The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, And What it Means to Be Indian

by Shashi Tharoor

Inspired by the example of Nazi Germany, Golwalkar had appalling ideas on how ‘foreigners’ should be dealt with. As he regarded Muslims, Christians, and communists as ‘hostile elements within the country’ who posed ‘a far greater menace to national security than aggressors from outside’, if they refused to convert or submit, he intimated, they would have to be purged—forced to ‘quit the country at the sweet will of the national race’.207 It is difficult to translate this kind of language in contemporary terms, except to draw invidious parallels—such as some have drawn between the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, (CAA), and the proposed National Register of Citizens, on the one hand, and Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, on the other. The Nazis restricted German citizenship only to those who had been granted citizenship papers by the Third Reich; the BJP government of Narendra Modi proposed to do something similar. That, in many ways, sums up the alternative idea of India on offer.