State-Nation Building: The Making of Liberal Democracy

Abstract

The story of nation building in India is about how the Indian multiethnic civilizational society was first straitjacketed into a single territorial state by the British colonialists and then how, in the course of becoming a ‘national society’, it became divided into three nation-states after decolonization: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the story does not end at this point. In fact, as we shall see, nation building in India acquired an entirely new dimension after independence. While remaining rooted in India’s long tradition of cultural pluralism, the postcolonial project of nation building acquired new foundations in popular sovereignty, political equality and social egalitarianism. It was through a long and tumultuous process of political debates, social conflicts and changes in the self-definitions of cultural collectivities, which occurred in the colonial period, that nation building in India found its modernist ideological core. It is therefore necessary to take a look at this crucial formative phase of nation building in India.