During the session, she also spoke about how there have been over 22 secessionist attempts in the state, with the carving out of Uttarakhand being a successful one
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav must take a leaf out of his Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar's book in the upcoming elections, said Prerna Singh, the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA. Singh made a case for the existence of subnationalism within the idea of nationalism when she spoke at a session on the disparity between Indian states at the ongoing Zee Jaipur Literature Festival.
She said that akin the idea of offensiveness that the term 'bhaiyya' carries, 'Bihari', too, is a term that accompanied by scorn. "Yet, Nitish made a distinction with Lalu's politics and said that, 'We are not about caste, we are about being Biharis'. He used the term in a manner in which it was no longer offensive and brought pride to the idea of being Bihari," she told DNA. "Uttar Pradesh can definitely look to its neighbour, and leave behind the caste-based mobilisation that has been its politics for decades. Akhilesh can step up and say it is not about Hindus versus Muslims, or about castes, and it is really about the people of Uttar Pradesh."
During the session, she also spoke about how there have been over 22 secessionist attempts in the state, with the carving out of Uttarakhand being a successful one. She also spoke about the sustained Tamil nationalist movement, and said that the several instances of run-ins with the Centre have come up to build the idea that India's ethnically diverse identities need to be protected.
She told DNA that the explosion of the Jallikattu issue is a good example of what accompanies subnationalism. "It's gone beyond the concern about the health of bulls to the idea of central encroachment on state autonomy. Does the Centre get Tamil culture to intervene on it," she questioned.
For a discussion on disparity on states, leaving out the Centre's blinkered approached to India's Northeast would have been foolish. Singh told DNA that while outsiders see the northeast as a cohesive unit, people,from the seven states view themselves as either Nagas or Mizos or Assamese. "You can be Naga and Indian at the same time, they are not mutually exclusive. There's a need to identify the idea of nested identities. When you force a certain identity as a uniform one, it will be a recipe for disaster," she said.
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