The question then was: why was this so? One of the most general answers to this question, which is the one I offered in that book, is that the framework of ideas within which non-Western nationalism tried to answer the questions - of why these countries were subjected to European rule, why this rule was considered illegitimate, what would be a more legitimate form of rule - was completely derived from the whole body of modern, Western political thought and social theory. Within that framework, the question was, effectively, who was it that ruled? What is the structure within which people ought to be ruled? What were the most desirable forms of the state? I think all of those questions were effectively taken to have been answered already within the body of modern, Western political thought. In the case of many of these postcolonial debates within nationalism, there were liberals, Marxists, and socialists, but really all the debates were in effect the same debates that had taken place in the West. The interesting question then was: Were there possibilities that had been repressed in the course of these movements? That is where many of the new possibilities opened up: Were there alternative ways of thinking about a modern state?

In the Indian case, the whole Gandhian way of thinking was clearly very interesting. My answer, after having looked at what the body of Gandhian thought and practice meant, was: Yes, this was clearly an attempt to think of the state and forms of rule in very different terms. But it was effectively a failure. Having raised the question and having produced completely new conditions through which people could be mobilized for the anti-colonial movement, the Gandhian intervention in effect completely failed to reach the sorts of objectives that it had placed before the nation. If you ask me why, I would say it was because of the way in which it tried to deal with the fundamental problem of violence in society. The original and distinctive contribution of Gandhian politics was to evolve amazingly effective techniques of non-violent resistance by an unarmed people against the institutions of state violence. But it never managed to propose a theory, or even a set of techniques, by which a state could legitimately employ violence against wrongdoers. In the absence of such a theory, Gandhian thinking could only present itself as a non-modern form of resistance, never as an alternative form of the modern state.

I think similar questions have been asked, for instance, about the place of religion in modern society, attempting to reformulate the question of religion in the light of modern conditions. Obviously, Islam is a very major field here in the Indian subcontinent and other parts of the non-Western world as well, and many things have been said about it. These discussions and debates continue even today. The range of questions that gets opened up are essentially about whether a different modernity is possible.

My answer in Nationalist Thought book was largely pessimistic. At the time, I would have said that, of course, there were many of these other possibilities that had been raised and because they were raised I think they allowed for many new forms of mobilization, which had never been seen in national movements or democratic movements in the West. These were completely new ways of mobilizing people. But if you think of the end results, they were largely imitations of the modern state in the West, which, I would have said then, would explain in some ways why many of these postcolonial states seemed to be deficient, like poor copies, second-rate modern states.

From the Fragments book onwards, I have been more concerned with looking at practices rather than the big frame. In other words, I became aware that rather than asking the big questions - looking at the overall frame of modern politics and the modern state - if one were more sensitive to the local practices and the more localized innovations that have taken place, I think one would become more aware of where the differences lie. In terms of the overall frame (the constitution, the basic institutional structure), one could say that they are often quite good copies of the liberal constitutional state (India is a good example of this, I think). It is in the actual working practices, I think, that many of the innovations emerge. If one looks at the sources of these innovations and what these innovations actually try to achieve, in the local sense, one becomes far more appreciative of how even the so-called "corruptions" of the original are actually doing things which many of these constitutional or democratic forms of government in the West could never have achieved. These become much more interesting and important questions.

You have, for instance, rules of formal equality: the law applies equally to everyone. Everyone is aware that this is a major principle of the modern state in the West. If you move to the Indian context, it is a principle that is upheld by the courts and the constitution. Yet, if you look at the localized context, you will find that even state authorities make exceptions to that rule. The law does not apply equally to everybody. And the exceptions are often very interesting: why exceptions are made, how and why they are justified, and what the exceptions actually achieve. Very often, one would find that if the exception had not been made, large sections of the people would probably have never been brought under this system of modern governance. They would have been excluded in ways that would have completely jeopardized the overall structure itself.

Some examples are common and actually quite obvious. For instance, in most Third World cities there are large populations which can only survive by breaking the law. They live on land that does not belong to them, they squat on public property, they travel on public transport without buying tickets, and very often they use electricity and water without paying for it. If the law applied equally for everybody, then those who were buying tickets to travel on trains should have refused to allow those who were not buying tickets to make the same journey.

But in actual administrative practice, that rarely happens. Administrators will tell you that they know that people are squatting on illegally occupied land, but it is best to let them stay. This is so because, for many reasons, this same population often has a very important role to play in the urban economy; in their absence, these urban economies might simply collapse. One could see this from another perspective as well: if these people had no livelihood at all, they would be even more of a threat to property, to the law, and to order. This is a way in which these people are actually controlled and governed, by precisely making them an exceptional case.

So if one looks at the local application of the principles of modern government, I think one will find extremely interesting innovations. Not all of them necessarily appear desirable and many of them involve some degree of routine violence. Those are the more interesting areas in which one can actually see borrowed or copied models of the modern state actually being domesticated, often in very new and innovative ways. They are actually producing different results and having different effects which they do not have in Western contexts.

In the same book, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World, you say, "to the extent that nationalism opposed colonial rule it administered a check on a specific political form of metropolitan capitalist dominance. In the process it dealt a deathblow (or so at least one hopes) to such blatantly ethnic slogans of dominance as the civilizing mission of the West, the white man's burden, etc. That must be counted as one of the major achievements in world history of nationalist movements in colonial countries." Your parenthetical qualification (one hopes) in this quote already indicates a doubt with regard to the historical finality of the postcolonial victory over Western racism. What was behind this apprehension?

Well, you see it right now! Even today, I would put it in that slightly ambivalent way. I think, overall, the lessons of decolonization and what it means for world history are irreversible. I do not really believe that this call for a new empire, in spite of recent claims about how empire is actually good for everybody, carries any real conviction anywhere in the world . But it is true that in many, many ways, some of the slogans of the civilizing mission have returned, even if employing other phraseology.

I suppose even then, there was some lurking suspicion that these things might come back. I really think it is impossible to return to any framework of colonial empires because unlike in the 18th or 19th centuries when you could make a kind of moral argument about bringing modernity and civilization to uncivilized parts of the world, you cannot make the same claim today precisely because the main claims of European or Western modernity have actually become completely universal. You cannot claim that democracy is the exclusive preserve of the West, although in popular political discourse in the West these claims are often made, about democracy somehow just being part of Western culture. It is simply not true; whether they have it or not, the idea of democracy is actually available everywhere in the world. I think the same goes for many of the other claims on behalf of modernity, including the claims about science and technology and modern medicine and everything else. It is simply no longer credible to make the claim that modern medicine is somehow a "gift" of the West. People all over the world know that these are things that are available. There may be arguments and debates about whether they want them, at what cost, on what terms, etc. but everyone is aware of their existence. Many of these may well be real questions, but it is no longer a question of a Western "gift" to the rest of the world.

In that sense, what is generally described as the period of decolonization after the Second World War did deliver a complete deathblow to any kind of traditional colonial structure in the world. I do not think that form is ever going to return.

How do you explain the resurgence now of precisely the same kind of rhetoric?

There are a lot of people who are trying to make sense of the structure of dominance in the world, what it means and how it is to be exercised - and of course we are talking now of the dominance of the US. They are making sense of it in terms of an older rhetoric, an older language, which is why there is suddenly a spate of books about the British Empire of the 19th century and how that historical lesson might be relevant for American rulers today. The reason why this rhetoric has become so fashionable is simply because that historical moment offers a certain justification for worldwide dominance by one power. It offers a set of rhetorical languages by which that power can be justified.

I do not believe that the effective structure of dominance of the US today is anything like the British dominance of the world in the 19th century. US dominance is not simply a dominance over the so-called "less developed" parts of the world; it is dominance over Europe, over Japan, over China. These formations over which the US is seeking dominance are completely within the structure of a global modernity, in the standard conception of what "modernity" entails. This is a new kind of dominance. I do not think there is a good language to describe it. For this reason, there is so much apprehension over what this form of dominance might mean for the rest of the world. The real apprehension is that those that wield this power do not actually understand what this power is all about and how they are going to use it. After all, this power is almost entirely the power to use violence; it is fundamentally military power. There is such an enormous concentration of the means of violence in one country and so little ethical justification for using that absolute military power. We are living today in a very dangerous situation. But for the reasons I have given, I do not think this is the same as the 19th century British Empire.

Also in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World you indicate that the emergence of both separatist movements and the fundamentalist cultural revival in the third or postcolonial world has to be seen in terms of the structural tensions in the history of nationalist thought in the colonial world. What do you mean by that?

Well, we should return to some of the things we were talking about earlier. The innovations in nationalist thinking and nationalist mobilizations which have occurred in the postcolonial world have tended to get repressed by the emergence of fairly standardized forms of governance. Many of these innovations were actually repressed because they were not seen to be consistent with the known forms of the modern state. For instance, if you had movements or parties which were largely based on religion, this was seen to be somehow inconsistent with the idea of a modern constitutional state. Therefore, there was always this problem of what to do with such movements. Yet, those movements have been very influential and powerful in terms of mobilizing people against colonial rule.

So, once the objective of decolonization and transfer of power to a new nationalist elite had been met, the question was how to contain or manage these forces that had been released in the course of the national movement. That is where many of these tensions remained unresolved. If you look at the case of post-independence India, this whole debate about the "secular" state and what the secular state must do and what it means, in a sense, reflected this unresolved tension. In the historical process of the emergence of that state, a great deal of the mobilization had used religion, had depended on extremely powerful religious reform movements, of actually shaping what were seen to be religious beliefs and religious practices but changing them, reformulating them, in order to conform to what were seen to be the new challenges of the modern world.

So these religious reform movements were often completely part of the broader set of social changes that brought about nationalism, that brought about the new state, that brought about new political formations. They were integrally tied with many of those movements and yet the requirements of the secular state presumably forbade religion in public places or public life, or forbade political parties based on religion, because these were somehow inconsistent with a modern nation-state. Very often, there were all kinds of shortcuts or repressive ways of keeping those things under cover, as it were. Many of the tensions around secularism, for instance, and the kinds of challenges that emerged later on, in the case of India's Hindu right-wing in the 1980s for instance, were very much part of these unresolved questions from within the national movement. What the Hindu right then appealed to was not to say that nationalism was all wrong; they said, in fact, that they were the "true" nationalists. The reason why that could be said persuasively was because of a great deal of religious-based rhetoric and the presence, as I said, of these powerful religious reform movements, which were always part and parcel of nationalism.

So these remained unresolved problems. The overall frames remained derivative, almost imitations of forms of the state as developed in the West, but in actual practice what had to be done was to find completely innovative practices at the localized level. The real problem occurred when many of these local adaptations and innovations required a new translation into the larger frame. If you look back on the many kinds of tensions that were brought out later on, such as complaints about minorities being given all sorts of privileges - one standard complaint against the secular state - you will find that many of these so-called "concessions" or privileges were completely justified but entirely localized arrangements. There were certain locally acceptable forms of public display, for instance, which clearly reflected a certain majoritarian understanding of what a public ceremony meant. But these required certain local adjustments. Through the post-independence period, for instance, there have been public celebrations of religion where state functionaries and officials have participated because they were seen to be local festivals which large numbers of people attended. Many of these forms also meant that at the local level there were celebrations by minority communities which also had their place. So people knew that on a particular day, during a particular celebration, there would be music on the streets and so on, but on another day, because it is the local minority community which is celebrating something, this will not be done. It is a local understanding, a local consensual arrangement. In many of these cases, these local understandings evolved and the arrangements often varied from one place to another. But once you had these local arrangements being compared and translated in terms of the overall framework of the character of the state, then it posed problems. Is it truly a secular state? If it is a secular state, then why is the minority community treated one way in this place and another way in the other place? It is then that the autonomy of the local arrangement is called into question. The criticism would always be that if India is a secular, democratic state, then these local arrangements cannot hold because all citizens are supposed to be equal, and supposed to be treated equally, so there can be no such special concessions made to minority communities. This became the new problem because many of the issues that appeared to have been resolved were resolved purely in the local context. But once the autonomy of the local is called into question, what begins to appear is the inadequacy of the overall arrangement. This is when the whole thing became exposed and began to unravel, as it were.