The world has become a grim, dark place in the eyes of many people in our time. Decades of growing interconnectedness between nations (aka globalisation) economic crises and large scale migration has made people fearful and resulted in the closing of their minds and the growth of unbridled nationalism.
The consequences are plain to see – Brexit, the rise of right wing groups, the unexpected strength of Donald Trump’s candidature in the US presidential elections and so on. This sort of nationalism feeds off fear, job insecurity, economic distress, irresponsible politicking and a suspicion of anyone who does not “belong”.
India is not immune to global trends, to which it adds unique twists. In the past decade or so unscrupulous politicians have spared no effort to take advantage of the troubled times we live in. Are politicians solely responsible for the mess we find ourselves in? Not at all.
India, the cheerleaders of the Modi government notwithstanding, hasn’t suddenly become a much better place. Not a day passes without some fresh outrage being reported in the media or being talked about in our neighbourhoods.
None of this is new. We continue to live, as we have for the last couple of centuries now, in a country that is poor, violent, corrupt, overpopulated, misogynistic, unequal, and prone to sectarian violence, terrorism and environmental disasters, to name just a few of the challenges we have to cope with, and it is unrealistic not to expect bad things to occur. We all hope such tragedies will be eliminated, that we will touch greatness, but unless all those who are able to make this happen actually rise above their own selfish agendas and begin to work in concert and with tremendous dedication, it would be safe to say that for the majority there will be no radical change for the better any time soon, despite the fact that some of our countrymen work hard to make a difference.
What we do have, imperfect though they may be, are freedom of expression, liberalism in some pockets, inclusiveness, cultural vibrancy, the right to practise whatever faith we choose without let or hindrance and so on – the fundamental rights bequeathed to us by our founding fathers. In recent times, though, a very vocal set of politicians, sectarian organisations, god-men, trolls and assorted thugs have begun to brazenly attack some of the values that invest this country. Never before have they been assailed with such impunity.
One of the most contested ideas in twenty-first-century India is nationalism. It is easy to see why. If the forces I am speaking of (usually right wing and majoritarian) succeed in recasting nationalism in a straitjacket that suits their own narrow ends, they will, they hope, usher in a thousand-year rule of the theocratic kind. That they will probably not succeed in their aims, given the multifariousness of their “co-religionists” and the tens of millions of “minorities” (by this I mean not only religious minorities, but everyone who has a problem with religious fundamentalism and the notion of living in a violent theocracy – else, why is every sane, secular person opposed to the likes of ISIS or Boko Haram?) who might not take kindly to becoming second-class citizens is small consolation because considerable damage will have been done to Indian society by then.
We need to constantly remind ourselves that the only way for India to survive and thrive is to continue to be the open, inclusive country that our founding fathers fought to bring into being, and that all of us inherited at birth.
It could be said that nationalism is subtly threaded into our DNA; it doesn’t intrude upon our daily lives but makes itself manifest on demand, often when it is under threat in some way.
Some years ago, my wife, Rachna, and I had occasion to think about our nationality, and the nationalism it engendered. We had just become eligible for citizenship of the country we then lived in. Our home was in a city that routinely featured in lists of the most congenial places in the world to live and work in. We had a very brief discussion about whether we wanted to adopt a new nationality. Despite the fact that the country we lived in offered some enormous advantages over our own, there was no doubt in our minds that changing our nationality wasn’t an option. We were born Indian and would die Indian.
Some of Rachna’s reasons paralleled mine. For both of us, our decisions were based on what could be called a mix of nationalism and patriotism. George Orwell, the British writer and humanist, has an interesting way of differentiating between the two. He wrote in an essay entitled Notes on Nationalism, published in 1945: “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people…Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his individuality.” Others have defined nationalism a little differently but basically it was why we decided to stick with the passport with the gilt-embossed Ashoka Chakra.
As I was writing this essay, I was reminded of the things that went through my mind that wintry evening almost a decade ago. In sum, my decision was based on a sense of belonging to a larger community, both real and imagined, that I had inherited when I was born. This community had nothing to do with caste, creed, region, language, but rather all of these and more. It had to do with memories of my grandmother’s sari, the softest garment I had ever touched (the softness of her sari was because my maternal grandparents led a middle-class life in small-town India with no frills. My grandmother only possessed a few cotton saris that had been washed often; this lent the material an extraordinary delicacy); the feeling of joy when, as students, we received news of the defeat of Indira Gandhi after the dark days of the Emergency; the sadness that enveloped us when we heard of the demolition of the Babri Masjid; the exhilaration we felt when MS Dhoni hit the winning six to seal India’s victory in the World Cup; the great sense of satisfaction I felt when I read and published Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy or P Sainath’s wrenching stories about India’s poorest districts; the awe I felt when I first glimpsed the most beautiful lake in the world, the Pangong Tso, in Ladakh. Underpinning all this was, of course, the decades of learning and doing, the friends, the family, the shared history and heritage.
As with the good stuff so with the bad. The anger I felt over all the things that bothered me was keener when they had to do with India than any other place on earth. No other country could provide that feeling of belonging. That was my nationalism; it was the sense that I was an integral part of something much larger than myself which no one could take away from me, not now or ever. It was a concept, it was a tangible reality, and in its most abstract form it included every Indian, known and unknown, in the best possible way.
It is this nationalism that is under siege today.
It is this nationalism that certain extremely motivated people are seeking to make exclusionary and cast in a mould of their own discriminatory making that will segregate us all into superior Indians or second-class Indians, those who belong and those who don’t. These elements are seeking to subvert the rights guaranteed to every citizen under the Constitution and are attempting to redefine the very essence of India. If they succeed in their efforts, they will destroy the country we love, the only India we have ever known.
Today, some of the important questions we need to ask ourselves are as follows: 1) What sort of India do we want? 2) What sort of Indians do we want to be? and 3) What sort of country are we going to leave behind for future generations?
Nearly eighty years ago, during an intervention in the Bombay legislature, Dr BR Ambedkar made a statement that answers these questions. He said: “…I do not believe there is any place in this country for any particular culture, whether it is a Hindu culture, or a Muhammadan culture or a Kanarese culture or a Gujarati culture. There are things we cannot deny, but they are not to be cultivated as advantages, they are to be treated as disadvantages, as something which divides our loyalty and takes away from us our common goal. That common goal is the building up of the feeling that we are all Indians. I do not like what some people say, that we are Indians first and Hindus afterwards or Muslims afterwards. I am not satisfied with that…I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians…’
These are words that are as relevant today as in 1938 when they were first spoken. We ignore them at our peril.
This essay has been adapted from the author’s foreword to the book On Nationalism, by Romila Thapar, A. G. Noorani and Sadanand Menon, Aleph Book Company.
