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As part of the "What the nation really needs to know" teach-in series on nation and nationalism at Jawaharlal Nehru University, on Friday Professor Achin Vanaik spoke on the power of nationalism. Vanaik has recently retired from the Delhi University Political Science department.

Vanaik begins by putting student politics in context. "From time to time students become the spark for very positive and progressive transformations worldwide." Commenting on the teach-in he says, "What you have done here is very remarkable in terms of insisting on having a teach-in, not just the usual forms of opposition, legally and so on etc., but that we must have this debate about what kind of nationalism we want. This is something from which the political parties outside Parliament, the media and others can and should learn."

"There is a systematic attempt to elaborate and instill a very anti-democratic, intolerant, belligerent and aggressive nationalism to which we have to respond with a much more humane, democratic and inclusive nationalism," he asserts.

In his talk Vanaik links nationalism to culture, and then explains different possible meanings of the terms.

He says there are four approaches to understanding the beginnings of nationalism.

First, changes in social structure, where industrialisation necessitates nations.

Second, changes in political structure – the idea that the modern nation state begins in 1648 with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia treaty.

Third, changes in political consciousness, where a certain kind of cultural nationalism precedes political nationalism.

And fourth, the most important, changes in social consciousness.

Vanaik refutes the first two approaches, saying that even countries without "serious processes of industrialisation" have nationalism, and that the nation state was not born in 1648 because those states were absolutist states that were centralised but also personalised and sacralised. "The modern system nation state comes through after 200 years of also imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation."

"The power of the nation state comes from the fact that it's supposed to belong to the people," Vanaik points out.

Explaining changes in social consciousness, Vanaik refers to Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities. Though the best definition of nationalism came from the liberal tradition before him, Anderson developed it and made it much more powerful and effective, Vanaik says.

According to Hans Kohn's definition of nationalism from 1944, "Nationalism or the nation is a cultural entity lodged above all in consciousness striving to become a political fact." Vanaik says this is important because that means there is only one thing common to all nationalities and nations, and that is the question of consciousness.

Common territory, common language, or common history are not what makes for this political consciousness. "The only thing common is that in way or other... people come to think of themselves, the imagined community, as belonging to some kind of nation and that's the key..."

"In order to understand nationalism we have to understand culture," he says, which is also a very complicated term. He explains culture with five adjectives: plural (the aspect of being shared), open, ordinary, changing, and expanding. An essentialist view of culture is what leads to the labelling of people as anti-nationals, and doesn't agree with the idea of a secular nation state.

"You can think of the nation in two ways – either you can think of nationalism as an inheritance of the past, or you can think of it as something that belongs to the present and the future. If you say it belongs to the past, that it's an inheritance, then there will always be disputes about what the proper inheritance is and who the proper inheritors are."

"It belongs to the present and the future, and what that means is nationalism is what we will make of it."

"There must be different ways of being Indian and feeling Indian," says Vanaik. People from different parts of India can feel Indian if they feel that the state respects and acknowledges their language, their history, their culture.