All About “Nation State” or “State Nation”

• Territories are inextricably linked to states.
• A sovereign nation or state that exercises unquestioned authority over a territory
• Have distinct dividing lines.
• Ensures the protection of and maintains control over its territory within those borders. Is accepted in the markets of other nations (diplomatic recognition, passports, treaties, etc.). The governments of the states each have their own bureaucracies, which are staffed by state employees, which consists of a national bureaucracy that is staffed by personnel from the government (legal system, educational system, hierarchical governmental units, etc.)

Functions of states within their own territories

Certain functions are carried out exclusively by states within their own territories (sovereign):-

1. Maintains authority over the lawful application of force within its borders
2. Maintains authority over the nation’s monetary system (prints currency; collects taxes)
3. Establishes laws and regulations within its borders (law, regulations, taxes, citizenship, etc.)
4. Maintains a significant amount of informational dominance within its borders
5. Attempts are made by states to create nations within their borders (via symbols, education, so-called “national interests,” and other means).

State-Nation and Nation-State Relationships

Which term best describes India: “nation-state” or “state-nation”? It may seem like a question of semantics, but the answer will determine the course of democratic development in India. The political scientists Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, and Yogendra Yadav argued in their book published in 2011, Crafting State-Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies, that societies that are ethnically diverse have one of two options when attempting to strike a balance between the twin goals of nation-building and democracy-building.

The establishment of a nation-state in which the cultural borders of the nation are mirrored politically by the political borders of the state is one possible solution. In his seminal work, the historian Eugen Weber famously described how French leaders in the decades following the French Revolution turned “peasants into Frenchmen” by forging a cultural, linguistic, and national identity that was unmistakably French and was practised only by French people.

The nation-state model, on the other hand, is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst for societies that have strong cultural diversity, at least some of which is territorially based and supported by strong sub-national identities. An alternative route, which the authors refer to as a “state-nation,” is something that Linz, Stepan, and Yadav propose for these complicated scenarios. A state-nation, in contrast to a nation-state, does not insist on alignment between the boundaries of the state and the nation. Instead, a state-nation makes it possible for a variety of “imagined communities” to coexist within the confines of a single democratic system. It acknowledges the possibility that individuals may hold multiple identities, some of which may overlap with one another, without these identities necessarily undermining a larger sense of national unity.

In addition, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was recently passed by Parliament, making it possible to grant expedited citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities who are originally from three of India’s neighbouring countries. When examining this piece of legislation, it is impossible to do so without simultaneously acknowledging its connection to Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is angry that a significant number of the 1.9 million residents who were not included on the NRC rolls are Hindus, and it has vowed to move the CAB in order to free them from their purgatory. In point of fact, during the course of their campaign, the party has advocated for the nationwide establishment of an NRC.

There may be a shift away from the state-nation model as a result of these moves. However, the political leadership of India should give a great deal of thought to the implications of uprooting the negotiated framework before doing so. This framework is what has made India the envy of the democratic world. India is the only one of the few remaining multinational federal democracies with a long history that does not have an advanced industrial economy.

This does not necessarily imply that India’s model is perfect. It’s possible that the unconventional definition of secularism used in India, in which the state keeps a moral distance from all religious faiths rather than erecting a solid wall between them, has reached its natural conclusion. This doctrine’s foundation has been weakened as a result of the opportunistic violation of it committed by secular politicians. 

Conclusion 

In a similar vein, it may be time to reconsider the concept of establishing distinct personal laws for each of the various religious faiths. Introducing a standardised civil code is one possibility; however, Yadav has recently proposed that another alternative would be to maintain distinct family laws while simultaneously eliminating any restrictive clauses they may contain.