¹ The suicide attack on a May Day parade in Colombo killed twenty-three people and wounded twenty-six. The attack seemed to have been planned with meticulous care so as to produce the maximum political impact. ‘Police blamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), announcing on May 2 that they had found around the neck of the corpse of the suspected assassin the remains of a cyanide capsule as carried by LTTE guerrillas who preferred suicide to capture.’ Keesing's Record of World Events, Vol. 39 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 35467.Google Scholar

² See Harrison, Selig's appropriately named India, the Most Dangerous Decades (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a detailed description of subnational movements in India during the first decade after independence.

³ Mr K. P. S. Gill, the Inspector General of Police of Punjab and India's ‘top cop’, who dismisses ‘all talk of subnational or religious motivation as rubbish’, expresses the sentiments of those who believe primarily in a tough law-and-order solution to the problem of separatism. See Gupta, Sekhar and Sandhu, Kanwar, ‘K. P. S. Gill: true grit’, in India Today, 15 04 1993, p. 39.Google Scholar

⁴ See Malik, Iftikar, ‘The Continuing Conflict in Kashmir: Regional Detente in Jeopardy’ (London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1993), p. 12Google Scholar; and Sathyamurthy, T. V., Nationalism in the Contemporary World: Politics and Sociological Perspectives (London: Frances Pinter, 1983).Google Scholar

⁵ Lerner, Daniel, in his study of Turkish society. Passing of the Traditional Society (Glencoe, NY: The Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar, provides an interesting distinction between the ‘Moderns’, the ‘Traditionalists’ and the ‘Transitionals’. The Moderns are the small politically active class of nation-builders; the Traditionalists are the quiescent, politically non-relevant mass of people; and the Transitionals are those elements in the process of passing from tradition to modernity (Sathyamurthy, , Nationalism in the Contemporary World, p. 11).Google Scholar

⁶ Hutchinson questions the Marxist interpretation of cultural nationalism as a product of the uneven nature of capitalist development: ‘The bourgeoisie is compelled to sponsor the creation of a distinctive modernizing (nation) state, which will provide protection for its markets. To this end, the intelligentsia … constructs a national culture out of popular myths and vernaculars in order to integrate and mobilize the masses round this goal and to project potential internal class conflict outward against an external threat.’ (See Hutchinson, John, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), p. 7Google Scholar.) The counter-examples that readily come to mind are those of Tamil nationalism in India and Sri Lanka, Punjab, Kashmir or Bodoland in Assam where no significant industrialization has taken place, at least to the extent where the local bourgeoisie would feel sufficiently threatened to invent a nation with which to protect its market. For a discussion of the ‘liberal-rationalist dilemma with nationalist thought’, see Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 2Google Scholar. For the difficulty that the Marxist method encounters in discussing nationalism, see Newman, Saul, ‘Does Modernization Breed Ethnic Conflict?’ World Politics, 43 (1991), 451–78, p. 453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Hutchinson, , The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, p. 9.Google Scholar

⁸ Movements for regional autonomy and the political rhetoric that surround it are often treated as evidence of the disintegration of the Indian state by the Indian media. However, they fade out of media attention once a settlement has been made, usually leading to the creation of a new political arena where the former insurgents wield political power.

⁹ See Stokes, Gale, ‘The Undeveloped Theory of Nationalism’, World Politics, 31 (1978), 150–60, p. 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Malik, , in ‘The Continuing Conflict in Kashmir’Google Scholar, has suggested a preliminary basis for a typology of subnational movements in South Asia. But most writers are content with the lumping together of all challenges to the national states as an inevitable aspect of politics in post-colonial societies. Harrison, 's India, the Most Dangerous Decades is a good example of this.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Smith, Anthony, Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 1971)Google Scholar and The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

¹¹ Malik, , ‘The Continuing Conflict in Kashmir’.Google Scholar

¹² See Kothari, Rajni, Politics in India (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1970) for a succinct treatment of the theme.Google Scholar

¹³ See Jeffrey, Robin, What's Happening to India? Punjab, Ethnic Conflict, Mrs Gandhi's Death and the Test of Federalism (London: Macmillan, 1986)Google Scholar; Singh, Gurharpal, ‘Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case Study of Punjab’ in MaGarry, John and O'Leary, Brendon, eds. The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation: Case Studies of Protracted Ethnic Conflicts (London: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

¹⁴ See Ganguly, Sumit, ‘Kashmir’ (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association, Leicester, 1993).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Hewitt, Vernon, ‘Islam, Federalism and Centre-State Relations in Pakistan: The Case of Sind and Baluchistan’ (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association, Leicester, 1993).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Information on the movement of Chakma tribals is rather sparse. They were considered ‘pro-Pakistani’ by the new regime in Bangladesh after its creation. The movement has seen the flight of thousands of tribal refugees into India. See Timm, Father R. W., The Adivasis of Bangladesh (London: Minority Rights Group International Report, 1991) 92/1, p. 12.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The distinction between primordial and instrumental character of separatist movements is made by Singh, Gurharpal, ‘Ethnic Conflict in India’.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See Smith, , Theories of Nationalism, pp. 214, 226 and 228–9Google Scholar for typologies of nationalist movements.

¹⁹ For a distinction between transactional and transcendental factors in Indian politics, see Mitra, Subrata, ‘Between Transaction and Transcendence: The State and the Institutionalisation of Authority in India’, in Mitra, Subrata, ed., The Post-colonial State in Asia: The Dialectics of Politics and Culture (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Wheatsheaf, 1992).Google Scholar

²⁰ Jeffrey, , What's Happening to India?, p. 9.Google Scholar

²¹ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15.Google Scholar

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²⁴ See Banton, Michel, Rational Choice: A Theory of Racial and Ethnic Relations (Working Paper on Ethnic Relations, No. 8, University of Bristol, 1977), pp. 2–3Google Scholar. Riker and Ordeshook operationalize instrumental rationality in terms of transitivity, connectivity and completeness. Since all political outcomes are probabilistic, rational actors seek to opt for alternatives that are likely to yield the highest expected utility, i.e., X is preferred to Y if and only if the expected utility of X is greater than that of Y, E(U _x) > E(U _y), where E(U _x) = p _i(X) [0 ≤ i ≤ 1] and E(U _y) = p _j(Y) [0 ≤ j ≤ 1].

²⁵ Olson, Mancur Jr, The Logic of Collective Action (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 35.Google Scholar

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²⁷ Carling, Alan, Social Division (London: Verso, 1991), p. 334.Google Scholar

²⁸ Green, Leslie, ‘Rational Nationalists’, Political Studies, 30 (1982), 236–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an early attempt to formulate cultural nationalism within a framework of rational and strategic behaviour rather than presenting it as a spontaneous outburst of anger and resentment.

²⁹ Riker, William and Ordeshook, Peter, An introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973)Google Scholar, provide a systematic account of individual behaviour driven by a desire to maximize expected utility. Collective outcomes are deduced from the assumptions of individual rationality rather than presuppositions about cultural conditioning.

³⁰ See Green, , ‘Rational Nationalists’, p. 240.Google Scholar

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³³ Field data from India reveal the tendency on the part of local elites to combine the strategies of contacting civil servants and putting pressure on them by taking recourse to protest action in their attempts to maximize their share of developmental benefits. Although it is generally risky to engage in protest action, when it is effective it can quickly mobilize the media, higher level political leaders and civil servants and lead to prompt action. See Mitra, Subrata, ‘Room to Maneuver in the Middle: Local Elites, Political Action and the State in India’, World Politics, 43 (1991), 390–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ See Singh, , ‘Ethnic Conflict in India’ for the strategic aspects of the movement for Khalistan.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ The political tactics followed by the Tamil nationalist Dravida Munetra Kazagham in Madras in the early 1960s provide some empirical insight into the symbolic uses of cultural nationalism as a powerful tool of mass mobilization. The early exponents of Tamil nationalism were harking back to the glories of the Dravidian past and dwelling upon the social and economic oppression suffered by the non-Brahmin at the hand of the Brahmin, the Bania, and the Aryan North. They attempted to mould the masses into a self-conscious community through the use of the symbolic paraphernalia of language and nationality.

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⁴⁶ Axelrod, , ‘An Evolutionary Approach to Norms’, p. 1097.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Axelrod, , ‘An Evolutionary Approach to Norms’, p. 1097.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ ‘At first boldness [the tendency to question the legitimacy of conventional institutions] levels fell dramatically due to the vengefulness [the readiness to punish norm-breakers] in the general population. Then, gradually, the amount of vengefulness also fell because there was no direct incentive to pay the enforcement cost of punishing a defection. Once vengence became rare, the average level of boldness rose again, and the norm completely collapsed. Moreover, the collapse was a stable outcome.’ See Axelrod, , ‘An Evolutionary Approach to Norms’, p. 1109.Google Scholar

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⁵² Brass, Paul, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 27.Google Scholar

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