeling of nationalism never fulfils the democratic dreams of the marginalized; at the same time he never neglected the role of progressive religious imaginations in fostering a social democracy. He found significance and fecundity in Navayana Buddhism towards the end of his life through which he tried to establish a theological basis for his idea of subaltern nationalism. Ambedkar’s subaltern nationalism was founded on a progressive religious ideology that redefined secularism in terms of mutual respect and fraternity. This fraternity is not apolitical or transcendental but political and materialistic in content and practice that ensures the repositioning of the subalterns in national social and political power.

Re-imagining a Differentiated Nationalism

M.S. Golwalkar, in his We and Our Nationhood Defined (1939), initiates discussions about ‘Bharath’ that emerged from the Vedic cultural civilization. It is a notion of inclusive nationhood that envisions one culture, one religion, and one language as its core-essence. The margins and the minorities, according to Golwalkar’s vision, are to be incorporated to this oneness. This is, of course, a vision of hegemonic and exclusive nationhood disguised in the form of inclusivism. Inclusivism doesn’t mean sacrifice of differences. Critiquing the hegemonic, unitarian, and totalitarian notion of unity, the resurgence of identity politics, on the other hand, emphasizes the differences and multiplicities inherent in the process of being and becoming a nation. Identity politics is said to "signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of' injustice of members of certain social groups." As a political activity, it is thus considered to signify a body of political projects that attempts a "recovery from exclusion and denigration" of groups hitherto marginalized on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, sexual preferences, caste positions, etc. Identity politics thus attempts to attain empowerment, representation and recognition of social groups by asserting the very same markers that distinguished and differentiated them from the others and utilize those markers as an assertion of selfhood and identity based on difference rather than equality.

^{M.S. GOLWALKER | WIKI COMMONS}
Seyla Benhabib, alluding to Homi Bhabha, speaks about a ‘performative re-generation of the nation in literature, culture, art, music and Journalism in which identities are not considered as fixed, contradictory or fragmented (Benhabib, 1997). This performative regeneration of the nation challenges the one single essential core of a nation, but attends to and celebrates the differences in the process of narrating the nation differently. Benhabib is hopeful that this narrative process would resist the fragmentary and separatist identity formation even in the context of globalization which also offers a fake homogenization of identities.  She argues: “A narrative understanding of identity is against both unitaristic visions of the self and celebrations of fragmentary selfhood.  A more precise working out of the implications of this narrative model for collective movements will be the task of future work” (Benhabib, 1997:43). However, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks the question of how does this performative mechanism will do justice to the marginalized subaltern who have no accessibility in the power dynamics. The subaltern in India, according to her, is not even in the position to speak and how does she de-generate her identity in the contemporary context of exclusion and marginalization. By offering a political practice of ‘deconstructive embrace,’ Spivak envisages a notion that celebrates the ‘politics of difference’ (Spivak, 1999).

‘Deconstructive embrace’ is a political practice of re-organizing identities and reconstitute it not as an opposite phenomenon, but as a differentiated identity. But from where do we start this process of the political reimagination of identities? For Spivak, it begins with the struggles of the margins as they expose the unitary and the totalitarian content of the national identity, be it in the Manipur riots, challenging the hate speeches in Haryana or the struggles for reverting CAA. These are the local political platforms where we deconstruct our nationhood and repose it in terms of multiplicity and differences. According to Spivak, subalternity is a radical rhetoric of reimagining our essentialist identities and at the same time affirming our ‘pluri-singularity’. Nationalism here is a process of learning to learn from the subaltern how she reimagines herself in the overarching powers of discrimination (Spivak, 2012). It is exciting to see the title of Arundhati Roy’s book Listening to the Grasshoppers (2004), coming as it is immediately after the book Empire (2013). In a nutshell, the differentiated nationalism goes even beyond the inclusive nationalism and invokes us to participate in the political process of the subalterns to become a political community. Equipping people to listen to the art and music of the subaltern resistances will help us to train ourselves in a process of reimaging ourselves as a responsible community. This, of course, is not an easy task, especially in the contemporary Indian political context of totalitarianism and cultural nationalism. The ways that we foster this radically differentiated nationhood in the current political scenario will in fact determine the future of our nation.


^{ARUNDHATI ROY | PHOTO: FACEBOOK}
In response to the Supreme Court’s judgement in Supriyo vs Union of India case that denies persons belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community the constitutional right to marry and establish a family while recognizing their right to choose partners of their choice and cohabit with them, Sriram Panchu, a senior advocate at Madras High Court, pens down his hope when our judiciary and legislator listen to the most weakest persons and communities of our society:

“A day after the judgement a couple came to the Supreme Court’s lawns. Their names are Utkarsh Saxena and Ananya Kotia, the petitioners in one of the cases. Against the backdrop of the Court that denied them relief, they exchanged vows. I hope these young men and women whose hopes have been dimmed, if not dashed, by our judgement, plant a tree on this spot. I hope the tree grows quickly with luxuriant foliage and dwarf the building opposite. And I hope that one day a constitutional court will direct the doors facing it to be opened to let in fresh light and air. The court will see the tree and the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. And hopefully someone in the court will recall Gandhi’s words: “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.”

I rest now. Not in peace but with hope. The hope that justice will ultimately trump law. It usually does” (Frontline 17, 2023:65).

References

^{Aloysius, G. 1997. Nationalism without a Nation in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 
Ambedkar, B.R. 1990. Writings and Speeches, Vol. 9. Maharashtra: Education Department of Maharashtra. 
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: verso.  
Benhabib, Seyla. 1997. “Strange Multiplicities: The Politics of Identity and Difference in a Global Context”, Macalester International, Vol. 4, Article 8, Spring. 
Butler, Judith and Spivak. 2010. Who Sings the Nation-State? London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull. 
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
Chatterjee, Partha. 2010. Nation & Empire: Essential Writings 1985-2005. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. 
Chatterjee, Partha. 2020. I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. 
Gaikward, S.M. 1998. Ambedkar and Indian Nation, EPW, Vol.33, No.10 (March 7): 515
Joseph, Kip k. 2005. “Reichard Cregg, Mohandas Gandhi and the Strategy of Non-violence,” Journal of American History 92 No. 1, March. 
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2010. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University. 
Khatoon, Mohsina. 2021. “Ambedkar’s Perspective of Nation” in Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR), Vol 8, Issue 11: 373-381.  
Kunte, B.G. 1982. Source Materials on Dr. Ambedkar and the Movement of Untouchables. Maharashtra: Education Department of Maharashtra, Vol 1: 250-251.  
Menon, Nivedita. 2010. “Introduction”, Nation & Empire: Essential Writings 1985-2005. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 1-20.  
Nandu, B.R. 2006. Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography Completed and unabridged. Delhi: Oxford Press. 
Narrain, Arvind. India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance. Chennai: Context, 2021. 
Roy, Arundhati. 2004. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. New Delhi: East End Press.  
Roy, Arundhati. 2013. Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin. 
Spivak.1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Spivak. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. London: Harvard University Press. 
Spivak. 2015. Nationalism and the Imagination. London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull.}