Political Hurdle to Indian Nationalism

The raise of Narendra Modi in the Indian political firmament has brought to the fore the debate on nationalism and anti-nationalism, like never before, and that too with a rare patriotic fervor. With the unfolding events in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, it’s as if the ‘secular’ left and the ‘Hindu’ right have drawn battle lines for what could be a decisive ideological war on the Indian patriotic front. 

While the hitherto ideologically muzzled majority is shrill over the campus ranting of ‘bharat ki barbaadi’ as an anti-national activity, the religiously-rooted minorities, backed by high-decibel left-liberals, have come to articulate that ‘Afzal teri katil zindahai’ sloganeering is just an instance of ‘free speech’, that too enshrined in the constitution. Contrast this with the universal taboo on Nazi symbolisms that ironically include the Hindu Swastika, imaginatively ‘tilted’ by Adolf Hitler for artistic effect. And all this is so long after our British colonial masters had granted us the right to breathe our own ‘fresh’ air.

If Gandhi’s Congress, in the main, conceived a social structure for free India, mainly it’s Nehru, who had designed and built our political edifice. And if a dwelling turns out to be unwieldy for living in it, blame the intellect of architect for it, but if it develops cracks, shouldn’t the builder be brought to book? And it’s a double jeopardy for India that not only the premise of the design was unrealistic but the material of construction was unsound. Before going into the genesis of our patriotic paradox, it is imperative to understand what nationalism is all about and who is an anti-national for that matter. The dictionary defines nationalism as the spirit or aspirations common to the whole of a nation and an anti national as the one who is opposed to national interests or nationalism.

Name it Bharat that is India or Ila Varta or Arya Varta, this ancient land had all along been a nation of nations as parts of it were kingdoms with distinctive political boundaries though culturally unified. That was before foreign forces came to set up their sultanates. Though the entry of the Afghans and the Turks did not sunder the land, the Islamic surge they occasioned had culturally divided the people, eventually resulting in the country’s partition for the Muslim accommodation. Add to it the British mischief that left it to the rajahs and sultans to take their fiefdoms whichever way they wanted, so to say, nipped the evolution of Indian nationalism in its bud. While an ailing Sardar’s patriotic energies were consumed in creating an Indian political entity, he died before he could infuse a national unity into it. But sadly for India, Nehru messed up Patel’s unfinished job.

What with the Muslim classes having left for Pakistan, leaving behind the Islamic masses, the supercilious Nehru took it upon himself to play the role of an unsolicited Mullah. Be that as it may, had he energized himself to improve their economic plight and rationalize their fundamentalist mindset, as he tried in case of the Hindu majority, he would have served India well. But instead, he took the easy route (the lazy man) to humour them by catering to their religious instincts and separatist psyche, thereby keeping them away from the Indian nationalist mainstream. And beginning with his daughter, Indira, as the unscrupulous politicians in the cow belt saw the electoral dividends catering to the Muslim religious sentiments fetched, never mind its inimical impact on the community at large, more so its women folks, vote bank politics took deep roots to ruin the nation that, any way, was never in the making.

The sum and substance of this political zero sum game is that it not only hinders the entry of the Musalman into the national mainstream but also stymies his personal well-being through ghettoized thinking. That Muslims should fall prey to this Machiavellian deception packaged as secularism for electoral consumption is the bane of the Indian democracy. It’s thus; the cynical secularism of the self-serving politicians that won’t allow us to inculcate the spirit and aspirations common to us as the citizens of the whole of India is the hurdle to our nationalism.

      

Irony of India’s un-nationalism

That 9/11 in 2001, when some of the 44 passengers aboard the Al Qaeda-hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 came to know about the carnage of the World Trade Center through their cell-phones, realizing that their lives would soon end in the debris of some notable building, maybe the White House itself, they had conveyed to the callers their intent to unnerve the hijackers to avert further damage to their nation, only to perish in the process shortly thereafter.  

But three years earlier, when the Indian Airlines Flight 814 was hijacked by Islamic militants to Kandahar in 12/1999, the families of its 178 passengers managed to build the public opinion for their trade off with terrorists jailed in Indian prisons, which eventually pushed the government in that direction. Whatever might have been the on-board mood of the passengers-in-captivity, the symphony of joy played out at their family reunions carried no jarring note of it having come at the cost of their nation’s well-being!

This piece though is not about the America’s exemplary sense of nationalism, but is all about the Indian non-nationalism.

India’s left-oriented historians and the Nehru-mould intellectuals would rather have it that never was India a nation before the British colonized it into one, albeit before its partition. Nothing is farther from the truth for from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari and from Kandahar to Comilla, it had been the Hindu tradition to begin a prayer or ritual with the ‘jambu dweepe, bharata varshe bharata khande’ sankalpa that further contains the applicable sub-geographical location, the on-going yuga, the current  year etc. Wonder how this vital fact of Aryavarta is lost on all those who scoff at the Hindu nationalism as the said sankalpa reverberates in every nook and corner of our India that is Bharat every day, even these days.

The idea of India, devoid of a nationalist urge, even after it became a free nation, after two millennia of subjugation, was ironically shaped by the very leadership that was instrumental in helping it gain freedom! Given this abnormality, the question that naturally arises is why and how so, but before answering the same, it is relevant to observe the fascinating proposition of Ms. Maryam Jameelah that “If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen.” (Islam and Orientalism, Adam Publishers, New Delhi). Indeed, it is ironical that Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s homeland for the Indian Musalmans, was later vivisected by the Bengali Muslims to cater to their cultural separateness though within the Islamic fold.

When the entire case for India’s partition was built by the Muslims, solely upon the incompatibility of their Islamic faith with the Hindu beliefs, logically speaking, post-partition, there was no case for any Muslim to remain in the parent country. Yet, as if to showcase Hindu pluralistic ethos or to win the world acclaim, and or both, our leaders of that era were not averse to letting the wiling Musalmans to stay put in India. Well, it can be argued that all Muslims were not enamored of a separate homeland, but yet, after the partition of the land on religious fault-lines, they had lost the rights of tenancy, derived from the virtue of ancestry, legally as well as morally that is.

Whatever, they were allowed to stay back in numbers to form a substantial Muslim minority amidst India’s Hindu majority, and sadly for both, instead of ironing the incompatibilities of their alien faith with the Hindu beliefs, the raison d’être of the partition, for the harmonization of the country’s communal amity, Nehru strived to nurture the Islamic sense of separateness among India’s formidable minority. One often wonders that but for Dr. BR Ambedkar, whether Gandhi, Nehru et al, well-educated all, had an idea of what Islam is all about – its supremacist and separatist ethos, its animosity to the people of other faiths, its insatiable urge to make it a Muslim world by means of procreation, conversion and coercion, its concept of Muslim Brotherhood that’s at odds with nationalistic impulses, and such fissiparous doctrines. Moreover, their refusal to amalgamate with the non-Islamic societies they happen to live is akin to their being merely tenets on lease devoid of any stake in or an emotional attachment with it. Given their Islamic naivety on constant exhibition, needless to say, the Hindu intellectuals of our generation fare no better in a critical appraisal of the world’s fastest growing religion with an avowed intent to imperil every other faith (interested may access my free ebook, ‘Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife’, through Google).

Since nationalism is anathema to Islam, so as to spare the Muslims from such an irreligious suffering, it was only proper for the Indian State to dent the Hindu nationalistic ethos, exemplified by their ‘jambu dweepe, bharata varshe bharata khande’ sankalpa, so might have thought Nehru, the alter ego of Gandhi, who was silly enough to aver that Hindus should smilingly face death if Muslims were to kill them, and acted besides. But if he had a long-term vision, he would have clearly envisaged the possibility of Hindu-Muslim amity brought about by shared national ethos for Hindu nationalism was non-intrusive, and at that point of time the Muslims would have been more amenable to that idea than ever before or ever after. While his mentor dented the resurgent national impulses being cultivated by Subhas Bose in the bud, Nehru made India miss the nationalist bus, probably forever. What’s worse, when his daughter, Indira, saw the electoral benefits accruing to her dynasty from the sectarian strategy, she fine-tuned it to form Muslim Vote-Banks all across the country, which, in time, became the edifices of the secular ‘idea of India’.

The cumulative effect of this peculiar aversion to nationalism (name another nation on earth, whose citizens are devoid of nationalist impulses) in time became the cause of India’s undoing in every conceivable way. While the nationalistic void was insensibly filled by caste and communal bondage to India’s democratic detriment, the lack of nationalist ethos fomented the nation-destructing art of self-aggrandizement, leaving the moral fabric of our society in tatters. The widespread corruption that plagues our country exemplifies the near total absence of nationalistic feeling in our society for as graft hurts a country, it’s an anti-national activity. Nothing illustrates the baneful affects of India’s non-nationalistic character than the congenital lethargy in its government offices and the dismal failure of its public sector enterprises. The grand success of Bharat Atomic Research Centre and Indian Space Research Organization and the dismal failure of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited would underscore the beneficial outcomes even in the public sector, when driven by nationalist commitment.