How can we agree to disagree?

Nationalism, India, and the political theory of political identity: Part I

When Aristotle was reflecting on the limits of self-government in the political community of the polis, he settled on a figure of roughly 100,000 people. In the 21^st century, however, the largest functioning democracy in the history of the world is the Republic of India, which numbers roughly 1.4 billion, according to the 2024 estimate. Within this enormous population, diversity is a fact of life, from the land’s geography to the massive wealth discrepancies, but no diversity colours India’s politics more than its religious diversity. With just shy of 80% of the population identifying as Hindu, 14.2% as Muslim, 2.3% as Christian, 1.7% as Sikh, as well as a plethora of other religions, the deeply divided faiths of the subcontinent make governance difficult, especially given the sectarian violence that India deals with regularly.

As the conflict between India and Pakistan heats up, attempts to understand the demographic identity of the country has led to calls for a 2025 ‘caste census’, which in turn has exacerbated issues around faith’s relationship to the political identity of India.

India’s answer to the diversity at the heart of its political identity, alongside its federal political structure, has been a long and enduring form of nationalism known as Hindutva, coined in 1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, stresses the Hinduism at the heart of Indian identity, and demands a Hindu cultural unity that ought to inform all aspects of social life. Savarkar wrote:

In the case of some of our Mohammedan or Christian countrymen…their Holy Land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil…A Hindu…is he who looks upon the land that extends from Sindu to Sindu – from the Indus to the Seas – as the land of his forefathers, his Fatherland (pitribhu).

Sam Bidwell’s (2025) long-read on this is a must-read for anyone in the Anglosphere who wants to understand the demographic complexity of India.

We see in India, therefore, the most exacerbated and intensely challenging expression of the question upon which this essay is predicated: how can we agree to disagree? If we have such varying views of the way we ought to live our lives – and if those views make substantive demands of other people – how can we live together? In many ways, this question goes to the heart of political theory: if moral philosophy is the question of how we live well, political philosophy is the question of how we live well together.

In that regard, and in answer to that question, this essay is sub-divided into two halves: the first will consider three different theories of peoplehood, specifically those of Carl Schmitt, John Rawls, and Ernesto Laclau. The second half will then, respectively, consider how those different theories attempt to answer the question.

Who are we?

Michael Oakeshott described politics as ‘the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a collection of people who, in their common recognition of a manner attending to its arrangements, compose a single community’. In other words, politics is only possible when there is a common community over whom that politics can be practiced – a ‘we’ capable of speaking of ‘our’ government that is responsible to ‘us’.

The other important phrase in that definition, however, is the idea of ‘common recognition’. It is not enough for a people to exist in order for there to be politics; they must recognise their own existence in order to act as a community. But this leads us into a circular issue; how do we determine the people, and how do we know when a people has recognised itself? Referred to, broadly, as the ‘boundary problem’, the issue of identifying a ‘we’ has come to occupy a particularly significant place in political theory.

The circularity of the democratic approach to the boundary problem, as Bonnie Honig describes it, goes thus: notionally, for democracy to be real, there must be a group to whom political institutions are responsible. The group is, immediately, imagined into existence: but to concretise the limits, in line with democratic principles, these limits should be democratically decided. But how do we decide who decides? Do we vote to create a government body that identifies the limits? But that will require us to know who can vote; and so, we return to the first objection, that we do not know where the boundaries of that vote lie.

This is not to say there are no answers. So, what answers are there? In this part of the essay, I will outline three different theories of the people that hold high levels of influence in the literature and amongst other theorists. First of these is the radical authoritarianism of Carl Schmitt.