Q14: APSC Prelims 2023 GS-II: Previous Year Question with Answer

Read the following passage carefully and answer the question : The development of nationalism in the third world countries, as is well-known, followed a very different trajectory from that in the advanced capitalist countries. In the latter it was a part of the process of the emergence of the bourgeois order in opposition of feudalism, while in the former it was a part of the anti-colonial struggle. The impact of colonialism, though it differed across countries, had on the whole been in the direction of transcending localism and unifying supra-local economic structures through the introduction of market relations. The struggle against colonialism, consequently, took the form of a national struggle in each instance in which people belonging to different tribes or linguistic communities participated. And the colonial power in each instance attempted to break this emerging national unity by splitting people. The modus operandi of this splitting was not just through political manipulation as happened for instance in Angola, South Africa and a host of other countries; an important part of this modus operandi was through the nurturing of a historiography that just denied the existence of any overarching national consciousness. The national struggle, the national movement were given a tribal or religious character, they were portrayed as being no more than the movement of the dominant tribe or the dominant religious group for the achievement of narrow sectional ends. But the important point in this colonialism, while, on the one hand, it objectively created the condition for the coming into being of a national consciousness at a supra-tribal, supra-local and supra-religious level, on the other hand it sought deliberately to subvert this very consciousness by using the same forces which it has objectively undermined. The rise of nationalism was sought to be broken by the colonial powers by