Pseudo Nationalists AND Indian Nationalism
Suresh Kodoor
The wind of Nationalism has once
again been blowing across the political horizon over last couple of years since
the rightist’s elevation to the power in India.
Earlier instance when nationalism was in the thick of things was during
the freedom struggle, spearheaded and orchestrated by the national movement. This
time, however, it comes across more like a farcical and uncalled repetition.
The difference is, then, it was genuine and driven by a need to forge unity
among people around a national cause while now, it is pseudo in character and
content and mischievous and divisive in the underlying motivation. These days,
we are being constantly asked by various quarters that we keep proving our
nationalism and publicly demonstrate our patriotism by showing respect to
various national symbols, including national anthem. Nationalism has suddenly
become a topic of utmost importance and unfortunately even some of the constitutional
institutions have overcome by the jingoistic fervor filled in the atmosphere,
deliberately created and kindled by the ultra-nationalists since Modi-led BJP
government came to the power at the center.
The irony is that it is the pseudo
nationalists, who could claim absolutely no role whatsoever in the Indian
national movement and India’s freedom struggle, who are at the forefront of the
drive now, acting as the self-anointed contractors of nationalism in the
country, having convinced themselves that they have the monopoly to define what
constitutes nationalism. Nationalism has
in fact become an excuse for the rightists to hound and silence everyone,
including intellectuals, students, writers and activists, subscribing to an ‘idea
of India’ that differs from that of their own. Their intolerance has reached
its intolerable high, starting from enforcing what people should or should not eat
to the authoritarian interference in the matters of federal states, dictating
who and how the states be ruled and even resorting to defaming the states who don’t
fall in line. The rightists are trying
to reduce the question of nationalism to a simplistic binary where only those
who chant ‘bharat mata ki jai’ are nationals while all others, even if they use
any synonyms to this new-found so called national symbol, are anti-nationals.
Our founding fathers would be
dejected and heart-broken if they had witnessed today the ongoing severely skewed
debate on nationalism and the growing attack on free expression and right to
live. This is certainly not the liberal and democratic India they envisaged.
For instance, as we insist today on the national anthem being played in the
movie halls and mandate people to stand up as a reaffirmation of allegiance to
Indian nationalism; it would be interesting to recall what the very man who
penned our national anthem thought of the idea of nationalism. Throughout his
life, In fact, Tagore remained deeply
critical of nationalism. He said, “I am willing to serve my country; but my
worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my
country as a god is to bring a curse upon it”. Placing humanity over patriotism,
he said “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is
humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never
allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live”. The architects of
our nation were indeed wary of the dangers of overplaying nationalism. Nationality
is only one of the forms of how we organize ourselves. These forms kept
changing and we do not know what would be the new form that may emerge couple
of generations ahead. But, humanity is a virtue that makes us humans. Triumphs
of Humanity over any other entities of identity is essential for our survival
as a human race and in our constant thrive to form better and better civilized
societies. And, look at the state we are in today where the pseudo nationalists
are roaming freely being hell-bent on enforcing their brand of self-destructive
nationalism, by hook or by crook, with the active blessings and support of the
government in power at the center.
To start with, look at the
credentials of those who are in the mission of preaching nationalism to their
fellow citizens. RSS, the motherly coalition of all the right-wing organizations
in India, has never been part of the freedom struggle and neither supported India’s
struggle for independence. Their jingoistic
indulgence and self-positioning as the advocates of nationalism today also stem
from their desperate attempt to hide the fact that the rightwing could boast of
not a single leader worth mentioning who could claim the legacy of freedom
struggle or have participated in the process of nation building. Hence the rightist
attempts to projects figures likes of V.D.Savarkar, the late Hindu Mahasabha
leader and RSS ideologue and Deen Dayal
Upadyay, erstwhile president of Bharateey Jan Sangh, the predecessor of today’s
BJP. They shamelessly try to adopt
legends like Sardar Vallabhai Patel and even Bhagath Singh. The names of Mahatma and Nehru were
conspicuously absent in a booklet listing the names of great leaders of India, published
and distributed to lakhs of students recently in the state of UP by BJP to
celebrate the birth centenary of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Many of the ‘great men’
listed in the booklet have never taken part in the freedom struggle. BJP is
trying to alter the history in order to project some of their right-wing
figures as national heroes.
For instance, V.D.Savarkar, the champion
of Hindutwa ideology in the pre-independent India and the proponent of ‘Hindu
Rashtra’ and the President of Hindu Mahasabha in the 1940s, whom prime minister
Modi declared as the ‘the true son of Mother India and inspiration for many
people’ recently, not only stayed away
from participating in the freedom struggle after the British released him from the
prison following his numerous pleas for mercy, but in fact even collaborated
with the English rulers to whom he had declared his loyalty to thwart the
independence struggle. He was fiercely against the Quit India movement and
asked all the Hindu Mahasabha members to stay away from the struggle and ‘stick
to their posts’. He had weakened the freedom movement by pushing
his Hindutva ideology that deepened the communal divide when the national
movement was trying to forge people’s unity to strengthen the strike against
the colonial rule.
Hardly
a month into the hardships of prison in Dec 1910, Savarkar wrote his first
mercy petition to British authorities, which was rejected in 1911. In his
second mercy petition that he wrote in 1913, he pledged his unconditional
support and loyalty to the British. He wrote;
“Therefore if the government
in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the
staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English
government which is the foremost condition of that progress. I am
ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion
is conscientious (കോണ്ഷ്യാന്ഷിയസ്) so I hope my future conduct would be”
And
indicating his complete surrender to the British authority, he concluded his
letter stating;
“Mighty
alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son
return but to the paternal doors of the Government?”
In
his fourth mercy petition submitted on mar 30, 1920, Savarkar assured British
government that he would stay away from politics in return of his release. He
wrote, “if the Government wants a further security from me then I and my
brother are perfectly willing to give a pledge of not participating in politics
for a definite and reasonable period that the Government would indicate”
Finally,
following many mercy petitions, Savarkar
was shifted to a prison in Ratnagiri in 1921 and later released in 1924,
restricting his movement to within the Ratnagiri district and on the condition
of his non participation in
political activities, which were lifted later in 1937. He went on with his divisive
mission of spreading communal hatred and his hindutwa venom and was even
indicted in Gandhiji’s murder, though was acquitted by the court for lack of
evidence.
The
biography of Savarkar , titled ‘Life of Barrister Savarkar’ written by an
author named ‘Chitragupta’ was published in 1926 while Savarkar was still
alive and it glorified him as ‘Veer’ Savarkar. When the second edition of this
book was published by the publishers much later in 1987, almost two decades
after the death of Savarkar, it was
revealed in the preface of the book that ‘Chitragupta’ was none other than
Savarkar himself. Simply put, it was a
desperate attempt by a defeated man to
self-glorify, disguising his autobiography as a biography written by a third
person.
The RSS-BJP
elements are now trying to project Savarkar as an icon who has contributed
immensely to India’s history on par with other national Heroes, if not more. One can understand their desperation and
agony as their talk about nationalism stands exposed in the glaring light of
their shameful legacy of siding with the British when the whole nation was
rallying behind a movement fighting the colonial rulers. The mega events
organized in 2015 to commemorate Savarkar on his 132nd birth anniversary, where
the Prime Minister Mr. Modi participated, bowing in front of the portrait
of the Hindutva icon, was part of an attempt to build legitimacy for the wrong
legacy of Savarkar.
But, do we
need to get lectures on nationalism from these followers of Savarkar today?
The contrast is so glaring when one compares the mercy
pleading by Savarkar with the inspiring
and courageous words by the great revolutionary Bagath Singh as he wrote to the
British asking to be treated as war prisoners and demanding that he be shot
dead instead of being hanged. His words were;
“…We wanted to point out that according to the verdict of your court we
had waged war and were therefore war prisoners. And we claim to be treated as
such, i.e., we claim to be shot dead instead of to be hanged…” was the words of
a 23 year old sentenced with death-row
Do we want
the followers of Savarkar to define our nationalism or we be led by the
inspiring memories of our national heroes like Bhagath Singh?
For psuedo-nationalists in India,
nationalism is nothing but Hindutwa-Nazism. RSS idealogue M.S.Golwalker never
supported a secular India. He was of the view that Hindus and other non-hindu
religions cannot co-exist in India. He
was a strong proponent of using Nazi model to purge India of non-hindu races. In
the book ‘We or Our Nationhood Defined’, the bible of the Indian rightists, he
wrote
“To keep up the purity of the Race
and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the
Semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.
Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures,
having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole,
a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”.
Golwalker never considered non-hindu population as Indians. In the same
book, he wrote
“The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and
language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must
entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture
... In a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country,
wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights.”
It is this
skewed and dangerous brand of nationalism that RSS and BJP pledge to and trying their best to implement
in our country.
Nationalism is a
construct, not a phenomenon that is time immemorial or naturally evolved, contrary
to what RSS believes. For RSS, as Golwalker suggested in the book ‘Bunch of
Thoughts’, “Since times immemorial, a great and cultured people called
by the name ‘Hindu’ have been living here as the children of this sacred
motherland”. The truth is quite contrary to it. Indian nationalism is
relatively a recent construct, created and evolved as part of the Indian
national movement leading the fight for independence. It is the fight against
British that fuelled and acted as the basis for the formation of Indian
nationalism. As we know, the word
‘Hindu’ itself is the contribution of outsiders and it was used to denote and
refer to the people living in the land of river Sindhu and it had no religious
connotation to it. As ‘S’ becomes ‘H’ in
the Persian dialects, Sindh became Hindh and thus the people living in the land
of Hindh became ‘Hindus’ . There was no notion of a nation ‘India’ until the
emergence of freedom movement. Till then Indian subcontinent consisted of
hundreds of small kingdoms with hugely diverse and unique cultures, languages,
traditions, food habits, myths, and beliefs, rituals , laws, value systems,
currencies and economies etc. That is why Tagore called india as a ‘nation of
nations’. Some of these Kingdoms spanned across today’s India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Afghanistan. There were many large kingdoms known as ‘mahajanapadas’
in ancient India like kamboja, gandhara, panchala, matsya, avanti, magadha,
kashi etc which were all like independent sovereign countries. The people’s allegiance was to their local
rulers or Kings and their ‘nationalism’ as we define today, was determined by
their loyalty to the King and the royal family. People submitted themselves to
the King, not the Kingdom. The Kingdom, the physical entity, never remained
static as the kings and satraps continuously engaged in wars and conquests in
order to expand or defend their empires. Some of the empires extended across
India that the subjects of those empires consisted of people from different
cultures, speaking different languages and following different faiths. Thus, language, cultures or race could not have been
the base of their ‘nationality’ and rather the King was the rallying point that
defined their national identity. And, these Kings fought with each other with
the victorious either merging the conquered the territory to his empire or
looting the wealth and subjugating the defeated Kingdom and the people in there.
Looting and destroying temples were so common in those days as temples acted as
the seat of wealth where Kings kept their treasures. So, when some of the BJP
and RSS leaders want to call Tipu Sultan
a mass murderer today, they must also answer what should they call Great Asoka
who successfully led numerous conquests and killing millions of people,
including close to 2 lakhs people in the Kalinga war. Would they want to say
‘Hindu’ king Ashoka defeated another ‘Hindu’ king of Kalinga and killed those
tens of thousands of ‘Hindus’? In the same coin, shouldn’t Asoka also be called a mass murderer? Or, is it
that BJP reserves the qualification to only Muslim rulers? Where would they
place King Pushyamithra who spearheaded the systematic annihilation of millions
of Buddhist monks by most cruel and violent means and destroyed numerous Buddhist
temples and monarchies? King Sasanka,
the shivite king of bengal, was another bigot in the Indian history who
destroyed Buddhism in India at the behest of Brahmins. He went to the extent of
cutting down the Bodhi tree, where the Buddha had attained enlightenment, and
burned it down. Shouldnt he too be called a mass murderer? Many monasteries and
stupas were destroyed or converted into temples like jagannatha temple at puri
and temple of Madhava in Assam and vishnupada temple at Gaya
The
Budha had challenged the hegemony of vedas and brahminism in India. This put
Brahmins on a course of direct confrontation with Budhism. Brahminical
revivalists resorted to a three-pronged strategy. First, they unleashed a
campaign of hatred and persecution against the Buddhists and eliminated them
physically. Many puranas and texts campaigned against Budhists. Manusmriti
instructed that ‘if a person touches a budhists, he shall purify himself by
having a bath’. Puranas considered it as a grave sin for Brahmins to enter the
house of a Budhist even at the time of great peril. Second, they appropriated
many of the finer aspects of Buddhism into their own system to attract people
on the other side. As Dr.Ambedkar pointed out, adoption of vegetarianism was
part of their strategy to combat Budhism. He said, Brahmins, the biggest beef
eaters once, turned into vegetarians, even against the preaching in Vedas,
imitating Budhists as part of their strategy to diminish the appeal of Budhism.
The cow-vigilantes who want to ban beef eating in the country and keep killing
people for having beef meet should remember that beef meat was a mandatory item
for Brahmins once upon a time. That is why Swamy Vivekananda said, “You will be astonished if I tell you that,
according to the old ceremonials, he is not a good Hindu who does not eat beef.
On certain occasions he must sacrifice a bull and eat it.”. He said “There was
a time in this very India when, without eating beef, no Brahmin could remain a
Brahmin;”. The final step in destroying Buddhism was to propagate the myth that
the Buddha was just another ‘avatar’ of Vishnu. As the Budhism slowly
disappeared from its land of birth not able to withstand the violent onslaught
by Brahminism, the Buddhists got absorbed into the caste system as Shudras and
‘Untouchables’. Dr. Ambedkar has suggested that the ancestors of today’s Dalits
were Buddhists. Many of them later
converted to Islam, Sikhism and Christianity in a quest for liberation from the
Brahminical religion and hegemony. In the RSS scheme of things, none of them
belong to India. As per Golwalker, they are internal threats to India’s
security. He wrote in the book ‘Bunch of Thoughts’, "hostile elements within the country pose a far greater menace to
national security than aggressors from outside" and his three biggest
internal threats of course were Muslims, Christians and the Communists.
We
can not alter history. Neither we can deny it. But, we can learn from history
and we must. Going for ‘correcting’ the mistakes made by earlier generations
that were far behind us in terms of knowledge about the universe, will be
nothing but mocking our own intelligence. The correction process will have no
end and you can not set a start date beyond which the mistakes could be
pardoned. We must accept the happening of history as it is and move ahead and
try not to repeat the mistakes and leave behind a better and harmonious world
for our future generation.
The
concept of nationalism itself is very recent. So, Indian nationalism is not something
that existed since long and neither it is something that we had inherited from
our ancient forefathers. Even a national identity based on language evolved
only during early twentieth century. It was in 1918 that Indian national
congress decided to form regional congress committees based on linguistic
states. These regional sub-nationalisms emerged in the 1900s were not in
conflict with the Indian nationalism that was taking its root along with the
national movement and freedom struggle. They mostly acted as complimentary to the
larger Indian nationalism, with may be very few exceptions. There are various
factors for a nationality to emerge, including a distinct geographical
location, myths and stories about its origin, heroes and legends, language, unique
culture etc and many of these regions and population there in had those
essential ingredients to emerge as sub-nationalisms. Various leaders and movements contributed to
the emergence and consolidation of these sub-nationalities in India during the
20th century. Each of these sub-nationalisms evolved in its own
distinct and unique ways and they posses their own contents and characters
along with deep rooted beliefs, values and cultures. So, India is a coming
together of such very diverse sub-nationalisms, cultures and population, vowing
their allegiance to the larger national entity and voluntarily subordinating
their regional nationalisms to the parental Indian nationalism. Recognising and
acknowledging this diversity is the foundation and core of Indian nationalism.
Any attempt to disrupt or break these sub-nationalisms will disturb the
delicate balance and weaken the fabric of the Indian nationalism, will give
rise to dissents and will sow the seeds of suspicion among different sections. Gandhiji had realised this and he had always
argued for an inclusive approach, bringing all the sections together and taking
them along. The proponents of ‘Hindutva’
are trying to impose an ideology of ‘exclusion’ and ‘elimination’, which will
be extremely detrimental to the existence and survival of the Indian
nationalism. Attempts to impose the cultures, faiths and values of one group on
the other will be against this spirit of togetherness and will be a threat to
our nationalism and to the very Idea of India as a prosperous, civilised,
scientific and secular nation.
Video: https://youtu.be/kTrwC0H6Coc
