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indianexpress.com

Unity and diversity: Our obsession

with diversity misses the point
Meeta Rajivlochan

5–6 minutes

The obsession with diversity haunts India. “India is marked by

unity in diversity,” Nehru observed. The fact, of course, is that
nations all over the world are diverse. Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Nepal and Afghanistan are diverse. So are China, Russia,
Germany, Poland, Great Britain and France. Perhaps the only
non-diverse nations that exist in the world are some of the
pocket-sized nations in Northern Europe, which have a
population less than Delhi. Diversity or its absence is never a
problem. The absence of a national will is, as is the belief that
some people within the nation do not belong.

Diversity never vanishes. People merely stop obsessing about

it. In 19th century Europe, people realised that it made sense to
live together as a nation rather than insist on a lesser identity,
whether of religion or region or caste. The modern state system
has emerged based on impersonal rules that are neutral to such
identities. In Britain, such a realisation was already present in
the early 19th century. In France, Napoleon forced unity even
though as recently as 1999, an official report from France
identified the continued existence of some 75 distinct languages
in that country. Germans and Italians consciously sought out
cultural unity among their diverse political groups. Even the

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USSR, one of the most diverse countries in the world, managed

to find unifying threads that would hold its people together.

Come to think of it, China is even more culturally, linguistically

and religiously diverse than India. “Han” – the term used to
denote the people who are the supposed majority in China —
was before the 20th century, merely used to denote a civilised
person as opposed to the barbarians; much like the word “Arya”
is said to have been used in India before unthinking Indians
were seduced by the idea that it stands for race. “Han” did not
refer to an ethnic group. Modern Chinese scholars Zhang Lei
and Kong Qingrong in their 1999 book Coherence of the
Chinese Nation write that, “according to Confucianism, the
distinction between ‘hua (xia)’ (civilised Han) and ‘yi’ (minority
barbarians) was a cultural boundary rather than a racial and
national boundary”. They explain that “the barbarian-civilised
distinction did not indicate racial or national exclusiveness.
Instead, it was a distinction involving differentiated levels of
cultural achievement”.

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The Chinese, unbeknown to Indians, profess five major and

over 20 minor religions and, speak in over 13 mutually
unintelligible languages. On gaining independence in 1948,
China worked to strengthen the nation over divisive extra-
national identities. India went the other way — highlighting
divisions rather than what held people together. That is a
problematic way of ordering things.

The nation is, after all, an inchoate entity. There is nothing

natural about it. It is a marvellous piece of social engineering
that human beings evolved in the past two centuries. It is

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essentially held together by the modern institutions of law and

state. It requires constant reification and reinforcement through
the fairness that is inherent in using the institutions of law and
state. Left to themselves, without the support of institutions,
human beings like most other animals have little capacity to
synergise on a large scale.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar based on his study of

primates has suggested that a human being can maintain stable
social relationships at best with 150 other individuals. Political
scientist Rick Shenkman argues that this is how our brain
continues to be hard-wired.

Perhaps.

It is the institutions of the nation-state that enable people to

reach out beyond such natural limitations. It allows people to
synchronise their energies, and operate beyond small face-to-
face groupings like the family, tribe or town. It frees the
individual from primordial bonds, and, enables much larger
synergies to be developed than had ever been possible till now.
Most importantly, it provides people with the protection of a
system of laws that was not dependent on a person’s status or
membership in any primordial group. We risk great danger if we
dilute this by privileging narrower identities.

India has thrived so far despite numerous dire predictions

because over a billion people value the benefits that flow from
being part of the larger collectivity much more than their
membership of any narrow grouping based on caste, religion,
language or region.

Meeta is an IAS officer and Rajivlochan is a professor at

Panjab University. They are authors of Making India Great
Again: Learning from our History

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