Nationalism and democracy

In a thriving democracy, free and fair elections are vital, but so is strengthening constitutionally empowered institutions

India has announced the holding of general elections for the 18th Lok Sabha from April 19 to June 1. This is a momentous event not just for India but also for the world. Its scale is unprecedented and its management a formidable challenge. The drama of nearly a billion people out of a population of 1.4 billion exercising their constitutional right to elect those who shall govern them over the next five years is unparalleled in history. This should be a matter of celebration and of justifiable pride for all Indians. Elections may not be sufficient for democracy but they are certainly indispensable to it. They accord legitimacy to an elected political leadership in exercising governance, though it is another matter whether such leadership is exercised with wisdom and a sense of responsibility or descends into demagoguery.

Democracy is an ancient concept dating back to the 6th century BCE Athens, which for the first time put forward the idea of rule by the people. Who constituted the “people” changed over time but generally progressed from more exclusivist to more inclusive definitions. Those entitled to elect their leaders may be holders of property. Women were excluded as were slaves. Democracy did not mean equality in a more general sense. However, the notion of representative government, albeit limited in scope, had been established as a political ideal.

By contrast, nationalism is a relatively modern concept, dating from the 17th century, when after the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the Peace of Westphalia was concluded. This set down a set of rules of the game that would govern relations among political entities occupying the European space. Each entity would have strictly defined territorial boundaries in the shape of fixed lines on a map, which would be recognised by other states. Within these boundaries, the political entity would enjoy complete and untrammeled jurisdiction and a monopoly on coercive power. By the same token, its sovereign control within its territorial limits would be recognised and respected by other entities and would not be subject to external interference. This was a most important political and ideological development in history, leading to concepts that we are now familiar with — national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

It may be noted in passing that the concept of a nation state also became possible as a result of major advances in cartography, which enabled more or less precise boundaries between states to be drawn.

Nationalism in its early phase was linked to ethnic identity and affinity. Nations were most often, though not exclusively, composed of relatively homogeneous ethnic communities with a shared history and culture. Nationalism reinforced such ethnic identities. But such nations, for example France and Germany, co-existed in the 18th and 19th centuries with multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious empires such as the Austrian-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. These later dissolved after the First World War into several nation-states, based mostly, but not entirely, on shared ethnicity. An exception may have been the conversion of the old Russian Tsarist, multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire into a Soviet socialist empire after the 1917 revolution, but this lasted for about seven decades before dissolving, like the Ottoman and Astro-Hungarian empires, into several nation-states.

These newer states were based on older ethnic and cultural identities except that they now included, as a result of having been part of the Soviet state, other ethnicities as well, and this has become a source of tension and even fragmentation as the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh has shown.

However, various states may have ended up being multi-ethnic or multi-religious because of historical reasons and not as a matter of deliberate choice. Ethnicity, along with cultural and religious affinity, plays an important role in how people perceive their nationality.

A truly plural nation-state is an even more recent development, not earlier than the post-Second World War period, spawned by unprecedented cross-national migrations of people and the greater currency of ideas of equality. Several states in Europe and certainly the US fall into the category of plural states. The big change is in defining citizenship not on ethnic, cultural or religious grounds but on the concept of loyalty to the state, which was also adopted by independent India. This can and does lead to strains with more “original” communities resenting the intrusions by recent immigrants.

A nation-state need not have a democratic political dispensation. It does not need democracy. However, democracy can reinforce nationalism by giving each citizen a stake in the success of the nation. The coming together of two powerful political ideas, one of nationalism and the other of democracy, can unleash the transformation of a people constituting a nation.

The framers of the Indian Constitution had a formidable challenge in scripting the trajectory of the Indian nation-state after the country emerged from colonial rule as an independent country in 1947. Could India be welded into a nation state given its immense diversity and plurality? What could hold it together? They decided that building a sense of nationhood by suppressing the country’s multiple identities would be self-defeating. They created an overarching concept of citizenship, transcending but not supplanting existing multiplicities in religion, languages and cultures. They adopted, not by compulsion but as a matter of choice, a democratic political dispensation that gave even the most humble of India’s citizens the right to vote for leaders of their choice. It is through participation in the electoral process that the sense of nationhood is reinforced. In addition, democracy created space for the plurality that defined India.

India has both nationalism and democracy as powerful instruments of its transformation, but, like all powerful instruments, they need to be used judiciously and with clearly laid-down guardrails. Much of India’s constitution incorporates precisely these guardrails in the form of constitutionally empowered institutions, processes that ensure accountability and the upholding of the fundamental rights of citizens enshrined in the Constitution. Democracy implies rule by majority, but only according to the rules laid down in the Constitution. The holding of free and fair elections is only the first step, though indispensable, in a thriving democracy. The commitment to keeping and strengthening constitutionally empowered institutions, whose loyalty is to the people of India and their welfare, must also be high on our national agenda.

The writer is a former foreign secretary