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If indeed Obama wins the Presidency, the American voter would have set anexample to other regions, India included, where Constitutional stipulations withregard to nation and citizenship continue to be bedeviled by racial andreligious supremacists who contest the ideal of secular equality under acommonly accepted regime of laws as stipulated by the Constitution at any giventime.
These impulses of course work severally: they can be pressed into service toseek from the state a redistribution of largesse by privileging one identity orthe other, internally.
Often an identity that has been reviled previously finds itself elevated tofavour subsequently (today's Maharashtra offers a fine instance; for now,neither South Indian lungivalas nor Marathi-speaking Muslims are the targets ofMaratha chauvinism); More ominously, a reformulation of the notion of thenation-state in toto becomes the object.
Which of course is not to say that the nation-state is already too evolved to bemeddled with on behalf of those that derive rather little participation in orbenefit from its decisions and operations.
Occasionaly, intermediate forms of racial privileging detrimental to the idea ofthe nation-state also surface with strident insistence on behalf of somesections of the citizenry, without overtly challenging the nation-state per se.
A fine current example of this in India is the pressure built within Tamil Naduon behalf of fellow-Tamilians in another country.
Members of the Indian parliament from this state have thought nothing of makinga gesture of resigning their parliamentary memberships if the Indian statefights shy of intervening in Sri Lanka to protect the interests of Tamilians.Never mind that in that beleaguered country, the government of the day isbattling the world's first and worst terrorist outfit, banned in most countriesincluding India, namely the LTTE.
Not only did this outfit invent the suicide bomber, it also murdered an IndianPrime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, using such a bomber.
Tamil parties in India, with the honorable exception of the AIADMK, supportedalso by bevies of film stars, have thus expressed their primary allegiance totheir racial tribe in another country rather than to the Indians who electedthem to the Indian parliament.
Not to speak of sections of more vociferous racists among them who haveclandestinely supplied munitions to the LTTE for many years, and who make nobones about going to war on its behalf.
Given all that, the Indian government which depends on the support of theTamilian parliamentarians has felt obliged to send its foreign minister toColombo to do some talking, and to make repeated statements on behalf ofTamilian refugees in Sri Lanka.
Speaking of which, imagine how the government of India would react were SriLankan Muslims to issue statements with respect to real or imagined excessesperpetrated on Kashmiri Muslims, or Muslims in Tamil Nadu itself. Unbearablethought that. Not to speak of Indian Muslims expressing the least anxiety aboutMuslims anywhere else. That would be pure treason.
Thus, in short, much like many Muslims the world over who privilege the Muslimnation, or the Ummah, over the nation-state, India's Tamilians feel that the"Tamil nation" takes precedence over the Indian state when push comesto shove.
As to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Global Hindu Community), it is on record asbelieving that "in pre-Christian times, all people, everywhere in theworld, were Hindus" (see H.K.Vyas, The VHP, Communist Party of IndiaPublications, New Delhi, 1983). And yet, it only sees enemies everywhere,including in India. You might well wonder why.