AS India approaches its eighth decade after independence, perhaps one of the country’s single greatest achievements has been the creation of a nation state despite the deep skepticism of its critics. Churchill’s contemptuous dismissal that India is ‘no more a single country than the equator’ or Jinnah’s contention that ‘India is not a nation, nor a country – it is a subcontinent of nationalities’, now appear to be relics of the past. But in his last address to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar himself was apprehensive that ‘we are not yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the word’, worrying ‘that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation’?

Ambedkar’s disquiet was different from the one that many other external observers of India believed would undermine the unity of the Indian state, namely the challenges of building a multinational state in a poor, rural society within a democratic polity. Indeed, many of the disputes that threatened India’s unity – around the language issue in the 1950s and early 1960s, or Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, parts of the North East for many decades or, of course, Kashmir – did stem from such factors.

But by and large India has managed to address these challenges, not with flying colours but not too badly either. Instead, Ambedkar’s worry stemmed from something that he was only too painfully aware of – the deep social hierarchies in Indian society and the resulting structural inequalities and fragmentation that inhibited solidarities among the people and a resulting absence of fraternity. As he put it, ‘Fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.’

 

Ambedkar was deeply perceptive about the interlinkages between fraternity and the nation but it is arguable whether fraternity comes about ‘only when there is a nation’ or the converse, i.e., is a strong nation the result – rather than the cause – of deepening bonds of fraternity?

The idea of ‘fraternity’ was defined after the French Revolution in the following terms: ‘Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you; do constantly to others the good which you would wish to receive from them.’¹ This is an incomplete description of the concept which is now seen to encompass dimensions of collective action, social bonding and an emotional connection with one’s fellow citizens. The ethos of fraternity is linked to the more commonly used idea of ‘solidarity’, a view of society which is collective and imbued with responsibilities for others.

Of course, a key challenge – conceptual as well as practical – is to whom the principle of fraternity extends. Ideas of ‘community’ or ‘nation’ are inclusive but also necessarily exclusive. Who or what constitutes the nation is a perennial work in progress and it is often perceived strong when it tragically stands before a precipice. Think of the nations of Western Europe – the cradle of modern nationalism – in the first decade of the 20th century; or Japan in the 1930s; or the Soviet Union at the end of the 1970s.

Peacetime by itself is not sufficient to promote a broad and inclusive civic sense of the nation – as distinct from a more exclusionary and narrow ethnic nation. High rates of unemployment and large numbers of international migrants have raised deep anxieties in countries from the United States to the UK, sparking contentious debates on who constitutes the ‘nation’ even in these mature, advanced democracies. And even without these anxieties, secessionist tensions have continued in seemingly benign contexts, evident in the fraught relations between Quebec and Canada, Scotland and the U.K., Corsica and France, and Catalonia and Spain.

 

The core challenge of reconciling India’s multiple social cleavages – region and religion, caste, class and gender – with an overarching national identity, goes back to the late 19th century. While the process has not been linear or spatially even, the sense of identity of being ‘Indian’ has grown since independence, even as other attachments and identities have also flourished. Of course, what constitutes being Indian has been severely contested, perhaps more so today than has been the case in recent years.

The building blocks of making an Indian nation after independence came from multiple sources. State building went hand in hand with nation building. A far-sighted Constitution which put into place institutions of coordination and restraint such as the Election Commission, Finance Commission and Delimitation Commission, have ensured a broadly level playing field across a federal polity.² Federalism has helped create multiple, overlapping identities that have kept the nation together rather than pulling it apart. Indeed the nation building project has been undermined whenever federalism has been under stress, not when it has flourished. A savvy ‘coup proofing’ of the armed forces, have ensured civilian primacy in the workings of the state.³

 

The public sector, while much maligned today, played an important role, be it the civil services, the armed forces, or the burgeoning number of public sector firms. Many of those who came to work in the Bokaros and Bhilais, or served in the army or civil service, had ethnic identities based in one part of India, while working in an ethnically distinctive part of India. While their own identities may not have been distinctly altered, the transformation was inter-generational. Their children developed a deeper pan-Indian identity, having grown up in a part of India distinct from their parents’ ethnic identity, and with peers and friends similarly situated. The large firms in the private sector played a similar role. The townships attached to textile and jute mills had managers and workers drawn from a wide hinterland.

A third site of building pan-Indian identities were the new institutions of higher education. This had already been the case in pre-independent India, in the presidency universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and the universities of North India, such as Lucknow, Patna, Allahabad and Delhi, where the faculty in particular came from all parts of India and helped create a broader cosmopolitan ethos on campuses. And as others have noted the cultural underpinnings of the new nation came from diverse sources from Bollywood to cricket.

Of course, in all these cases, it was primarily upper caste elites that were the initial beneficiaries and vanguards of the new national identity and while reservations did begin to make a difference, overall those who benifited from the vast numbers of socially marginalized groups were quite small.

 

Nonetheless, despite these efforts, there were a range of other pathways that were forsaken. In his incisive book, Peasants into Frenchmen, Eugen Weber argued that more than a century after the French Revolution unity continued to elude the French Republic and it took the forces of modernity – connectivity, markets and education – to turn the large rural peasantry with localized identities into ‘Frenchmen’.⁴

But for many decades India eschewed these pathways. While there was considerable public investment in the forces of production such as state-owned enterprises or dams for irrigation and electricity, investments in physical connectivity – rural roads, highways, railways, telecommunications – were meagre. Connectivity is the vital tissue that binds different parts of a polity. It is crucial for market forces to penetrate India’s vast rural areas, as well as for spatial mobility as rural residents begin to venture out for wage labour, sell their produce or buy new products. It is also important for the state’s penetration to provide public goods and services, whether education or health or law and order.

However, the skepticism of India’s elites of market forces meant that the links between connectivity, markets and broader transformation of social identities developed weakly and gradually. It is, therefore, not surprising that the biggest challenges to the development and acceptance of an ‘Indian’ identity and the writ of the state have been in Kashmir, the North East and central India – all regions with the poorest connectivity to other parts of the country.

 

But perhaps the single biggest lacuna was primary education, where public efforts to provide good quality universal primary education were for the most part feeble relative to the magnitude of the task. Much has been written about why this was – and continues to be the case – and this is not the place to discuss the reasons, but the consequences for nation building have been deeply detrimental.⁵ It is not just that human capital matters for economic growth or that in a country that is severely land and natural resource constrained, human capital is about the only viable ladder for social mobility.

The absence of universal primary education robbed the state an opportunity to begin the process of an ideational transformation of its populace. Indian society is deeply hierarchical and the values of secularism, tolerance, equality, that are the foundations of a liberal democracy are not deeply held in vast swathes of the population. India’s abysmal record on gender equality, has effectively meant that fraternity – literally brotherhood – does not extend to half of India’s population. Undermining the tenacity of patriarchal norms requires an ideological assault. These values needed to be inculcated at much earlier stages in the life cycles of a rapidly expanding population. That this did not occur was perhaps the single biggest mistake made by the political leadership in the early years after independence. India has paid – and will pay – a severe price for this omission.

 

In addition, education also matters for the multiple life skills, from public health to sanitation to the creation of social norms on acceptable and unacceptable patterns of behaviour even on seemingly mundane matters such as spitting in public or standing in a queue. Hence, behavioural changes in Indian society have been much slower than has been the case in countries such as those in East Asia. Thus, the substantial efforts by the current government through the Swachh Bharat programme to construct toilets, while necessary, are not sufficient to change sanitation behaviour because the roots of the need for such changes were never instilled very early on in young children via primary education. In Japan, the first task that school children do after coming to school is to sweep the floors of their classroom clean and in so doing learn from an early age that the cleanliness of public spaces is the task of all individuals and not that of a low status ‘sweeper’. These are the foundations of fraternity, not just among the students but between society and public spaces.

The costs of poor education continue to hobble fraternity in many facets of life in India, even in such basic tasks as driving. The failure to ensure that the rules and norms of driving are instilled deeply in young people is abundantly evident on Indian roads where rules are flouted with impunity and there is but a thin veneer of the simple courtesies and civility that underpin fraternity. The costs have been enormous – slower traffic which results in greater pollution, higher levels of stress and the deaths of nearly four hundred people daily.

Perhaps one of the single biggest barriers to deepening fraternity in the Indian context is the practice of endogamy. For Ambedkar, endogamy was ‘the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste’ and the ‘absence of intermarriage’ was ‘the essence of Caste’. Despite steady increases in the factors that would normally predict the decline of endogamy – education, income, urbanization, markets, media – the practice continues to be deeply entrenched in Indian society. There appears to be little change in the rate of inter-caste marriages over the past half-century, which appears to have been steady around 5% since 1970 (up to 2012).⁶

 

In 2013 the Indian government launched the Dr Ambedkar Scheme for Social Integration through Inter-Caste Marriages, offering financial incentives (of Rs 2.5 lakh) to inter-caste couples where one of the spouses is a Dalit. Initially the scheme was applicable only for couples with a total annual income of Rs 5 lakh or lower, but the income ceiling was removed in 2017. However, the scheme targeted barely 500 such marriages each year, and the number has not even crossed 100 in any year so far.⁷ The derisory low target, with the requirement of recommendation of an MP, MLA, or District Collector, shows the cosmetic nature of the scheme and a lack of commitment to challenging endogamy.

But while political support for inter-caste marriages in India over the last century has been modest, that for inter-faith marriages has been non-existent even by those advocating for the former. As recent incidents on inter-faith marriage – especially if one of the partners is a Muslim – the divides on this issue are chasms that are unlikely to be bridged this century

 

Much has changed in India since the early decades of the Republic. Connectivity – both physical and cyber – and market forces are gradually reaching into all parts of India, altering identities and – perhaps – turning the peasantry into ‘Indians’. Yet, what ‘Indian’ means is ironically more contested than ever with ‘open majoritarianism and divisiveness [is] now a dominant cultural and political sensibility.’⁸ The economic, political and social transformations underway in India are reshaping the ties of fraternity. Over the next few decades six factors will shape how the ‘Indian’ identity evolves.

First, rapid economic growth will markedly alter the economic foundations of certain identities. The sharp congruence between occupation and caste has become weaker as economic growth has brought into place new occupations that are not linked to any specific caste. Historically, the key mechanisms of the inter-generational replication of caste have been occupation and marriage. The modern economy, however, generates new occupations that may well have a correspondence with class but not caste. A truck driver may have a low income, but there is no historical caste identity linked to driving a truck.

Second, rapid urbanization is likely to reshape the local identities so manifest in village India, in complex ways.⁹ Urbanization transforms social institutions, family structures, the nature of work, and the growth of individual freedom and autonomy. Urban areas have more heterogeneous populations and this greater exposure to non-traditional attitudes, behaviour and lifestyles makes urban identities different from their rural counterparts. The high population densities of urban areas increase the likelihood that residents have more opportunities for face-to-face interactions. And larger cities have a greater diversity of those faces. They also provide the possibility of greater degree of anonymity and range and types of economic activity. A female migrant from India’s North East is visible today in front line service sector occupations in Bengaluru or Delhi, but those occupations are not available in small town India for women, let alone those from the North East.

 

But it is the types of urbanization that will unfold in India rather than urbanization per se that will affect shifts in the ideational trajectory of the Indian nation. South Africa’s apartheid city and India’s gated communities exemplify how bad urban planning can distort the social and physical features of neighbourhoods – and urbanization’s promise of forming broader, more inclusive identities. Public parks, footpaths, public transport, open market spaces – these all constitute sites of quotidian interactions, without which the possibilities of fraternity are likely to be less. And if some social groups and communities are spatially isolated – as appears to be the case with Muslims – the result is active discrimination.

The third factor that will shape the evolution of what is ‘Indian’ is education. While education has expanded massively at all levels, its benefits in creating shared sensibilities and universal values have been hobbled by abysmal quality. Most Indian universities now recruit faculty only from within the state, and as a result, universities are less sites of a burgeoning cosmopolitanism than hotbeds of internecine conflict among faculty and students on caste lines.

The IITs and IIIMs brought students and faculty from all parts of the country into their hallowed portals – and that intermingling justified the ‘Indian’ in their names. Last year, at a reunion of what is now IIT BHU in San Francisco, the alumni university president who graduated in the early eighties, perceptively recalled his years as a student, ‘I came as a Madrasi, and left as an Indian’. Today, as more and more IIT’s have been created, ironically this role is declining, as faculty and students increasingly come from the states where they are located. A simple rule that central higher education institutions should have half their faculty and students from outside the state would at least ensure a broader intermingling from different parts of the country.

 

The external environment will also matter more in shaping the Indian identity as India becomes more integrated with the world economy. Pressures from a more belligerent China or revisionist Pakistan can both mould a stronger sense of fraternity but also stoke some of the worse nationalist sentiments.

The fifth factor will be the ability to create a stronger sense of community through obligations required of all citizens. In the early decades after independence there was optimism about nation building and a shared sense of community among elites. Over time both the optimism and the commitment to public service waned as the latter often became a disguised form of private rent seeking. Civil society sought to remedy the weakening of elite commitment by pressing for a ‘rights’ revolution in the last UPA regime, seeking to ensure greater social and economic rights for citizens from the state. However, there has been little demand for its converse – obligations. India has consistently failed to demand of its citizens the two core obligations of citizenship: taxes and military service (or another form of national service). And India’s economic elites will need to cultivate a much deeper philanthropic sensibility if they are to convey that their privileges notwithstanding, they share common bonds with their fellow citizens. Without a sense of shared obligations, the bonds of fraternity are harder to build.

 

And finally all these factors are subject to the maturity and vicissitudes of Indian politics and political leadership. Many of the weakness of contemporary India – the poor provision of public goods, corruption, violence and venality in public life – while stemming in considerable part from weak institutions and incentives, perhaps more fundamentally stem from the frail strands of fraternity that bind Indians together. It is the fragility of fraternity that has led to the weakness of collective action in the demand for better public goods and services.

Democratic politics – especially a first past the post system – is not intrinsically designed to strengthen fraternity. Political competition when organized around political parties committed to a specific social base may be good for that group, but not necessarily for fraternity writ large. In any case, building fraternal bonds seems to be the last thing on the minds of most Indian political parties, which have become vassals of individual and dynastic ambition. Fundamentally, whether fraternity deepens or weakens will depend on the behaviour of political parties and their leadership. Whether they will have the wisdom to do so is an open question. But without a much greater degree of fraternity the strength of the Indian nation – however defined – will be moot. And that is the fundamental challenge of nation building India faces in the next few decades.

 

Footnotes:

1. Cited in P. Spicker, ‘Equality Versus Solidarity’, Government and Opposition 27(1), 1992, pp. 66-77.

2. DeveshKapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav (eds.), Rethinking Public Institutions in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2017.

3. Steven Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy Since Independence. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2015.

4. Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford University Press, 1976.

5. Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India. Child Labour and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1990. Latika Chaudhary, Aldo Musacchio, Steven Nafziger and Se Yan, ‘Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, 1880-1930’, Explorations in Economic History 49(2), 2012, pp. 221-240.

6. Tridip Ray, Arka Roy Chaudhuri and Komal Sahai, ‘Whose Education Matters? An Analysis of Inter-Caste Marriages in India’, ISI Discussion Paper 17-05, September 2017.

7. Shalini Nair, ‘Centre Offers Rs 2.5 lakh for Every Inter-caste Marriage with a Dalit’, Indian Express, 6 December 2017.

8. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘That Fateful Day’, Indian Express, 7 December 2017.

9. DeveshKapur, ‘How Will India’s Urban Future Affect Social Identities?’ Urbanisation 2(1), 2017, pp. 1-8.