Is nationalism solving India's problems or creating them? | Unpopular opinions on NL Hafta 600

we will tell you what today's hafta is it is each of us has had at some point or the other an unpopular opinion of course every opinion is unpopular among somebody or the other but generally in hafta discussions certain opinions stand out so we will discuss those one at a time so let's start with the person who's joining us after the longest time mehraj so mirage what is your unpopular opinion that you are quite confident the rest of the panel will not not agree with uh i mean we have had discussions about this before also i remember back in the day not like lengthy but yeah we have made this point that one of the reasons for the problems that india faces now social economic and increasingly administrative one of the root causes of that is the idea of nationalism and i don't mean in the sense of hindu nationalism but more in the you the traditional sense of the term what a nation means right and i'll just explain why i say that so basically when you talk about nationalism the core belief of nationalism is that people become more equal they become more free and they become more modern when two things happen One is that you kind of strip away their immediate communities, and by extension, their immediate identities, and then you coalesce them around a broader identity. That broader identity can be religion, it can be ethnicity, it can be, you know it can be language and the like and in in case of very large nation states such as india it's invariably a piece of a piece of geography a particular geography right but with its attendant symbols flags myths imagined history how it came into be now obviously this is necessary to build a nation state you have to have that common thread to get like all these diverse groups of people pulling in somewhat of a same direction. And that's what the founders of this nation tried to do. Some of this is obviously, I mean, you can make an argument and some of this is good, right? You take, for example, caste inequality. Breaking down that caste inequality and supplanting it with something more egalitarian, this idea of nationalism, that's obviously good. But there are two problems, right?