By Sondip Bhattacharya
The senior BJP leader, L.K. Advani, in Deendayal Upadhyay Memorial lecture, tried to define Indian ethos and nationalism practised by his party in its two avatars-the Jan Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party. Does he mean that before the birth of the Jan Sangh in 1952, the principal national party-the Indian National Congress-didn’t have any idea what nationalism is all about.
The history of the Congress party is history of revival of Indian nationalism, nurtured by the sacrifice of millions of known and unknown patriots. If Mahatma Gandhi gave a concrete shape to it, it was left to Jawaharlal Nehru to see it blossom.
Earlier, positive image of nationalism, and hence an ardent emphasis on national unity, was inspired by the leadership of the generations gone by through immense sacrifices. An apocryphal story about Rajiv Gandhi’s election campaigns sums up the situation very pithily. A voter asked about his ethnic identity is said to have answered that he belonged to an insignificant minority-namely, Indians.
Loyalties, idealism, the willingness to die for a cause, all these are far from absent in our public life today. In fact, death risked, and sometimes deliberately courted in confrontations over public issues has become too common a phenomenon to excite even our curiosity. Only the daily sacrifice of lives we read about with glazed eyes is not in any cause which concerns all of us in this country. The multiple public passions blazing all over the territory are not the real issues. In the process, nationalism has become the first casualty.
Political leadership in the recent past has found nationalism something of an embarrassment. Its voice is too strident to be consistent with sober rationality or even good taste. Western historians have told us that the “freedom fight”-a mildly ludicrous Indianism-was a fairly transparent cover for a very different type of struggle, for jobs, status and seats in legislature. Judging from the political conduct of the second and third generation leadership, they were not very wide of the mark.
Judging by the contrast between rhetoric and practice since the ’60s, many of us have come to accept implicitly this thesis as true. In Europe, while nationalism epitomised in de Gaulle’s quest for la gloire for his France, remains very much a living force, its 19th century romantic legitimacy was lost through two world wars and the perversities of its most aggressive expression in imperialism. Struggles against colonial rule in the name of nationalism are conceded a measure of respect by liberals and radicals, though right-wing social scientists have interpreted these as crude imitations of a western ideology.
In India, there is a new radical critique of nationalism which is increasingly being identified with a centrist etatism based on the class alliance of vested interests. For instance, the new economic policy, in essence, will give birth to a new class of people ignoring the basic needs of the masses. The Mandal mantra has sharply divided the nation. The tensions built up in the recent past are tearing apart our polity in the name of caste and creed.
If terrorism in Kashmir, Punjab (in 1990s) and the northeast has raised its ugly head, it is, in some sense, largely because of the unresolved issue of Centre-state relations. A redistribution of power between the Centre and the states will prevent the threatened unity. If one’s perception-that we are passing through a deep crisis, that the dangerous decades are at last here-is correct, then there is a desperate need for re-examination of issues confronting the nation.
Every country invests an enormous amount of resources on propaganda in times of war with a view to boosting morale. In the heat of the battle the individual soldier has the choice between efforts to save his skin or fight without concern for his personal safety. The choice he makes is known to affect the outcome. Arguably, we have reached a moment in our history where we are faced with a comparable choice: commitments to defend our nationhood, if need be, at all costs or let the forces which threaten our fragile unity take over.
The alternative is not a peaceful redistribution of power in favour of “natural communities” or the somewhat less natural linguistic states, but either an anaemic national life dominated by mindless self-interest and criminalised politics or the unthinkable prospect of endless conflicts between communities and the state.
Nationalism is an uncouth, rude and often ugly manifestation of the human spirit. But at this point in our history we need it badly as an over-arching ideology. The bargaining for shares of the cake would have to be worked out within its boundaries. And that holds for the worthier aspirations of warring communities and social classes as well.
Contrary to the unstated assumptions of our political leadership, there will not be a great deal of social justice left to dispense if our nation state, iniquitous in many ways, were to dissolve. No one has a crystal ball to look into to predict our future. At the moment, an upsurge of passionate nationalism does not appear to be even a tiny speck on a remote horizon. But, to repeat, the alternative is horrendous beyond belief. INAV