The Oxford English Dictionary defines a nation as "An extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory." Webster's Unabridged New Universal Dictionary says that a nation is "a stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic life, distinctive culture, and language in common" (1979 edition, p.1196).

Nations are thus produced historically, that is, they arise over time, in specific territories, and they are formed by conscious human activity. But how? That is a question that preoccupies many historians. Venerable work by Karl Deutch in the 1950s has been recently revitalized by Juergen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, and media studies, to highlight the communicative and cultural character of the nation -- and today the formation of nationality in representations, propaganda, and marketing is very prominent in academic research, including substantial work on Canada. I want to work with and supplement this theoretical approach to the nation in my discussion today of interactive problematics of nations, identities and modern states, which will focus particularly on Hindu nationalism in India

First we must recognize that treating the nation as a historical construct necessarily contradicts the assumption that a nation constitutes a virtually natural phenomena, of which nationalism is merely a reflection or an embodiment. In this view, which is held by most nationalists, a nation is born like a baby from the womb of social formations of language, religion, and kinship; and nations develop naturally within nationalist struggles into the form of a nation-state. Such claims are rhetorical implements for nationalist projects and they do not represent academic accounts of history.

Like the Berlin Wall, nations are built by human hands; and like the Great Wall of China, their solidity may not be what it seems. Treating the nation as a historical construct also reveals the embarrassing fact that historical writing itself is a communicative force in the creation of nations -- building conceptual walls around nations and states and creating rational beliefs in affinities among peoples gathered under the authority of national governments. History as a discipline is deeply involved in the national project, and having a "common history" is after all a part of the definition of the nation. Reading history books, we can easily see that the role of national politics in reflecting national identity is very often assumed while the role of political institutions in defining national identities is most often missing. History departments are constructed along explicitly national lines; and the history of one's own nation is a top priority in the education of citizens. Education is deeply national and studying history in school increases the intensity of national feeling as it deepens the assumption that nations are natural -- that national boundary lines on world maps are virtually inscribed on the planet. Naturalizing the nation in education is a project that is now embedded in the foundation of the historical profession.

Historians who study the nation critically and comparatively thus appear as traitors to their own nation and a menace to others, as well as delinquents in their profession. This occupational hazard is part of a wider upheaval that is too familiar in Canada, for the very idea of the nation is today controversial. As a result, critical discussions of the nation can become very tense.

Conflicts over the idea of the nation have been heating up in the last twenty years or so and this heating up itself indicates a historical period in the history of the nation as a historically constructed form of social order. We have recently passed the end of a period of stability in the history of the nation and we entered a new period of turmoil whose character and trajectory are still unknown.

There was a time -- from roughly 1920 until about 1980 -- when a reasonably stable set of assumptions and political conditions defined a relatively stable set of nations within the international state system. After 1975, this stability fell apart and its first crash was heard internationally in the din of the Iranian Revolution. In India, much more quietly, the State of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, in 1975, began the unraveling of the Congress Party and thus a slow-motion national crisis. The Congress became a mass-mobilizing, anti-colonial, nationalist party in 1920; it organized decolonization -- which included the violent Partition of British India in 1947; and it institutionalized the Indian nation within a thriving nation state. But today, it is but one party among many. In the 1996 national elections, Congress came in second to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's premier Hindu nationalist party, formed in 1981 from the old Jan Sangh.

By 1980, the nation had entered a period of turmoil and subsequent trends in what are now the "former" Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, in Canada, China, Cambodia, Ruwanda, Burundi, Angola, Sudan, and in what may soon be the "former" Zaire and Albania -- highlight the pain and suffering of this period in the world history of the nation. Trends in South Africa, Latin America, and Europe seem rather more hopeful, but they have also entailed serious turmoil and change in the nature of nations. I would argue that the nature of the nation has also changed quite significantly in the United States, despite the appearance of a bland stability.

Something significant happened after 1975, not only to many individual nation states but also to the nation as a historically produced type of social organization and collective identity. But what? No one can answer this question definitively, but looking back over longer periods, and looking at nations comparatively, we might see this moment in the history of the nation more clearly than if we fixate only recent events.

One idea afloat today is that change in the world of nations has been forced upon us by the changing material (especially technological) conditions of late capitalism and by attendant globalization and transnationalism. Certainly in most of what we call "the Third World," structural adjustments forced by international financial institutions have altered national politics dramatically. In India, debt-driven financial policies began in 1981 and since 1989, liberalization policies have substantially dismantled the framework of protection around Indian industry, opened the Indian economy to foreign enterprise, increased inflation, devalued the Rupee, and enhanced economic growth in some sectors. Urbanization has accelerated along with urban land values, and many more sites in India are today involved in international business activity. All these trends together appear to have accelerated differentiation between richer and poorer people, locations, social groups, and regions in India, and some cities, classes, and states have benefit much more from new private sector investments than others. Late capitalism has indeed changed India.

But economic history does not support the idea that change since 1970 has dramatically altered India's economic structure. India is huge economy holding 850,000,000 people and the most economically advantaged parts of the country were well ahead in the game by 1980. Today as in 1950, indicators of well-being and economic development cluster and reinforce one another, creating structural patterns that cannot be altered quickly by shifts in national economic policy or world economic activity, partly of course because the Indian economy largely consists of the regional performance of agriculture, which still employs 62% of the workforce -- though the percentage in industry and services has grown steadily since Independence.

Rates of birth, death, infant mortality, and literacy, and the gender gap in infant morality, literacy, etc. are all highest in four states in the northern Hindi belt, which include 40% of the Indian population -- Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, and these same states are at the bottom of the ladder in their per capita income, the population below the poverty line, and in the percentage of industrial jobs, urban population, and other measures. Eight other states, which also contain about 40% of the population, account for most of the economic growth and improvement in social indicators, since 1920 and since 1970: these are the mostly non-Hindi-speaking states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab.

Though India's basic economic structure, social profile, and political system have remained stable, in India, as in other parts of the world, by 1980, one political party, which had alone substantially defined the nation for many decades, fell apart. If you look around the world, you will see that this is not unique. The political power of the Congress Party in the electoral system and the cultural legitimacy of its ideas about the nation declined together. From roughly 1980 to 1993, a transitional struggle occurred, which was often -- in India as elsewhere -- quite violent; and though this period may not be over yet, it has taken a rather more predictable form, in the past few years.

The collapse of the Congress, like the Iranian Revolution and the Stock Market collapse in 1929, they were not predicted by social scientists. The Ayatollahs' triumph and fall of the Berlin Wall seemed equally impossible virtually until the day they happened. The conjuncture of expected events and unpredicted trends after 1975 in national settings around the world was clearly not the result of close institutional inter-dependencies, but rather the result of a simultaneity in the impact of disparate trends whose connections and caused I myself do not claim to understand.

But it does seem, however, that after 1975 many new social movements gained substantially in their power to redefine national identities. By 1990, the nation had been revealed anew as a contingent historical phenomenon, which is construct by social movements which do not only build but also tear down existing national institutions and old formations of national identity. These social movements -- from India to the US, China, Russia and now Zaire and Albania -- argue that the people and parties which had controlled national governments for decades do not really represent the people. They are populist and they use mass mobilization and mass publicity -- they come from the right and the left, and they variously exalt ethnic, religious, class, gender, and racial identities and consciousness. Their rise and success do not fit models of change devised by Marxists and by liberal modernization theory, which of course try to explain them anyway.

In liberal theory, many of these movements appear, like the Iranian Revolution, to represent resurgent religious fundamentalism -- all across the Muslim world, among militant Sikhs in India, and also among Hindu nationalists -- so they are a political expression of ancient cultural sensibilities trampled upon by modernization. Among the many problems with this view is that these movements are distinctively modern in their modes of mobilization. Their traditionalism and often their religion are mroe rhetorical than institutional. In the case of Iran, the Islamic regime is more democratic than its modernist predecessor. Hindu nationalism has no theology. It is not lead by clerics. It is not about the purification of religious practice and says nothing significant about the interpretation of religious texts. Hindu nationalism -- Hindutva -- is not religious fundamentalism -- but rather a form of cultural, ethnic, and even racial majoritarianism.

What the liberal modernization theory does capture nicely is that religious rhetoric and classifications have became increasingly prominent in new social which define themselves as defenders of traditions trampled upon by previously dominant national parties associated with policies of modernization.

A loosely Marxist analysis reveals another important fact: that in most of these new social movements -- including those in the US, the former Soviet Block, and in India -- a rising middle class is very prominent. This middle class -- like American suburban society -- developed after World War Two, and in the recessionary climate of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it confronted two kinds of political challenges:

· From below, it faced historically disadvantaged groups mobilized from the 1960s onward for advancement within modernizing states and international institutions.
· And from above, it faced state institutions whose policies had disproportionately benefited the rising middle class but which were now being viewed as constraints to further middle class advancement. In the US, the so-called "American dream" -- which had been sustained by the state -- was now seen as being threatened by state economic controls and state-expenditures to help ethnic minorities and the poor. Reagan's cry became, "Get the state off our back!" In India, structural adjustment and liberalization were pushed by the World Bank and IMF but also by middle class leaders who -- like their Soviet counterpart -- felt deprived of consumer goods and economic opportunity. The popular magazine India Today reflected this critical middle class perspective on the state in India from its inception -- a middle class cry for the state to serve its needs.

But new social movements in India did not rest only on the middle class, by any means, and Hindu nationalism has been led variously by middle class professionals and the intelligentsia, by shop keepers, workers, peasants, and lumpen pavement dwellers. Hindu nationalist mobilization has also included an increasing diversity and shifting array of class interests. The whole array of new social movements in India cannot be classified on class lines: they include regional movements, caste movements, tribal movements, environmental movements, and women's movements; and the activities of Hindu nationalism must be seen in the context of all the various movements which are effectively contesting the nation in India.

In many modern states, recent social movements have both challenged and invoked cultural traditions, and arising within national systems of power, they have used national political institutions to attack the legitimacy of old parties, leaders, and institutions. They have variously taken power in many national states and redefined the nature of the nation. India is only one case, but large and complex enough to exemplify elements that pertain to many others. I will spend the rest of my talk on India, without losing sight of its comparative, global context, which is critical for understanding the Indian case.

All the new social movements love the media and rabidly seek publicity for the cause. In 1990, the BJP leader, Mr.L.K.Advani, staged the most successful opposition media event since Gandhi's Salt March in 1930 when he toured thirty-three cities in northern India for over a month, riding a Toyota van decked out as Rama's chariot, to raise the pitch of agitations over the reclamation of Rama's birthplace in Ayodhya. Riots triggered along the route of his Rath Yatra further extended its notoreity. Hindu nationalists are as aggressive as any group in the world in their use of the media and they are flooding the internet and the World Wide Web. News groups and websites overflow with Hindutva information, debates, and appeals.

Indeed, Hindutva's international media presence far surpasses that of the government of India and that of all the sixteen parties combined which joined together to form a United Front coalition government in 1996. On the airwaves, we could say, Hindu nationalism substantially represents the Indian nation in the world today. Their influence in the West is heightened by the widespread association of India with Hinduism and Hindu culture in scholarship, the media, and education at every level. India is quite often called "a Hindu country" in the press, so it is understandable that when the BJP and its allied organizations claim to "represent Hindus" as "defenders of Hindu culture," Western readers take this claim to be plausible; when in fact, since India's population is 80% Hindu in its religious affiliation, most political parties represent Hindus. When Pat Robertson claims to represent Christians in US political discourse, the fact that most Christians vote for other candidates puts this claim in a more realistic perspective; but such facts are not as visible in the world communication system when it comes to the case of India -- and the flood of Hindu nationalist imagery on the airwaves further accentuates the Hinduization of India.

This raises the critical question of what constitutes the nation today in a world in which the nation has assumed new communicative and cultural forms and meanings amidst late-capitalist economic and technological conditions. I want to address this question with a set of arguments about the contemporary historical process of the reconstruction of the nation in India.

1. The nation is a bundle of images that influence human sensibilities, alliances, and loyalties; so that struggles over the power to control the nation are not confined to political institutions inside the nation state: they also entail struggles over means of communication and thus over the control of image-making.

Nations have always been in part the artifact of communications, and Gandhi for instance was an avid media activist. Gandhi sought to construct the Congress Party in the media as the only legitimate opposition to the British, to secure an independent national government under Congress control. Today, the US nation-state is well served by American communications industry, which propagates imagery that bolster the propaganda of the US government, this is not so true for most Third World countries. Places like Jamaica are not constructed in the media as nations at all, but rather as tourist sites; and African nations are mostly disasters. In India, the Congress Party did try to use the state-run television to its own political advantage, but the opposition took control of much of the print media in India in the 1980s, and today, most media, including much of television, are effectively outside government control. Unlike in the US, there is no easy collaboration of national image makers and the national government in India. The image of the nation -- the representations of its substance -- is no longer contained in the schools, history books, and government publicity. The nature of the nation is being contested fundamentally. Social movements with suitable resources can effectively reshape the image of the nation that influences human sensibilities and loyalties by flooding the airwaves. Hindu nationalists are doing this more massively than any other social movement.

2. Large scale overseas migration has combined with rapid communications and transportation to alter the physical and social space of the nation. The social aggregations that define the nation are more fluid and extensive than ever. Indian nationalism is now multinational in its territoriality and transnational in its activity and identity.

Indians overseas not only participate in struggles over the nature of the nation inside India, but they constitute the nation overseas. Economically, Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) are courted by the Indian government as a source of foreign exchange and investment, and they now comprise a political constituency outside India that is seen as essential for India's economic future. Residing overseas, even being a citizen of another country, does not prevent an Indian from being an active nationalist in India and from participating in struggles to redefine the nation. This is especially true in their ability to participate in media constructions of the nation. in fund raising for their parties in India, and in lobbying with foreign governments for support of political projects in India. Being a Hindu nationalist as distinct from an Indian nationalist allows for a definitional fluidity in the idea of nationalism that goes along with the multinational citizenship of the nation. Anyone can proclaim loyalty to a Hindu nation, even if they are Canadian. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) -- the largest Hindu nationalist organization, which operates all around the world -- now has a web site that allows the user simply to click on a spot to "become a Hindu."

3. Transnational experience creates distinctive ideas about the content of the nation which are appropriate to its new, global territory and set from the limitations of containment with the boundaries of India itself.

Overseas settlement detaches NRIs from the experience of particularism of the regional and local cultures in India; and thus it produces a new feeling of being Indian and participating in the nation. It generates new images of the nation that can be projected back into India to reinforce particular trends in the country. A century ago, in the 1890s, Indians in Africa -- most importantly, Gandhi -- imagined India from a distance as a more unified cultural form than did most of his contemporaries inside India -- from a distance they could see their country in more holistic and simplistic terms than people living inside India. Third World nationalists in Africa and Asia -- from Kwame Nkruma and Jomo Kenyatta to Chiang Kai Shek and Ho Chi Minh -- in addition to all the top Indian nationalist leaders -- educated themselves outside their native land. All these leaders returned to their country to turn their imagination of the nation into political practice inside the country in struggles for independence from European colonial powers -- and their in their native land their idealized image of the nation confronted national realities and helped to forge national institutions to deal with national problems.

Today's overseas nationalists are more commonly emigrants and it remains much easier to reduce the complexity and diversity of India to a small set of cultural principles in New Jersey and Manchester than in India. Emigrant nationalists do not need to go back to India to work for the nation -- that is, for the Hindu nation -- for they can participate in the transnational public sphere of Hindu nationality -- their national homeland can be the world of disputation about the nation in India. I should point out that Hindu nationalist parties before Indian Independence did not line up behind Gandhi to fight for Independence from British rule; and likewise today, Hindu nationalists are fighting to replace ideals of the Indian nation which are attached to the legacy of Gandhi and Nehru with another set of national ideals attached to the legacy of Hindu nationalists, who include, it must be said, Gandhi's assassin.

4. The global space and imagery of Hindu nationalism is urban, and mostly shaped by the experience of a mobile, upper-caste, urban middle class; it's mode of dissemination as well as its content are designed for the interaction of sites of global travel and communications.

India is predominantly rural and agrarian. Politics there is about urban connections to the countryside -- about communications in many languages and dialects -- about relations between real people working in towns and in villages. But globally India is dominated imagery of tourist sites, urban sites, and religious sites. What David Harvey calls "time-space compression" is occurring among the global cities of late capitalism, which captures the world in images that zip between urban sites in a flash. Thus the images of Hindu India that inform Hindutva zip around on the airwaves and in the jetstream from Nagpur to Delhi and Bombay to New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Melbourne. Wherever you go in this diasporic urban world, you can also find Hindu celebrations and rituals, much more widely spread over the cultural landscape than are symbols of the Congress party, other political parties in India, or the Indian government.

In the global setting of Hindu nationalism, the localism and particularism of Hindu rituals and cultural practices is replaced by simplified, cosmopolitan forms -- in which, for instance, we can see many deities worshipped in one temple -- in the Birla temple in Delhi as well as in New Jersey and Boston. Whereas in agrarian India, each family, ethnic, caste, and social group even in a single village will have its own site of worship -- and the diversity of deities and rituals expresses the great diversity of Hindu cultural identities -- in the temples of global Hinduism, many different social groups of Indian origin, often from different language regions, come together, bringing their many gods into one Hindu ritual space -- a very distinctive type of space that is quite unusual in religious terms. This newly invented type of Hindu social space is primarily the construct of world of upper caste, middle-class urbanites, for whom the unifying vision of Hindu religious tradition is more salient and powerful emotionally than the particularistic ties and temple devotion of worshippers of Hindu deities in India. This global, urbane, unitary imagery of Hinduism is propagated by such journals as Hinduism Today and though it is quite distant from the everyday practice of Hinduism in most of India, its ecclecticism rather than the more traditional particularism, represents the Hinduism of Hindu nationalism.

5. As in the past, the nation today is also a business territory -- inscribed in the international system to organize marketing, exchange, and investment -- a territory for privileging the native and for constructing bonds of allegiance that can be used for collective social investment. In this context, the selling of Hindu India is a business enterprise that links enterprises of various kinds overseas and in India. Its homeland is described by emotive Hindu imagery but also by capitalist pragmatics.

Hindu nationalist politics in India has become most firmly entrenched in the state of Gujarat, in the city of Bombay, in some major urban centers in the interior of Maharashtra, and in urban centers from Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Nagpur to Delhi and Chandigarh. Nagpur is the home of the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of Hindu nationalism, and Nagpur is an old great cotton export town in Maharashtra and the seen of one of the great urban booms in nineteenth century India. In the urban sites in which Hindu nationalism thrives in India -- which include emerging sites, like Bangalore -- businessmen have wide connections overseas and deep connections with politics. The political propagation of the Hindu nation -- which took off in Gujarat with a series of riots in the early 1980s -- has -- like Reaganism and the rise of the Right in the US -- always gone hand in hand with the denigration of India's constitutionally mandated government programs of affirmative action, which are designed to improve the conditions of poor minority groups and also hand in hand with attacks on the Left and its labor unions -- beause these are said to disrupt the unity of the Hindu nation. Unlike in the US, the argument of the Indian Right does not focus on economic efficiency and the magic of the market -- it focuses instead on the glory and unity of the Hindu nation, which can brook no opposition from the pseudo-secular Left which has fractured the nation with its divisive electoral courtship of the Muslim minority and corrupt patronage of caste vote blocks. The tone of Hindu nationalism therefore not economistic or capitalist -- but rather ethnic and racial.

But business interests in Bombay, Delhi, and Gujarat do support Hindu nationalists and the many riots which accompanied the rise of Hindu nationalist parties were peppered with warfare over the local control of urban real estate. The president of the VHP in Mumbai is a major industrialist. Big business families like the Hindujas support Hindu politics. The Shiv Sena -- which leads the Hindu nationalist movement in Maharashtra -- was hired by industrialists to crush strikes in Bombay. The attractiveness of the idea of a united Hindu India, living under the peaceful unity provided by a BJP government is understandably attractive to many businessmen in India and abroad -- who can see not only a devotional dividend in their investment in Hindu nationalist programs, but also a potential economic dividend from alliances with Hindu nationalist entrepreneurs and financiers. When the agitations of the Hindu Right threaten business interests, however, they often withdraw their support.

6. The territory of business inside India, however, is bounded institutionally by the nation state, and composed of a massive agrarian population -- so even as Hindu nationalism relies on global connections that are forming a fluid, global nation-space, like all movements inside India which seek to redefine the nation, Hindu nationalists too must seek power in the state to legitimately define the nation in their own terms.

Inside India, the nation looks quite different than it does in world-imagery. The current government in New Delh is an alliance of thirteen parties which all derive their power and legitimacy from regional electorates. Few states in India are today dominated electorally by one or even two parties -- and the set of parties that dominate one state are most often missing altogether in the neighboring state. The nation of India in India consists of the elements that define the Indian political system -- including the administrative apparatus of the state, the system of laws, electoral politics, and ideological contestations in the public sphere. One specific set of images and interests in this system constitutes the Hindu India propagated by the BJP, RSS, and VHP. The cultural definition of the Indian nation is visible in the operation of the political system as a whole, not in the specific ideology of one party or set of parties.

This is a competitive, electoral system, in which social groups of many sorts organize for the pursuit of influence over the legislature. Its political parties are not institutions that are strictly demarcated off from institutions and groupings of other kinds (as they tend to be in Europe and North America) -- so that families, castes, tribal groups, religious sects, businesses, regions and localities create political formations that combine and intersect in the political arena -- and in the public sphere -- in the cinema, literature, music, art, media, and news -- so that explicitly political messages pushing support for one group or one policy or another are literally everywhere. Because there is a detailed articulation in politics of the vast diversity of the population -- which includes sixteen official languages, thousands of religious groups, hundreds of thousands of affiliations defined by kinship and marriage, many backward regions, a growing number of advanced economic sites, etc. -- virtually any cultural trait or symbol has some kind of contested political meaning. The cultural substance of the Indian nation is the articulation of social identities and solidarities with political institutions and public discourse in India.

Political institutions and public discourse in India have taken on a more saphron coloration in the last ten years -- saphron being the color that symbolizes Hindu nationalism -- and to some extent Indian national politics today is organized around the opposition of the BJP and all the great majority of parties that stand in fundamental opposition to the BJP and Hindu nationalism in general. Before 1985, Hindu nationalism had a very small political presence in India this process of change since 1985 is very complex in its details, but it can be understood schematically in a long-term view as a feature or by-product of the changing configuration of party politics.

Simply put, in 1920, the Indian National Congress under Gandhi became an organization for mass-mobilization and at the same time the British government instituted regional electorates, so when Gandhi decided to boycott elections in 1920 a number of regional parties stood for elections and won. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Congress steadily improved its position as an electoral party but the regional parties remained; even though their membership most often entered the Congress. The Congress became an umbrella organization -- in effect, a vast coalition of political groupings and interests of many kinds, each with their own social basis and electoral constituency. Within this vast coaliition were included diametically opposed political groups, for instance, the Untouchable uplift movement headed by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar, and the Hindu nationalist movement led by the RSS and Jan Sangh. Ambedkar's movement was opposed to the Hindu definition of India most radically and he claimed that Untouchables had been forced to convert to Hinduism from their original religion, which was Buddhism, he argued. He agreed with the Muslim League leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, that the potential for a domineering Hindu nationalism in India was sufficiently strong that minorities and Untouchables should seek constitutional guarantees in separate electorates to create a federated political system in which no one party would be able to dominate the political system. Ambedkar and Jinnah claimed that the Congress was essentially a Hindu organization, which Gandhian symbolism might suggest but Nehru's leadership would deny. The truth was that the Congress did include a substantial number of Hindu nationalists and people sympathetic with the RSS and Jan Sangh. But it also included socialists, liberals, and Untouchable leaders like Ambedkar, whose followers not infrequently fought with RSS cadres in the streets. Political struggles which pitted the Congress against the Muslim League heated up, therefore, as the League leadership and the Muslim electorate little by little decided not to be included under the Congress umbrella. Similarly, the RSS and Jan Sangh did not support the Congress -- but they had little electoral strength. In 1947, when the British decided to withdraw from India, Congress candidates controlled all the provincial legislatures, except those in Bengal, Punjab, and the northwest frontier. The Congress would not form coalition governments and the Muslim League would not accept a formula for a united India that would not guarantee its continued provincial power -- and the result of this stalemate was the Partition of India into India, Pakistan, and what became Bangladesh in 1971.

So the unity of India under the Congress government from 1947 to 1978 was gained at the expense of Partition -- and it left unfinished the political task of balancing national, regional, and increasingly diverse social interests within the framework of one nation. The effective mechanism for accomplishing this task has been the proliferation of parties and efforts by governments at the Centre in Delhi to accommodate their demands under the Congress umbrella. The Congress Party ceased to be a sufficient institutional mechanism for this effort in 1975 -- when Indira Gandhi's Emergency effectively announced the end of the Congress internal- coalition strategy. Since then, the conflicting party formations which had lived inside the Congress have taken on their own independent political life. One of these represents the Hindu nationalist cause, whose regional base runs from Gujarat and Maharashtra north to Delhi and whose activists are seeking further extensions by electoral campaigning and coalitions. But as the BJP expands, its vision of the nation -- like that of any other national party, including the vibrant Communist parties -- will need to embrace the culture of the nation and recreate itself institutionally as an umbrella or coalition which can combine a number of particularistic political formations representing diverse social groups. The mechanisms for this articulation of social diversity and political organization are feuds among party leadership, defections, alliances, scandals, fissures, reallignments, deal-making and opinion polling, all of which are duly reported in the papers and in gossip to give the voter in India a clear understanding of how the nation is working. The legitimacy of national parties in India depends not on their claim to be the one and only embodiment of Indian culture but rather on their effective institutional articulation of diverse interests and changing forms of alliance and collective identity.

Today, coalition politics is the order of the day in New Delhi -- and perhaps a political aesthetic will develop that will appreciate the flexibility and implicit federalism of national coalitions. But strong nations are still associated with strong national parties, and coalition-making appears in practice to be rather chaotic and a bit scarry. So there is rather widespread sentiment in India that some more stable party formation in Delhi is desirable, and at present the BJP is the largest party, and Atul Bihari Vajpayee -- who was Prime Minister briefly in 1996 -- is the most popular potential Prime Minister in India today according to recent polls. The current government does not need to call elections soon and recent polls indicate that it would be foolish to do so, because the BJP alliances in Punjab and Maharashta have recently increased its strength in those states. The Congress Party is still the second largest party in the country, but its share of the popular vote is smaller than its measured support in the polls, becuase its supporters are spread more and more thinly around the country, and its share of seats in the Parliament is smaller still than its popular vote because it is weaker and weaker in the most populous states, most importantly, Uttar Pradesh. If the Congress Party would ally with other parties in the United Front Coalition -- this is, if such an alliance were politically possible -- the BJP would be relogated to the relative political insignificance. But this alliance is not immediately in the works, and even the preservation of the tentative unity of the United Front partners depends upon their finding common ground on very difficult issues. These issues pit regions and social groups against one another in pursuit of national resources in the context of economic differentiation that is being accelerated by economic liberalization. The BJP is relatively strongest in rich regions in the west and northwest; but they have a strong national ideology -- so it might well be that their political pragmatism and social alliances will bring them more into the mainstream of Indian national culture. Already Hindutva has pushed the envelop of political discourse and altered the rhetorical setting in which debates over the nature of the nation occur. It is possible that Atul Bihari Vajpayee and L.K.Advani of the BJP will be seen in twenty years as having the same kind of significance for Indian political culture as Ronald Reagan in the US. But to do so they will have to back off of their crude majoritarianism and embrace regional coalitions and federal solutions. Or perhaps they will be seen as the analogues of Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich -- popular and powerful at one moment in time, and effective in pushing the discourse of the nation to further to the Right -- but too inflexible to be legitimate leaders of a modern state.

thank you