The gravest philosophical error of the modern state lies in its belief that society must be assimilated. In plural civilisations, this belief is not simply misguided; it is ethically corrosive. The state assumes that unity requires a dominant narrative, a standardized identity, and a shared emotional grammar. Yet society does not demand assimilation to remain coherent. It evolves through its own collective consciousness—slowly, unevenly, often silently. When the state refuses to recognize this and instead seeks to assimilate society under a singular imagination, it predictably turns pugnacious. Coercion becomes its language precisely because wisdom is absent.
Society, unlike the state, does not operate through command. It accumulates meaning through memory, ritual, suffering, inheritance, and moral negotiation. Émile Durkheim described this as collective consciousness—not an enforced consensus, but an emergent moral life that binds people without erasing difference. Such consciousness cannot be manufactured through law or policy. It grows only when allowed to breathe. The moment the state attempts to accelerate or discipline it, assimilation mutates into domination.
Plural societies are not accidental formations; they are historical achievements. Their coherence is civilisational rather than administrative. Difference is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be lived with. Yet modern states, trained in rationalist governance, find this unsettling. They mistrust what they cannot fully know, measure, or standardize. This mistrust is what ultimately transforms governance into aggression.
The pugnacity of the state, therefore, is not ideological excess alone; it is epistemic insecurity.
This insecurity expresses itself when the state seeks not merely compliance, but alignment—of memory, emotion, and meaning. It demands that society see itself through a prescribed lens. When society resists—not always loudly, often through silence or withdrawal—the state interprets this as disorder. Power intensifies. Surveillance expands. Law becomes pedagogy. What follows is not integration, but estrangement.
Political theory has long warned against this confusion. Hannah Arendt distinguished power from violence, arguing that power arises from collective consent, while violence appears when consent is absent. A state that relies on coercion to produce unity reveals not strength, but isolation from the moral life of society. Its aggression is symptomatic of its failure to listen.
This epistemic insecurity did not emerge suddenly. It has a long genealogy within the political imagination of the subcontinent itself. Even during the national movement, deep anxieties surrounded the question of how a civilisationally plural society should be governed. Independence did not resolve these anxieties; it institutionalized them.
The freedom struggle was never a single epistemic project. It was a dense discursive field where competing visions of unity coexisted. At its heart lay a fundamental question: should unity arise from cultural assimilation or political accommodation? This was not merely a constitutional dilemma, but an epistemological one—about whether the state should shape society or restrain itself before it.
The debates within the Constituent Assembly of India reveal this uncertainty. The Assembly did not presume a singular national essence waiting to be implemented. It grappled with the reality that society was older, thicker, and more complex than the state that sought to represent it.
As Jawaharlal Nehru cautioned the Assembly:
“We are trying to build up a state on a very large scale… but we must remember that this country is composed of a variety of elements and it is dangerous to ignore those elements in the name of unity.”
(Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946)
Nehru acknowledged plurality and rejected overt cultural homogenization, yet placed immense faith in a centralized, rational state capable of managing difference through development, planning, and scientific temper. This faith, while progressive in intent, carried an epistemic risk: it assumed that administrative reason could substitute for ethical listening.
By contrast, Mahatma Gandhi articulated a radically different political epistemology. He feared the absorption of society into the state. His insistence on moral autonomy, decentralization, and spiritual plurality reflected a belief that society possessed its own wisdom. For him, enforced unity—even in the name of nationalism—was a form of violence.
This Gandhian anxiety was echoed inside the Assembly by members who feared excessive centralization. K. Santhanam warned:
“The real danger is not that the Centre will be weak, but that it will be strong enough to override the natural life of the provinces.”
(Constituent Assembly Debates, 1948)
Post-independence governance largely moved away from this Gandhian restraint.
- R. Ambedkar, acutely aware of structural injustice, emphasized constitutional authority and legal safeguards. His vision required a strong state to protect the vulnerable, yet it also deepened the unresolved dilemma: how does the state intervene without assimilating, protect without homogenizing, empower without disciplining identity?
Ambedkar himself recognized the fragility of unity built without social ethics:
“Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.”
(Constituent Assembly Debates, 1949)
This was an explicit admission that constitutional power alone could not manufacture collective consciousness.
The question was never fully answered.
Instead, what emerged was an uneasy compromise. Political pluralism was formally acknowledged—through federalism, secularism, and linguistic accommodation—while a powerful central state increasingly imagined unity as something to be produced. Over time, plurality was tolerated only insofar as it did not challenge the dominant narrative of the nation.
Here, epistemic insecurity hardened into epistemic control.
The state gradually claimed authority over meaning itself: which histories were legitimate, which memories were excessive, which emotions were patriotic, and which silences were suspect. Regions, communities, and experiences that remembered differently became sites of anxiety—not because they were chaotic, but because they exposed the limits of the state’s knowledge.
What followed was a familiar pattern. Exceptional governance normalized itself. Law learned to suspend its own ethics. Administration replaced dialogue. Giorgio Agamben described this as the state of exception—where the state preserves order by repeatedly stepping outside its moral boundaries. Such governance does not integrate society; it teaches society how to live around the state.
Yet society does not collapse under such conditions. It adapts.
Left alone—or even partially alone—society continues to evolve its own moral coherence. It remembers without archives, teaches without curricula, mourns without permission. Humor survives where speech is risky. Ethics circulate where law is absent. This endurance confirms a simple truth: collective consciousness does not require state supervision.
The tragedy of the pugnacious state is that its aggression is unnecessary. Assimilation is not the precondition of unity; restraint is. In plural societies, the ethical task of the state is not to define identity, but to protect the conditions under which identities can coexist without fear.
Assimilation is the desire of insecure states, not confident civilizations.
The unfinished task of the republic, therefore, is epistemic maturity: the ability to accept that society will never be fully knowable, fully aligned, or fully resolved. Unity does not arise from narrative dominance, but from mutual recognition. Where the state abandons this humility, it reveals its own fragility. Where it practices restraint, it may finally encounter trust.
Reference
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https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3531096.html
Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. Harcourt Brace.
https://monoskop.org/images/7/7c/Arendt_Hannah_On_Violence_1970.pdf
Bhargava, R. (1998). Secularism and Its Critics. Oxford University Press.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/secularism-and-its-critics-9780195642717
Durkheim, É. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press.
https://archive.org/details/elementaryforms00durk
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https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_1977.pdf
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https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078158/seeing-like-a-state/
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691037796/multiculturalism
Constituent Assembly Debates (1946–1949). Government of India Archive.