Eternal India United by Differences

India’s problem has never been difference. It has been the sudden urge, every few decades, to pretend that difference was a clerical error. That if we just revised the rolls, corrected the names, purified the lists, the noise would reduce to a chant. This fantasy returns with remarkable regularity. Empires tried it. Reformers tried it. Colonisers perfected it with files and forms. Postcolonial states inherit it with better software and worse patience. The temptation is understandable. Difference is exhausting. It refuses to stand in a line. It talks back. It eats at the wrong time, prays in the wrong direction, votes for the wrong party, and speaks a language the capital finds inconvenient. Uniformity, by contrast, is efficient. It photographs well. It sounds like order. But India has never rewarded efficiency when it came to identity. Every attempt to compress it has produced heat, not harmony. Yet moments like the Special Intensive Revision controversy force an uncomfortable question into the open: who is a “true Indian,” and what really makes someone an Indian citizen? The anxiety around this question is not new. It returns whenever the state begins to speak the language of verification rather than belonging. Electoral roll revisions are administratively necessary, but in a country like India, where identity has historically been contested and weaponised, such exercises never remain purely technical. They collide with older cultural fears about purity, origin, and legitimacy. The SIR has been able to weed out illegal migrants, by and large Muslim and from Bangladesh and Myanmar. This demographic pollution has altered ethnic, demographic and electoral profile of regions which are hostile to Hindu nationalism. Naturally ‘secular’ parties and professional liberals are anti-SIR since it cuts into their vote banks. The backlash in Assam and the Northeast shows history neither forgets nor forgives.

Take the obsession with origins. Who came first, who came later, who belongs more deeply to the soil. This is history reduced to a land dispute. India’s past does not offer clean certificates of nativeness. Aryans, Dravidians, Shakas, Kushans, Arabs, Turks, Mughals, Europeans form layers piled upon layers, none with a clear exit stamp. Even the gods migrated. Even languages travelled. Even caste, often presented as eternal, mutated across regions and centuries. To demand a pure lineage in such a place is not nationalism; it is historical illiteracy dressed as confidence. This is where the provocateur must say the uncomfortable thing: the Indian state did not create unity; it inherited a civilisation that had already learned how to live without it. Long before flags and anthems, people negotiated coexistence through custom, compromise, and contradiction. That messy social intelligence is what modern India risks losing when it replaces trust with templates. When the first instinct is to verify rather than include, to suspect rather than assume, the state begins to sound less like a republic and more like a gatekeeper with anxiety issues. The loudest defenders of cultural purity often forget how improvised their own traditions are. What passes today as ancient practice is frequently a 19th or 20th century consolidation, tightened under colonial pressure or nationalist response. “Timeless values” usually have a timestamp; it’s just printed in small font. This does not make traditions fake. It makes them alive. Only dead cultures stop changing.

Gen Z understands this instinctively. They switch languages mid-sentence, remix identities without apology, eat sushi for lunch and sambar for dinner, quote Ambedkar on Instagram and Tagore when they’re feeling ironic. They do not experience this as confusion. They experience it as freedom. The state, unfortunately, still behaves like a school principal from the 1970s, convinced that discipline will produce loyalty. It won’t. It only produces silence or rebellion, depending on who can afford which.

 The irony is that India’s global confidence today rests precisely on the pluralism it sometimes appears embarrassed by. Soft power does not come from sameness. It comes from a contradiction that somehow holds. Yoga went global because it was never owned by one church. Bollywood travels because it absorbs everything: Persian poetry, Western harmony, folk rhythm, urban angst. Indian democracy, for all its noise and flaws, remains fascinating because it refuses to settle into a single note. This is why reducing citizenship to cultural performance is not just unjust; it is strategically foolish. A country of India’s scale cannot afford to shrink its imagination of belonging. You don’t manage a civilisation by narrowing its doors. You manage it by strengthening its institutions so difference does not become desperation.

Ambedkar warned that constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment; it has to be cultivated. That cultivation requires restraint from those in power. It requires humility to accept that the nation is bigger than any ideology, older than any party, and more complex than any slogan. Verification has its place. So does vigilance. But when they become the dominant language of governance, they corrode the very trust they claim to protect. India does not need fewer identities. It needs stronger guarantees. The guarantee that citizenship is not a favour. The guarantee that disagreement is not disloyalty. The guarantee that speaking differently, eating differently, praying differently, or remembering history differently does not make you a provisional Indian. Eternal India was never united by sameness. It was united by the audacity to coexist without consensus. That audacity is fragile. It survives only if power resists the urge to simplify. The future of the Republic will not be decided by who is filtered out, but by who is still allowed to belong without explanation. Unless they have been flying under the radar.