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

by Shashi Tharoor

The top 1 per cent of the global population came to own half the world’s wealth, while the bottom 70 per cent had less than 3 per cent. With the Great Recession that began in 2008–09 and political convulsions in a number of countries, what Metcalf calls ‘the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America’4 was the result, as was rising ethnonationalism, populist authoritarianism, and illiberal democracy in a slew of countries. As Metcalf puts it, ‘There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.’5

neoliberalism’s pretensions of universalism and over-idealization of the market ignored the deep inequality that existed between and within nations: ‘Applied as a broad, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing impoverished and traumatised post-Soviet and postcolonial nations (as well as increasingly multicultural countries in the west, with complicated histories of their own), neoliberalism couldn’t help but be disastrous for many people.’6

The predictable backlash took two forms: economic and cultural. The economic backlash was straightforward. The poor and the unemployed in the developed world began to feel that they had no stake in the globalized system, and demanded to know why their governments’ policies benefited people in faraway lands like China and India with what used to be their jobs. They wanted to reduce the growing inequality in every ‘developed’ economy and go back to the security of older, more familiar economic ways, in which each generation assumed they would earn more and live better than their parents did. The cultural backlash derived from the same resentment but expressed itself in a different arena: the political denunciation of global trade led to hostility towards foreigners, as more and more people sought the comforts of traditional identity and ways of life. Rage was expressed against the ‘alchemical brew served up in the name of progress—liberal politics, theologies of social emancipation, technocrats, trade agreements, multiculturalism’.10

‘the masses easily adapt to the new narratives of their victimhood’—this translated into a rejection of the entire brew—cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and secularism in the name of cultural rootedness, religious or ethnic identity and nationalist authenticity.11

Today’s populism is arguably an updated form of the same yearning for simplicity (and simplistic answers) on the part of ‘the people’ threatened by the complexities of globalization. This explained both nationalism and xenophobia, both Brexit and the Hungarians sealing their borders, both Hindutva in India and the rise of Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Very often, diasporas preserve ideas, practices, beliefs, and rituals long after they have faded away or been transformed in their original homelands—

The idea of nationalism, to my mind, is essentially divisible into those forms of nationalism that are changeless (like ethnicity and the rest) and those where the sense of nationhood inheres in institutions, practices, and systems enshrined in a Constitution and reaffirmed regularly through a democratic vote. Whereas ethnic nationhood inheres in the body, civic nationalism appeals to the mind; it is a nationalism of constitutions and institutions you respect, rather than identities you are born into.

‘We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.’ The role of a common culture in cementing national identity is almost matched by the role of nationalism in promoting a common culture. It took the existence of Italy to create an Italian people, as opposed to Piedmontese, Venetians, Sicilians, and the like. The two forces are often mutually self-reinforcing.

Marxists have long argued that imperialism was merely the highest form of capitalism, using conquest to drive the creation of ever-larger markets, and consolidating dominance abroad in order to extract resources through the plunder of the colonies for the benefit of capitalists in metropolitan capitals.

‘The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in [nationalistic] ideologies,’ Eric Hobsbawm has argued. ‘If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented…. The past legitimizes. The past gives a more glorious background to a present that does not have much to show for itself.’

As the Turkish scholar Umut Özkirimli asks: ‘To what extent is a reconstructed and reinterpreted past the same past? When we speak of the collective memories of the people, which people and whose memories are we talking about?’

Gellner famously defined nationalism as ‘a political doctrine which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’.65 This, in turn, prompts the proposition that nationalism is, and requires, a form of homogenization, something that poses a specific challenge, as we shall see, to a diverse society like India.

The Serbian writer Aleksandar Hemon has described his horror at watching his childhood friend and companion turn into a Serbian nationalist full of racist and fascist fantasies; Hemon writes that his friend was beyond the reach of any rational appeal, and that, despite all the shared assumptions of their youth, he himself stopped trying to reason with him, so primordial was the man’s ethnonationalism.67

‘the narcissism of minor differences’;

Freud showed that small differences between people were heightened, magnified, and weaponized, particularly when these people are actually quite similar or inhabit spaces close to one another; he argued that the more similar or closely related groups of people were, the more likely they would be to amplify their small differences. Freud concluded that this was likely to be reflected in one group’s pathological self-love (narcissism) for itself and its dislike and loathing of ‘the other’ group that was similar but different from one’s own, leading often to violence against the other.

As the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has observed, the success of the nation-state was derived from its establishing relations of solidarity between the citizens as its basis, rather than the old feudal or monarchical allegiances. But, Habermas goes on to point out, ‘this republican achievement is endangered when, conversely, the integrative force of the nation of citizens is traced back to the pre-political fact of a quasi-natural people, that is, to something independent of and prior to the political opinion—and will-formation—of the citizens themselves’.69 The evocation of the past can thus be both a cementing factor in nationalism and one that undermines it—an important insight, as we shall see, in the context of contemporary India.

Nations, Renan argued in his canonical lecture, were constituted by a constantly renewed act of self-determination of their citizens.

According to the British scholar Frederick Hertz, writing in 1943 at the peak of World War II, national aspirations are composed of four elements: a striving for national unity, a striving for national freedom, a striving for separateness, distinctiveness, individuality, originality, or peculiarity, and a striving for distinction among nations. Hertz considered this last element, the striving for distinction among nations, to be the strongest of all four aspirations and to underlie them all—but as he conceded, ‘the striving for distinction among nations, for honour, dignity, prestige and influence easily becomes a striving for domination’.76 This is a concern that recurs repeatedly in the study of nationalism.

This is key: where patriotism can celebrate the individual as a constituent of the country whose love the patriot expresses, nationalism tends to suppress the individual by exalting the nation above any of its constituents. It rests on the premise that the individual is subordinate to the nation and that his loyalty and devotion to the nation-state must surpass any other interests he has, either as an individual or as a member of a group within the nation. Indeed, terms like ‘national integrity’ and ‘national power’ reflected both the totalizing tendency of nationalism and its irresistible desire to increase its power and strength in perpetuity through the mechanism of the state, as in Mussolini’s statement quoted earlier.

To sum up the essential differences between the two, whereas patriotism is about acceptance, coexistence, human values, and love of a country for its own sake, nationalism is about unity, power, prestige, pride, and strength in relation to others. It combines both tribal notions of group loyalty and a nativist xenophobia that rejects those who are deemed inferior and inadmissible into the primordial group.

The French leader Charles de Gaulle said memorably:

‘Patriotism is when love of your country comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.’

‘Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.’100

The ‘us–them’ syndrome is cultivated, of which the first step is ‘de-individualization’, in which people of a different ethno-national background are no longer seen as individuals, but rather as members of a broader, undifferentiated stereotype. If a society is lucky the syndrome stops there, as it has so far in India; if not, it descends to the second step, of dehumanization, reducing the other to non-human status and no longer entitled to basic human considerations of decency, respect, or even (as with Hitler and the Jews) life. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama dubs as megalothymia (‘a new word with ancient Greek roots’) this desire to be recognized as superior to other people, and adds that ‘nationalism represents a transmutation of the megalothymia of earlier ages into a more modern and democratic form’.103

‘The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.’

‘I am not against this nation or that nation, but against the idea of the nation itself.’

Scholars across a vast literature have identified five major elements in nationalism: the yearning for national unity (and even uniformity), the requirement of exclusive loyalty, the striving for national (rather than individual) freedom, the aspiration for exclusiveness and distinctiveness, and the quest for honour and prestige among nations. This last is where the biggest problem lies, for this quest for honour and prestige easily becomes an urge for domination. When a nation’s dignity requires the defeat of others, when your honour is seen through the need to assert your superiority to others, nationalism can easily degenerate into chauvinism, belligerence, and the rejection of coexistence.

‘I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty,’ said the great constitutionalist Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, ‘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.’121

‘The true nationalist must therefore become a true internationalist in order to avoid the peril of the impoverishment and destruction of his nation.’123

As the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno wrote: ‘An emancipated society...would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.’ He conceived of ‘the better state’ as ‘one in which people could be different without fear’.127 Such

‘The nostalgia of Brexit and Make America Great Again is exactly an appeal to the consoling idea (for some white people) that the moral failures of the past are, in fact, the triumphs we once thought they were.’137

In most, perhaps all, countries that I am aware of, loyalty is defined in law only negatively. All constitutional provisions and statute books define disloyalty: treason, sedition, espionage, sabotage, and related crimes are proscribed and punishable by law. But loyalty to the nation is not itself defined, and the failure to adhere to some invisible, and indivisible, code of nationalism is not illegal. For the ethnonationalists to suggest it is illegitimate gives rise to new sources of tension that militate against the classic nationalist project of national integration.

For now, let me stress that the idea of India as a modern nation based on a certain conception of human rights and citizenship, vigorously backed by due process of law, and equality before law, is a relatively recent and strikingly modern idea. Earlier conceptions of India drew their inspiration from mythology and theology. The modern idea of India, despite the mystical influence of Tagore, and the spiritual and moral influences of Gandhiji, is a robustly secular and legal construct based upon the vision and intellect of our founding fathers, notably (in alphabetical order!) Ambedkar, Nehru, and Patel.

Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history. Pluralism and inclusiveness have long marked the essence of India.

My experiences and encounters in my constituency remind me daily that India is home to more Christians than Australia and nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan. That is the India I lay claim to.

Country alone can be the basis for nationality, not religion. Unfortunately in India religion has been identified with nationality. That is how the country came to be partitioned. The question now is whether you will try to eradicate this mentality or by your actions foster and lend support to the very mentality of which the ‘two-nation’ theory was the fruit?151

Against the narcissism of minor differences, in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. To stand Michael Ignatieff’s memorable phrase on its head, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

So Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of what I have dubbed an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy under the rule of law.

The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for over seventy years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

Constitutions are (and Ambedkar explicitly made this point) tools to control and restrain state power. The challenge lies in reconciling restrictions on state power with popular rule—to prevent temporary majorities (since in a democracy, a majority is temporary, though some people forget that) from completely undoing what the Constitution has provided.

The struggle for Indian independence was after all not simply a struggle for freedom from alien rule. It was a shift away from an administration of law and order centred on imperial despotism. Thus was born the idea of ‘constitutional morality’, meaning ‘the commitment to constitutional means, to its processes and structures, alongside a commitment to free speech, scrutiny of public action [and] legal limitations on the exercise of power’. This was how freedom was intended to flourish in India.

‘My countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.’164

This fundamental difference of opinion—whether people are Hindus or Muslims first, or Indians first—continues to haunt our politics today.

The nationalist movement was divided between two sets of ideas, that held by those who saw religious identity as the determinant of their nationhood, and those who believed in an inclusive India for everyone, irrespective of faith, where rights were guaranteed to individuals rather than to religious communities. The former became the idea of Pakistan, the latter the idea of India. Pakistan was created as a state with a dominant religion, a state that discriminates against its minorities and denies them equal rights. But India never accepted the logic that had partitioned the country: our freedom struggle was for all, and the newly independent India would also be for all.

‘Alienness’ has to do with interests. Alienness is certainly not concerned with white or black skin. Alienness is not concerned with religion. Alienness is not concerned with trade or profession. I do not consider him an alien who wishes to make an arrangement whereby that country in which he has to live, his children have to live and his future generations have to live, may see good days and be benefitted. He may not perhaps go with me to the same temple to pray to God, perhaps there may be no intermarriage and inter-dining between him and me. All these are minor questions. But, if a man is exerting himself for the good of India, and takes measures in that direction, I do not consider him an alien.177

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.

As Ambedkar had stated: ‘If nationalism means the worship of the ancient past—the discarding of everything that is not local in origin and colour—then [we] cannot accept nationalism as [our] creed. [We] cannot allow the living faith of the dead to become the dead faith of the living.’222

Even as they have driven the economy into the doldrums, long before COVID-19 made its appearance (and provided them with an excuse and a smokescreen to cover up their failures on the economic front), the present ruling dispensation has become, in their own phrase, a tukde-tukde gang (a force that seeks to cut India into pieces). They are dividing this country into tukdes: Hindus versus Muslims; Deshdrohis versus Deshbhakts; Raamzaade versus something unprintable; Hindi speakers versus non-Hindi speakers; Us versus Them. It is bad enough that Prime Minister Modi forgets our history. It would be far worse if he leads the country down a path that repeats it.

Advocates of Hindutva like Savarkar, and sages like Sri Aurobindo, enthusiastically embraced the concept of Bharat Mata, much to the dismay of the broad-minded Tagore, and the scholarly Ambedkar.

But Mahatma Gandhi never used the idea of Bharat Mata in his nationalist messaging, and Rabindranath Tagore openly sought to restrain the Bharat Mata cult.