Nationalism to Regionalism

Nationalism - Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation.

The British presence in India began in Elizabeth’s time with a few trading centers at Madras (now Chennai), Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata). A multiplicity of motives underlay the penetration: commerce, security and a purported moral uplift of the people. The annexation of territories in India began in the eighteenth century with the French deciding to challenge the pre-eminence of The British East India Company by inciting some of the states of Mogul Empire to attack the British; thus leading to an emergence of the Empire in India. The British, who were more or less welcome in the country at the time, hardly faced any resistance from Indians until the Mutiny of 1857.

A century of accumulated grievances erupted in the Indian mutiny of sepoys in the British army, in 1857. This was the signal for a spontaneous conflagration, in which the princely rulers, landed aristocarcy and peasantry rallied against the British around the person of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah. The uprising, however, was brutally suppressed and by the end of 1859 with the deportation of the last Mughal emperor to Burma, where he died a lonely death, the Mughal rule in India came to a formal end. The British Raj by that time had spread its tentacles majorly over the country and it was becoming exceedingly difficult for a small handful of foreigners to administer such a vast country. They therefore created local elite to help them in their task; to this end they set up a system of education with the intellectual and the social values of the west. Ideas of democracy, individual freedom and equality were the antithesis of the empire, which led to the genesis of the freedom movement among thinkers with the leadership of the movement passing into the hands of the very same crystallized elite; thereby paving way for the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Slowly and steadily the movement started to grow and the entire nation united for a single cause to be. On 15 August 1947 India eventually got its freedom and was declared as an independent secular nation; the wonders of nationalism working towards the right of ones own freedom in ones country.

Regionalism - Loyalty to the interests of a particular region.

India is a federal state with a parliamentary form of government. By federal state we mean that all the states within the country are conjoined under a federal union and a federal union believes that democracy and the rule of law should apply between states as well as within them. In brief, this is the political system of our country.

The saddest part is that the very same country which had once united for a common benefit now stands divided for an individual one. In Assam we shout slogans to oust the migrated labours from West Bengal and Bihar. In Delhi we talk about the collapse of the infrastructure due to people coming in from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In Mumbai we stage violent demonstrations against the constant flux of people moving in from Uttar Pradesh. The best is yet to come in the form of our politicians who are the major cause for this rot. All in all we are looking at a ubiquitous political system, run by a set of people who think against the very same principles which governs the system run by them. That’s the irony of a nation which has switched to regionalism from nationalism, in a mere 60 years of independence.

It pains me to see what we have actually become, starting from what we had once set out to be six decades back. I am hoping that there would be a day when we would once again think, from a common platform, about issues which concern the nation as a whole rather than sulking over individual benefits.