The idea of the nation as a salad bowl comes straight from the writings of American political scientists in the eighties, and our culture theorists have taken it from there, without much thought. By the eighties some American academics and legislators thought that America had become ethnically and religiously too diverse to be homogenised into a single American culture. So the new idea was that of a melting pot where different cultures of immigrants melted into one American culture.

We don’t have an all-embracing Indian identity. This is our great charm. Europeans, who gave birth to the political organisation, called the nation-state marvel at how we exist as a nation with such immense diversity.

But it’s not the Indian civilisation, however romanticised by people like U.R. Ananthamurty and Mark Tully, that holds our diversities together. What holds us together are the ideas and institutions the Raj left us with sixty years ago. The modern Indian state is the creation of Imperial Britain. Our Constitution, built on English liberal ideas, legitimised the state. But more than the state which anywhere guards the national sovereignty, it is our democracy that keeps our diversity together in a form we call nation.

We have thoroughly Indianised the Westminster model as we have Indianised cricket. One example will suffice to illustrate how democracy weaves diversities together into a nation. The separatist strand in Tamil Nadu politics was mellowed by Delhi agreeing not to impose Hindi on the Tamils in 1962. Then the Tamil culture, which spawned DMK and AIADMK, was brought into the national mainstream by giving these parties a role in national politics. They have been partners in coalition government at the Centre since the end of the Congress rule in 1996. Since then the vast coalitions of as many as twenty-five regional parties in partnership with the Congress or the BJP have run the country.

But are not regional parties political expression of regional culture? Today India is a nation of distinct regions, with their own language, literature, theatre, cuisine. Whereas the multi-ethnic USSR and Yogoslavia broke along regional lines, we have stayed together. Our democracy works in a way so as to give rise to regionalisms but at the same time weaves together regionalisms into a common political domain.

Again it is the working of our democracy that has greatly undermined the old caste order, and brought in its place large interest groups comprising several castes. Bahujan Samaj is one such regrouping of the old castes. The central idea that is behind the Mandal politics is equality. With the BSP under Mayawati acquiring power in UP in the recent election, a dalit truly feels that he or she is the equal of an upper-caste Hindu. It is not just the equality of the Constitution but equality in real life.

Democracy has transformed the old regional and caste identities. It is democracy, an import from the West, that has made possible the emergence of a modern Indian nation. But the survival of a nation also depends on how well it does economically. The disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation and the USSR is greatly instructive for us. Both disintegrated with the end of the Cold War in 1989, because both were economically declining.

Both were hugely diverse, ethnically, linguistically and religiously, but that is no reason why Yugoslavia and the USSR could not have survived. The United States, Canada and Belgium are also diverse; but they survive as nations.

We could go the Yugoslav way. Of course, had we limped along at the Hindu rate of growth, we would have found it very difficult to continue as one nation. Our diversities would have been accentuated by poor economic performance. But now the high growth rates we are experiencing in recent years present us with another problem: distribution. Today the economic disparity between the regions is sharp and growing. The South and West is doing much better than the North and East. In the corporate world in Mumbai and Ahmedabad people ask, how long do we keep paying for Oriyas and Biharis? There is no eternal India. India as a modern nation is only sixty years old, an infant compared to many nations of older standing.

The writer is Honorary Fellow, CSDS