Pakistani Hindus seek safety in India

India is not a nation-state in the sense of France or Germany. I would take exception to your statement of a "normal" nation-state. Firstly the construct of a nation-state as we know it is fairly recent -- dating from after the French Revolution.

prior to that you were in kingdoms and your allegiance was to a person. That is why there were proposals for Russia to be renamed Petrovia under Peter the Great and not much "nationalist" opposition. That is why a "German" like Copernicus could pledge allegiance to a Polish king against the "German" Teutonic knights

Also, a "normal" nation-state is a mono-ethnic, mono-religious entity. It was purely a construct of Western Europe from the late 1700s: for instance until the French revolution barely 10% of France spoke what we call French -- they spoke Breton or Basque or o'il or Gascon.

the 1800s was the time when there came a consolidation and a clamping down on minorities -- which is when the English attempted to stamp out Manx, Welsh, Cornish etc., when the French stamped out the regional languages, when the German Empire attempted to force the Poles to speak only German, when the Russian Empire attempted to force Poles etc. to speak only Russian.

I give European examples because those were the states which were at the forefront of this nation-state creation. in Asia you had Siam doing the same and the Japanese had been doing it for a long time to the Ainu etc.

I would argue that the "normal" state is always a multi-ethnic,multi-lingual and multi-religious one -- right from the state of Sargon II of Akkad in 2000 BC.

The US is the best example of why this works in the long run. Japan is the best example of why it may work in the short-run but in the long run the consolidation is not good for the nation as it turns more insular.

the natural state is a mix where you have say Germans living in the Ukraine alongside Ruthenians, Russian, Poles, Jews, Armenians, Tartars, Romanians, Greeks etc.

In India's case there is the historical sense of being 'Bharatiya' just as Europeans have the sense of being "European". Both started off in the quasi-religious or religious sense.

Neither made the leap to assimilation as the Hans did in China -- probably because there was never one dominant culture as in China, but myriad żródła sources.

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