Whew! All is not lost. The future seems safe in the hands of student leaders like Kanhaiya Kumar.
Whew! All is not lost. The future seems safe in the hands of student leaders like Kanhaiya Kumar. Charged as an anti-national on the basis of doctored videos and behind bars for three weeks, the blockbuster speech he delivered on his return to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus and his extremely sensible, intelligent and morally correct views make him the hero that the country needs right now.
Meanwhile, let’s sort out who an anti-national is. Right now, anyone can be called an anti-national, by anyone, for anything at all. I am half expecting my six-year-old to call me an anti-national if I switch from a mindless cartoon channel to a mindless news channel. So who exactly is an anti-national Since doctored videos, fake tweets, rabble-rousing anchors, ludicrous leaders and poetic judges didn’t help, I went to the source: the dictionary. The Oxford dictionary said an anti-national was one who was “opposed to national interests or nationalism”. Not very helpful, this. Rabindranath Tagore has taught me to be very suspicious of the idea of nationalism, in fact, of the very concept of a nation. So where does a non-believer like me begin
At the dictionary again. What exactly does “nation” mean “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory.” The word comes from the Latin natio, which is from the verb nasci, meaning “born”. Okay, so by this definition, are we a nation First, are we connected by birth Are we of “common descent”
Certainly not, don’t be foolish. We are a country of the sons of Ram, of course (some daughters too, but they hardly count). But then there are the sons of Babar. Then there are the Christians and sundry others, I forget what. The rest is all of us, children of Ram. Er, well, almost. Psst! There are others too, who can’t be the children of Ram, no, of course, not, chhi! But I can’t quite recall where these low caste chaps sprouted from... Dalits have a very different bloodline. What The tribal lot I am not sure, really, but not from Ram, no. They have always been around, you know. Tribals are as old as the hills and forests.
Clearly, we are not all of common descent. Second: are we of common history Recent history, yes. But not the long, faraway history that informs our folklore and myths. There the north differs from the south, the west differs from the east, mainland India from the islands and mainstream India from the Northeast and tribal India. I’m afraid we can’t say we are of common history — though we do share histories.
Third, do we have one common culture Sadly, we have failed miserably in this department. God knows we tried, but the roots of these Indian cultures are too strong, their plurality impossible to smooth out. And what a host of races, ethnicities, tribes, regions, religions we have — oof! — each with their own cultural traditions. So no, we do not have one common culture. We remain distressingly multicultural.
Fourth, do all of us inhabiting our state speak the same language You must be joking! There are almost 800 languages in India, of which 24 are officially accepted as strong, literary languages. How can such a country speak in one tongue
So how can a country that does not meet any requirement of nationhood claim to be a nation And if we are not a nation, how can anyone be anti-national
Nationalism stems from an imagined, unbreakable bond that we in India never really had. It is a contrived idea that cannot contain our effusive, multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilinguistic, multireligious, multicaste motherland. Fortunately, you don’t need nationalism to love your country or be loyal to it.
A century ago, in 1917, Tagore had rejected the idea of a nation because it attempted to make a whole population into a mechanical, soulless organisation that can only serve political purposes. It obscures our humanity and makes “the moral man, the complete man” into “the man of limited purpose”. It forces actions and behaviour patterns on us, overrules our conscience and makes us less human. “This nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil,” he said. Thirty years before India became free, Tagore told the West: “You who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism...” Besides, India was too diverse to be one nation. He takes caste: “Have we an instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to mingle their blood shed their blood for one another except by coercion or for mercenary purposes ”
Not much has changed in a hundred years. Does the dalit and the upper caste man who can kill him for harming a cow have equal ownership of this nation Do the farmers who kill themselves when they can’t pay back a bank loan of a few thousands share the same nation as the rich corporates who have loans worth crores waived Do the tribals of Bastar who routinely face looting and rape by security forces, have no access to justice and have any protest silenced by fake encounters, severe sexual brutality or other police atrocities live in the same nation as Mumbai’s glitterati
Our realities are starkly different. Delhi’s view of the nation is very different from the view from the Northeast. In the saffron nation, Nathuram Godse is a hero, Afzal Guru a terrorist. In the non-saffron nation the killer of the Mahatma is no hero, just a murderer. In Kashmir’s nation Guru is not a terrorist but a victim of judicial murder. In the saffron nation, Mr Kumar can be jailed as an anti-national just for being at a rally where unidentified people shouted objectionable slogans, but Kuldeep Varshney, the saffron leader who offers on TV and Facebook a reward of Rs 5 lakh for cutting off Mr Kumar’s tongue, roams free, untouched by cops.
If we do want one nation we need to go by one fundamental reality and belief system. We need to go by the Constitution. Not sidestep it ever for reasons of politics, economy, tradition or custom. As long as we don’t doggedly accept the Constitution as our primal truth, we cannot be a nation. Except as a nation of anti-nationals.
The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com
