Churchill said India wasn't a nation, just an "abstraction". John Kenneth Galbraith, more affectionately and more memorably, described it as "functioning anarchy". Both of them, in my view, underestimated the strength of the India-idea. It may be the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period. It deserves to be celebrated-because its is an idea that has enemies, within India as well as outside her frontiers, and to celebrate it is also to defend it against its foes.

- Salman Rushdie, novelist

The failure to coexist is at the root of most contemporary conflicts both between nations and within them. As the world is becoming more global with mass migration of people and tight integration of economies, the urgency of learning to coexist is rapidly increasing. India is a unique experiment: it is perhaps one of the only nation-states held together not by any common ethnic, linguistic or religious factor but by the notion that heterogeneous people can coexist.

Though there have been many failures of coexistence within India, there are many success stories as well. India also has a bewildering variety of people. It is urgently required to document the successes and failures of coexistence amongst these communities. India has to a large extent succeeded in developing a viable model of coexistence. We need to study this model carefully and examine whether it could hold lessons for mankind as a whole.

SAPRA India Foundation, a New Delhi-based think-tank has launched a research project which aims to:

• Research specific instances of coexistence successes and failures in India
• Draw lessons from or analyse coexistence successes and failures
• Disseminate these lessons through seminars, articles and TV programmes

The research project would be divided into four sections:

Part I: Documenting Histories of Ethnic & Religious Groups in South Asia

Part II: Examples of Failures of Coexistence in South Asia

Part III: Examples of Successes of Coexistence in South Asia

Part IV: Lessons of Coexistence for the Global Community

In the first stage, the research would focus on a few specific instance of coexistence conflicts:

Call for Participation:

Send us your Inputs:

Stories, anecdotes to illustrate any of the above themes

References to books, articles, whitepapers, documents etc on related subjects

Names and contact details of persons who could either help with this research, have a story to tell or assist us in any other way

Photographs, movie snippets and any other graphical material to support our research

You could also support this initiative by donating money.

Your inputs should either be sent to "The Coexistence Project, The SAPRA India Foundation, Rooms 202-204 Uday Plaza, 16A Uday Park, New Delhi 110049, India" or emailed to sapra@subcontinent.com

Or you can contact Adite Chatterjee at adite.chatterjee@gmail.com with your inputs, feedback, suggestions.

Please visit the SAPRA India Foundation website to know more about its activities:

http://www.subcontinent.com/index.html