" India’s success in building a modern state that defied predictions of its demise derived from its thorough insistence on institutionalizing what was Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest bequest to the freedom movement: the construction of a new Indian nation, not by suppressing its many particularities but by incorporating them into a new composite identity that preserved in “marble-cake” fashion all its constituent diversities across ethnic, religious, and racial lines. These diversities, far from being obliterated, acquired salience depending on context but, being enmeshed and free-flowing, they erased the boundaries between the insular and national identities, congealing the latter even as they preserved the former. The modern Indian polity, therefore, emerged not as a nation-state since, given its myriad diversities, it could not be so—but rather as a nations-state. Under the rubric of “unity in diversity,” its different ethnic, religious, and racial groups combined to create a novel, multilayered political identity. However confusing that reality may be to the outside world, it is
authentically and indisputably Indian. "

― Bibek Debroy , Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform