Abstract
With the nationwide discontent against the Citizenship Amendment
Act (CAA, 2019), which allows citizenship on the basis of religion to
six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh,
and coupled with the exercise of National Register of Citizens (NRC)
that has been allegedly said to be an exercise in targeted exclusionary
politics against the Muslim population in Assam and as well as the
pan-Indian Muslim populace, the Indian government today seems to stand
on thin ice when it comes to justifying their stance on grounds of
secularism. The expectation of the government withdrawing the CAA is
absolutely futile. Rather, the government has made up its mind to
decisively push through this crisis, by using all of state apparatuses
to establish the state’s sovereign right to govern its population. By
and large, India as a pillar of global democracy is facing an exigency
of its own. The objective of this piece is to observe a novel trend of
nationalism as a concept subsuming democracy in itself slowly and subtly
in the age of neo-liberal democratic paradigm. In particular, India’s
modern nexus with democracy and nationalism is explored while glancing
back in history in order to understand the origins of Indian
nationalism.
