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

by Shashi Tharoor

In 1937, he wrote to Congress president Subhash Chandra Bose, a fellow Bengali, protesting against a proposal to declare ‘Vande Mataram’ as India’s national anthem: ‘The core of [V]ande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it...no Mussulman can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as “Swadesh”…. The novel Ananda Math is a work of literature, and so the song is appropriate in it. But parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song cannot be appropriate.’233 This was why the Congress took the inoffensive first two stanzas as the ‘national song’ and consciously expunged the rest from its official repertoire.

Since Bharat Mata involved personifying the nation as a goddess, as Tagore affirmed, the concept was troubling to many orthodox Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians who found the idea offensive to, or at least incompatible with, their own monotheisms. In promoting this idea of Indian nationhood, which privileged one religion, the BJP had yet again launched an assault on the basic ethos of Indian democracy, which recognizes the nation’s diversity. As the eminent lawyer and commentator A. G. Noorani put it: ‘When the upstarts of the BJP tell us that it is “anti-national” not to proclaim it, it is because they do not bear loyalty to Indian nationalism, but to Hindu nationalism or Hindutva.’237

Between the ‘civic’ nationalist notion of Indian diversity (which Salman Rushdie celebrated as ‘mongrelization’)240 and the Hindutvavadi’s insistence on ‘authentic’ Indian culture—narrowly interpreted, and uncontaminated by colonial influence or Ganga–Jamuni hybridity—there lies a chasm. Our nationalist heroes created a nation built on an ideal of pluralism and freedom: we have given passports to their dreams. The BJP, with its insistence on the chanting of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, would sadly reduce the soaring generosity of their founding vision to the petty bigotry of majoritarian chauvinism.

Ambedkar had addressed the subject of majoritarianism in a famous speech on 4 November 1948: To diehards who have developed a kind of fanaticism against minority protection, I would like to say two things. One is that minorities are an explosive force which, if it erupts, can blow up the whole fabric of the State. The history of Europe bears ample and appalling testimony to this fact. The other is that the minorities in India have agreed to place their existence in the hands of the majority…. They have loyally accepted the rule of the majority, which is basically a communal majority and not a political majority. It is for the majority to realise its duty not to discriminate against minorities.243

Prime Minister Modi’s great hero, Sardar Patel, had urged in the Constituent Assembly on 25 May 1949: ‘It is for us who happen to be in a majority to think about what the minorities feel, and how we in their position would feel if we are treated in the manner they are treated.’244

As the past is used by some to haunt the present, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, as the Mexican Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. The Kashmiri–Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote perceptively: ‘My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.’ As I asserted in the last words of my novel Riot, history is not a web woven with innocent hands.

This, Jaffrelot adds, ‘is what populists are so good at across the world: to help elite groups which are losing ground to resist new, emerging social forces by delegitimising socio-economic factors of politicisation.’259

Nonetheless, it is instructive to note how many of the fourteen common factors of what Umberto Eco describes as ‘Eternal Fascism’ seem to resonate with relevance when applied to the second-term Modi regime in India.

cult of traditionalism,

rejection of mo...

cult of action

a fear of difference

appeal to a frustrated middle class

external enemy

see enemies simultaneously as omnipotent and weak,

rejection of ...

contempt for ...

cult of h...

hyper masc...

selective po...

heavy usage of ‘newspeak’

As Umberto Eco says, these factors are all to be found to a greater or lesser degree in Ur-Fascism, and the world must be vigilant whenever they arise. The green shoots of every one of the elements in his list, alas, have begun to sprout in India.

In the words of the legal analyst Gautam Bhatia, ‘ex-Chief Justice Gogoi oversaw a drift from a Rights Court to an Executive Court.

‘To drive every Muslim from India...would mean war and eternal ruin for the country. If such a suicidal policy is followed, it would spell the ruin of...Hinduism in the Union. Good alone can beget good. Love breeds love. As for revenge, it behooves man to leave the evil-doer in God’s hands…. The idea that India should only belong to Hindus is wrong. That way lies destruction.’327

We have fought the good fight about Kashmir on the field of battle...(and)...in many a chancellery of the world and in the United Nations, but, above all, we have fought this fight in the hearts and minds of men and women of that State of Jammu and Kashmir. Because, ultimately—I say this with all deference to this Parliament—the decision will be made in the hearts and minds of the men and women of Kashmir; neither in this Parliament, nor in the United Nations nor by anybody else.338

To the Hindutvavadi, nationalism cannot be non-violent because in order to succeed it needs to be coercive and destructive of enemies, and when it succeeds it is expressed through the apparatus of the state, which has a monopoly over violence.

‘Anekantavada’—the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently by different people from their own different points of view, and that therefore, no single perception can constitute the complete truth.

For me, as a Congressman and a liberal, I find it easy to claim allegiance to Hinduism—a religion that is personal and individualistic, privileges the individual, and does not subordinate one to a collectivity; a religion that grants complete freedom to the believer to find his or her own answers to the true meaning of life; a religion that offers a wide range of choice in religious practice, even in regard to the nature and form of the formless God; a religion that places great emphasis on one’s mind, and values one’s capacity for reflection, intellectual enquiry, and self-study; a religion that distances itself from dogma and holy writ, that is minimally prescriptive, and yet offers an abundance of options, spiritual and philosophical texts, and social and cultural practices to choose from. These are not the qualities admired by the advocates of Hindutva. In a world where resistance to authority is growing, Hinduism imposes no authorities; in a world of networked individuals, Hinduism proposes no institutional hierarchies; in a world of open-source information sharing, Hinduism accepts all paths as equally valid. In every case, Hindutva asserts the opposite. Given these qualities of the Hindu religion, I, and others like me, profess, I would say to the troubled liberal: don’t lose faith. Hindu Congressmen have nothing to do with the Hindutva that you rightly abhor. Our faith remains true to the tolerant, liberal heart of the religion that has made India, till recently, t...

Rather, secularism meant, in the Indian tradition, a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state, which (in Amartya Sen’s words) preserved an ‘equidistance’ from, and an ‘equal symmetry’ of treatment of, all religions.

BJP politicians like Rajnath Singh and Adityanath have argued that Indian governments cannot observe dharma-nirpekshata but should follow the precept of panth-nirpekshata (not favouring any particular sect or faith). In this, they are not far removed from my argument—which I have made for several years before my entry into Indian politics—that ‘secularism’ is a misnomer in the Indian context of profuse religiosity, and what we should be talking about is ‘pluralism’. I believe the roots of India’s pluralism can be found in the Hindu philosophy of acceptance of difference: Ekam Sat; viprah bahudha vadanti. There is One Truth; the sages call it by different names.

Tagore said, ‘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.’

Ramachandra Guha identified three personal traits in Modi that, in his view, explained the prime minister’s failures in office: a deep suspicion of experts and expertise, the building up of a cult of personality around him to mask his own insecurities, and his ‘Sanghi’ communal bigotry.

Guha cited several examples of Modi’s errors (ones already mentioned in this book) and concluded that ‘his own megalomania, his own suspicion of experts, his own reluctance to share credit, and his own inability to transcend the sectarian ideology that he embraced as a young man’ were squarely to blame for them.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it: What has the prime minister reduced leadership to? Instead of confronting reality, deny it; instead of encouraging criticism, suppress it; instead of socially mediating differences, exacerbate them; instead of taking responsibility, take the credit and pawn the blame; instead of appropriate empathy, revel in a kind of cruelty; and instead of preparing the nation for challenges, constantly trap it in diversions…. His leadership has been totally missing. What has been put in its place is a politics of illusion we have all too easily internalised. India is heading into uncharted waters with no leadership at the helm, just the simulacra of one.402

Mehta adds: ‘We are back to a barbarism where crowds threaten to strip you to ascertain if you have a right to any civic standing. The purpose is to strip us of all the decencies of ordinary humanity; the only thing that matters will be the identity that can be inscribed on your body.’404

The Law will not protect you because it is compromised, the Court will not be a countervailing power to the executive because it is supine, and Judges will not empower you because they are diminished men.’408

ideology wholesale. As Mehta observed of Indian business, ‘It is having to devote all its capital, political funding, philanthropic commitment, media ownership, and even its symbolic capital, to the BJP and RSS…. No opposition, political or in civil society, can now count on that kind of material support.’411

We have pointed to the dangers of the BJP’s brand of Hindu nationalism, in particular the marginalization of minorities, especially Muslims, with the attendant risks of the radicalization of sections of that community; and the sidelining of the non-Hindi heartland, with the risk of growing disaffection in the southern states. Both these developments fundamentally threaten the nationhood nurtured by the nationalist movement against the British and sustained over more than seven decades of Indian democracy.

In Mehta’s words, India’s pluralism is a fact, not a solution. True enough; but in the acknowledgement of that fact lies the only viable possibility of a solution.

Majoritarianism, he concludes, is the natural outgrowth of a culture that fails to think beyond majority and minority: ‘If we care about freedom all kinds of identities will flourish. If we insist on circumscribing identities, neither identities nor freedom will flourish.’

Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud has argued that ‘a commitment to pluralism did not imply non-interference where group practices hinder the constitutional vision of an equal citizenship premised on equal dignity, worth and liberty of every individual’.447 In other words, group rights exist, but the court can and does intervene to uphold individual rights when these are compromised by one’s group. The challenge in Indian nationalism has always been that of finding ways of acknowledging and accommodating difference.

To my mind, this quest for balance between group and individual rights entails one thing: to reaffirm, and to fight for, India’s endangered civic nationalism, in the face of the determined effort to replace it with an ethno-religious nationalism as India’s ruling credo.

the India of tomorrow will only flourish if it resists the undermining of its strengths by a rampant Hindu nationalism, strengthens its civic institutions, and shores up its liberal democracy. That is the challenge that awaits India in the twenty-first century.

In fact, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta fittingly asked: ‘How did this fantasy of hope, painted in the colours of a nation marching to one tune and one purpose, completely blanket out the actual republic of fear?’454

majority vote, or ‘the supremacy of mere numbers’, Hitler argued then, ‘is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy…. Thus, democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people’s true values.’457

As Nehru said of Hindu fundamentalism and its adherents, after Gandhiji’s assassination: ‘We must face this poison, we must root out this poison, and we must face all the perils that encompass us, and face them not madly or badly, but rather in the way that our beloved teacher taught us to face them.’461

Both kinds of patriotism, local and national, taken together, safeguarded in the Constitution and coexisting in fraternity with others, preserve the pluralist essence of the idea of India.

‘The integrated Indian,’ he wrote, ‘is the one who regards India and everything in India as belonging to every Indian.’476

‘unity in diversity’ the most hallowed of independent India’s self-defining slogans. It is that unity we seek, not uniformity; it is consensus we must pursue, not conformity.

To restate the basic premise of the book, and that which gives it its title, the battle of belonging in our country is a battle between two ideas—the idea of a civic nationhood of pluralism and institutions that protect our diversity and individual freedoms, pitted against the ethno-religious nationalism of the Hindu rashtra.