The nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”
– Benedict Anderson
“From Kashi to Coimbatore, Lord Shiva is everywhere.”
– Narendra Modi, February 24, 2017
“India is now among the most unequal countries in the world.”
– World Inequality Report, 2022
If the scholar Benedict Anderson had famously argued that nations are, with the emergence of European linguistic nationalisms, a new secular, political community supplanting religious communities, the nation in India of the present is posited irrevocably as a religious community.
But what is ironic is that this imagined religious community is riven by drastic inequalities which show no sign of relenting. In fact, the so-called spiritual
— source thewire.in | Nissim Mannathukkaren | 28/Dec/2021