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Friday, Dec 28, 2007
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National identity can play a constructive role: Amartya Sen

Staff Reporter

— Photo: SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH

Sharing their thoughts: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen with West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi (left) at the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata on Thursday. Mr. Sen delivered a special oration on ‘Nationalism’ on the occasion.

Kolkata: A national identity can play a constructive role in today’s world where battlelines of terrorism and violence are often along divisions of religion, Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen said here on Thursday.

Referring to Iraq where the existing divisiveness in society was along religion and ethnicity, splitting up the country between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish groups, Prof. Sen said that the “quest for some kind of order in that troubled post-intervention land could be much easier if Iraqi nationalism or…Arab nationalism were an important force.”

Prof. Sen was delivering the Netaji Oration organised by the Netaji Research Bureau on the topic, ‘Is nationalism a boon or a curse.’

Classification of people

Prof. Sen also expressed his misgivings about the recent official moves made in the United Kingdom towards classifying people by religious categories only, such as “British Muslims,” “British Hindus” and “British Sikhs.”

This classification, combined with the extension of state-supported, faith-based schools, were sharply enhancing the importance of religious identities and reducing the help that children get from their schooling about how to make reasoned choices, including about beliefs and faiths, he said.

“They tend to give pre-determined priority mainly to loyalty to inherited religious communities,” he said, adding that the cultivation of a British national identity that is not parasitic on religious identities could be very important at the present time.

Nationalism could be a boon or a curse depending on the circumstances, Prof. Sen argued.

It might be productive where social divisions and hostilities are based on religious, community or ethnic identities, while being counterproductive where the main confrontations are along the lines of national divisions, as in Europe during the First World War.

“Nationalism…is one identity among many that we all have,” he said, adding that reasoned choice of prioritising the identities will have to be examined in the light of whether it adds to the divisiveness of a country or the world, or helped to reduce it by providing an alternative way of understanding human beings.

“The contingency here involves examining whether focussing on national divisions would sharpen hostilities, or alleviate them,” he said.

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