Nationalism has returned as a dominant political ideology across the world. Today, extreme nationalist parties and nationalist-populist leaders are in power in a large number of countries -from Europe to Latin America, Asia to Africa. Nationalism is also a fundamental element in the politics of the world’s two biggest economies. White Christian nationalism was a core part of former US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign.1 China has been encouraging and fostering extreme nationalism amongst its young.2

Is contemporary nationalism the same as the nationalisms that emerged in late 18th century Europe and later the colonies in Asia and Africa? It is my contention that there is both a continuity and a disjunction between the old nationalism and the new nationalism of the 21st century. To interrogate this difference, I shall start by reviewing some of the key theories of nationalism, that have dominated academic discourse on the issue.

One of the most influential works on nationalism is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.4 Anderson argues that the nation is imagined because,“…members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”5

At the same time, the nation, is also limited – it is confined within finite, geographical boundaries, “beyond which lie other nations.” Unlike other imagined communities, the nation is sovereign, where authority lies in the nation-state, as opposed to divine or royal authority. Finally, the nation is a community, where the national identity unites all members of the fraternity as equals, irrespective of their other differences. Nationalism, which appears to be a modern construct to the observer, is believed to be almost eternal by nationalists. Therefore, it is unlike other consciously held political ideologies; it is more like large cultural-systems, such as religion. 6 

Anderson traces the rise of nationalism to the emergence of ‘print capitalism,’ 7which created a homogenous textual language for readers within a specific linguistic group. He also argues that the first nationalisms emerged in white-settler colonies, which had acquired administrative, and not just linguistic homogeneity. In this sense, political power, expressed in the sovereign territorial state creates the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. Western ‘nationalism,’ while retaining its cultural distinctiveness, presented ‘modular forms’ which were then imported and borrowed by nationalist movements across the world, especially in the anti-colonial struggles of Asia and Africa. 

Anderson’s arguments came in from criticism from Partha Chatterjee, in his own contribution to the theory and history of nationalism, ‘Nation and its Fragments.’ In the influential first chapter called ‘Whose Imagined Community?’ Chatterjee argues that Anderson’s contention that the colonies could only borrow modular forms of nationalism that had already developed in the West, went counter to the history of societies like India. According to him, nationalism in the colonies in Asia and Africa emerged, “…by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains – the material and spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside,” of the economy and of state-craft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proven its superiority and the East had succumbed… The spiritual on the other hand, is the “inner” domain, bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity…In this, its true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power.”8 

Chatterjee goes on to argue that even the development of a ‘national’ language, through the apparatuses of ‘print-capitalism’ took a different trajectory in a colony like India. Here the indigenous elite had to develop its own “institutional network of printing presses, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and literary societies,”9 which was outside the purview of the colonial state and its allied operatives, such as European missionaries.

The anticolonial movement had to perforce take place within the political domain, where the colonised elite sought to first seek a share of power, and then take over state power entirely. This domain was where the elite had to give in to the ‘modular’ forms of the nation-state that were presented to it by the colonial state. However, within the sovereign cultural domain of nationalism, the influence of the colonial state and the West was consciously repudiated. 

In the postcolonial ‘national’ state, a distinction was made between the public and the private domains. The state’s jurisdiction ran in the public domain, while it legally protected the autonomy of the private. Chatterjee argues that the colonial distinction between the outer/inner domains did not coincide with the post-colonial distinction made between the public/private domains.10 The ‘inner’ domain of nationalist discourse of the colonial period had to have a normalising agenda, where differences of caste, religion, language, and class, had to be subordinated to the bourgeois hegemonic project. On the other hand, the post-colonial state, as it modeled itself on Western liberal-democratic forms of the state, had to relegate these differences to the private domain, which was of no concern to the state. Chatterjee argues that it is this inability to think of the national community and the state together, that is the biggest problem for postcolonial societies like India.“Herein lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to old forms of the modern state. If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows us to do this.” 11  

Even within the ‘outer’ domain, where nationalists negotiated with the material world of politics and the economy, there were compromises that had to be made with the ‘people.’ One of its effects was that the national movement could mobilise popular support only by opposing the effects of Western-style industrialisation, under Gandhi’s leadership. But as the nationalists came close to acquiring state-power, they jettisoned the anti-industrial thrust of Gandhian ideology. What emerged was a discourse of ‘development’ in the name of the ‘nation,’ which involved industrialization to catch up with the developed world. This project could, at times, be at loggerheads with the state’s role as being a representative of the sovereignty of the people.  “What the people were able to express through the representative mechanisms of the political process as their will was not necessarily what was good for their economic well-being; what the state thought important for the economic development of the nation was not necessarily what would be ratified through the representative mechanisms.”12 The ‘rational’ unified will of the nation, as a whole, was represented in the process of planning. It was here that the state represented the sovereign will of the people. “It was a bureaucratic function, to be operated at a level above the particular interests of civil society, and institutionalized as such as a domain of policy-making outside the normal processes of representative politics. But as a concrete bureaucratic function, it was in planning above all that the postcolonial state would claim its legitimacy as a single will and consciousness – the will of the nation – pursuing a task that was both universal and rational: the well-being of the people as a whole.” 13

Planning, in fact, was the route through which the Indian capitalist class undertook a ‘passive revolution,’ to establish their hegemony in small doses, without disenfranchising pre-capitalist elites, or causing major upheavals in the lives of the peasantry. This is how the process of ‘rational’ bureaucratic governance, supposedly above the political process, ended up determining the very nature of political practice in postcolonial India.

This is fundamentally different from the way nationalism emerged in ‘classical’ capitalist societies. Capitalism, as a system, requires the ‘primitive accumulation of capital.’ This involves the separation of the direct producer from all productive resources, and at the same time ‘freeing’ them from all customary claims on their labour. The worker appears in the market place owning nothing but their ability to do labour, over which they have complete control. The capitalist, appears as the owner of productive resources that can set the worker’s labour-power to work, to produce goods and services. Both confront each other, as independent owners of commodities – capital and labour-power – externally connected through the impersonal site of the market. In other words, the market creates a contractual relationship between independent equals. 

As the older relations get replaced by capitalism, older communitarian identities – based on kinship, locality, or even religion – get gradually eroded. As Etienne Balibar points out, this does not automatically lead to the ‘nation form.’ 14 If anything, one could argue that the pure operation of the capitalist market should lead to a libertarian internationalism, based on pure non-local individualism. The reason why nationalism emerges along with capitalism, is instead because of the uneven development of capitalism in different pre-capitalist states. The rise of nationalism can be explained if we take the position, “… which sees this constitution of nations as being bound up not with the abstraction of capitalist market, but with its concrete historical form: that of the “world economy” which is always already organized and hierarchized into a “centre” and a “periphery” each of which have different methods of accumulation and exploitation of labor power and between which relations of unequal exchange and domination are established.” 15

One could extend this argument to say that it is the unequal development of capitalism, as a global system, which created the conditions for the formation of capitalist nation-states, where the ‘national bourgeoisie’ could exercise their rule and seek protected markets, for the accumulation of capital within the domestic economy. At the level of the domestic market, the community bounded by the territory of the state, appears as a fraternity of equal, sovereign, citizens, joined together by a common language and culture. This is how ‘historical’ capitalism, located within a domestic market, gets imagined as a community.  

As Partha Chatterjee has shown, this form of nationalism was only valid in states which had developed around classical capitalism. In the colonial world, nationalism first emerged as a sovereign cultural discourse outside the domain of the market and civil society, and it was then reimagined as the ideology of the rational state above the cultural/political domain. In the postcolonial countries of Asia and Africa, nationalism as the rational expression of the will of the entire people, as represented in the state, was always at loggerheads with the old inner/cultural nationalism of the period of colonisation. 

Again, this form of ‘state’ nationalism was an aspect of the discourse of development that had, to a certain extent, modified the nature of the capitalist state in the West. This process which had already started in response to the workers’ movements of the 19th century, further crystallised in the post-depression and post-war periods (the New Deal in the USA, and welfarism in the UK). For newly independent states like India, this development-capitalism was a more relevant model to emulate, given the lack of capital-accumulation and the presence of a vast population of poor peasants. At the same time, the USSR provided an alternate model of economic development, based on centralised planning, which could help bypass the social upheavals associated with primitive accumulation in the West. 

Nationalism as an ideology of this developmental ‘nation-state,’ therefore had to be disinterested in the ‘cultural’ constituents of classical nationalisms – a commonality of language, religion, customs. Thus, by its very nature, this form of postcolonial nationalism had to be secular, multi-linguistic, and non-traditional. This was an essential necessity for the ‘passive revolution’ to be successful. The ‘national’ bourgeoisie had to cede power to a bureaucratic-managerial class, which has emerged from the colonial bureaucracy and was now ruling in the name of a postcolonial nation. Its stated objective was to be rational and instrumental, and stand above all cultural markers, to industrialise and modernise the economy, in the name of the nation. As Sudipta Kaviraj has argued, “The structure of the colonial bureaucracy was altered on crucial points by the constitution, which carefully retained and strengthened its national character, systematically insulating it from temptations of regionalism… Transformed by deliberate nationalist engineering, these structures of erstwhile colonialism performed efficiently for the endurance and legitimacy of the national state in the first twenty years.” 16 

While the process of governance itself drew-in the larger population into the specific type of nationalism that the bureaucratic-managerial class produced and promoted – secular, rational, pan-national – the state’s control over the modern sector of the economy, and hence ‘good’ employment, meant that those who aspired to be part of the bureaucratic-managerial elite, would aspirationally emulate and organically imbibe the ideology of the nation-state. 

This process came into a crisis from the late-1960s, as Keynesian welfarism began to decline in the West. As Kaviraj has argued, in India, capitalism spread by ‘subsuming’ the non-capitalist sector under it, without transforming it sufficiently --

“It its size, depth, and scale the modern economy in India was an enormous organization, a world in itself; inside its secure, comfortable interior space India’s social elites and their supporting professional classes could live out their existence; but in fact it sat uneasily poised over a statistically vaster, backward, populous, agrarian economy which was riven by more intense contradictions precisely because of the demands that the modern capitalist sector made on its resources. Also, this interior world of middle-class comfort was surprinted by processes of modern destitution and squalor, anger and resentment, symbolized by cities increasingly submerged by slums. Besides the classical terms of trade disputes between the two sectors, cultural resentment gradually surfaced.” 17 

The resentment was most strongly expressed by a class of rich peasants, who had gained from the trade between the capitalist and non-capitalist sectors, but had not got a share of political power. By the 1980s, this showed up in a political coalition of those who lost out, against the ruling coalition, ensconced in the modern capitalist sector. It showed up, as Kaviraj has argued, in a politics characterized by:

“…increasing energy, vehemence, irritation, and insolence by a bloc of social groups who were outsiders to the etiquettes of Westernized modernity. Politicians of this bloc spoke derisively of English-speaking modernists in a truculent vernacular, wore indigenous costumes; and they understood, tolerated, and at times revelled in premodern rituals of political power.” 18 

These pressures from ‘below’ combined with the global rise of finance capital and neoliberal policies, resulted in an internal shift within the bureaucracy itself. This, I would submit, was the fundamental condition for the beginning of the change of the state’s relationship with the ‘nation’ and the ideology of nationalism itself. 

As India’s economy began to open-up to global trade from the mid-1980s, the bureaucracy got increasingly exposed to the fabulous riches that market-capitalism offered, if only to a few. There was a growing belief that the ‘control economy’ had failed and that encouraging private enterprise would speed up India’s economic development. If bureaucrats were individually embedded in the apparatuses of the state, as a class they became enamoured with the potential of the private sector. From the mid-80s, top bureaucrats began to train their children to study commerce, business, and finance, with the hope of ultimately getting jobs in multinational companies. Indeed, when the Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) reforms took place in the early 1990s, the children of the erstwhile bureaucratic-managerial elite were the best placed to make the most of the opportunities presented to professionals. 

Liberalisation had profound effects on the culture that the state promoted, and the dominant public discourse itself. One example of that could be seen in Hindi cinema where the hero moved from being a coolie, factory-worker, a police-inspector, or even a criminal, to being a suave, suit-wearing entrepreneur or a corporate executive. Cable TV brought new forms of entertainment, which promoted the conservative Hindu Undivided Family, with business interests. Cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s, became about elaborate Hindu weddings, and rituals around matrimony. The lifestyles and cultures of the Westernised elite gave way to the lifestyles and cultures of the mercantile-industrial elite. 19

It is well-established that India’s mercantile-industrial castes and classes have had a close association with political Hindutva right from the point of its emergence.20 In North India, this has been tied to the promotion of a Sanskritised Hindi, shorn of Persian and Arabic influence. The most influential mercantile groups in India – baniyas, sindhis, and khatris – were at a cultural distance from both the English-educated nationalist elite of the colonial period, and the Westernised postcolonial ‘Nehruvian’ elite. The Hindi-chauvinism of this mercantile-industrial groups helped them to form an alliance with the rich farmers and the disempowered masses, who had hitherto been outside the capitalist sector. The two could find common cause against the supposed deracination of the old elite (which has come to be called the ‘Lutyens’ elite, named after ‘Lutyens Delhi’ the zone in the capital which houses governmental buildings) which could only carry out the discourse of power in English. At the same time, there was a privileging of ‘tradition,’ including religious rituals and practices, and a rise of ‘religious fundamentalism’, which appeared as the “last refuge from the abuse and ridicule of the secular mind.” 21

This, I would argue, is the core basis of the ‘new’ nationalism that has emerged in India in the past three decades, and intensified in the last 10 years. This nationalism, too, is an ideology of the state, which has been captured by monopoly capital. However, unlike the nationalism of the postcolonial bureaucratic-managerial elite, the new nationalism seeks to present itself as a unifying cultural identity of the ‘original’ Indian people, with a history that goes back millennia into the past. If the nationalist elite had declared an ‘inner’ domain that was outside the purview of colonial intervention, and protected from the material ‘outer’ world of politics and economic relations, the new nationalism, in the form of political Hindutva, claims to finally marry that ‘authentic’ inner core of the nation with its expression in the state. 

This self-image of the new nationalism is a crucial political strategy to imagine a community of ‘true’ nationalists, under the hegemony of the mercantile-industrial elite. The old ‘Nehruvian’ elite appears in this discourse to be an extension of the colonial state itself – and their dominance is seen as the rule of Brown Sahibs. In this sense, political Hindutva presents itself as a new ‘independence movement,’ and its ideologues seek to rewrite all histories – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. 

Of course, this new nationalist discourse needs aggressive dissemination amongst the ‘people,’ through school textbooks, university curricula, popular cinema, social media, and above all, organised news media. The project to replace the old nationalism of the secular/rational state, requires continuous revision of the public discourse that had developed for the first 50 years of the postcolonial state. Therefore, it requires a much more autocratic and rigid implementation, which cannot allow for difference and dissent. It requires complete loyalty and allegiance to the nation-state, such that anyone who questions any kind of governmental policy is automatically branded as ‘anti-national.’ 

This ‘new’ nationalism finds fertile ground in the politics of resentment that continues to survive even in post-liberalisation India. If anything, liberalisation increased the aspirations of the vernacular-speaking middle-class, and at the same time dramatically increased income inequality within the class. As mentioned earlier, some of the early beneficiaries of liberalisation were the families of the very bureaucratic-managerial ‘Lutyens’ elite, who had earlier ruled over the control-economy. Those outside this circle got some benefits from the liberalisation process, but their fortunes fluctuated with the economic booms and busts in the past three decades. 

This is especially true after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped out middle-class fortunes, destroyed real estate equity, and stalled the income growth of lower-end white-collar workers. Along with this, large-scale unemployment amongst graduates and young people with professional degrees, fed further into the politics of resentment. Populist extreme nationalism has found committed soldiers in this demographic and social space. Benedict Anderson wrote that the fraternity of nationalist imaginings makes it possible for people to “not so much kill, as willingly to die” for it. In its new avatar, extreme nationalism turns ordinary people into killers, once they are subsumed into the anonymous uniformity of the mob.22

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