How much Indian I am? – The Relevance of National Feeling today

By Rev. Johnson M John

It was during my college days I overcame the illusions created by my 3^rd Grade – Social Science classroom where, Ms. Hema Philip Viswasam, who hails from Tirunelvely in Tamil Nadu taught ‘Indian States’. For us she is a Tamilian, who belong to the Seventh Day Adventist church, a wife of a Naga, who blends saree,’ mullappo’, Idli-Sambar with Western Church music and Pork delicacies.  In her class she taught the Panorama of Indian states where most of us felt awe and wonder towards our ‘Myriad’ India. But the whole effigy was shattered into pieces when one of our room-mates said “ Iam a zou and I belong to Zou-land”. The pieces were later crushed to dust when the other class-mate told me “ We belong to Bodo-land”. Though they are sewn into the fabric of India both identities continue to live with a feeling of ‘illegitimate’ knots in the whole fabric. The quest for national feeling began there. How much Indian Iam?  It was increased when the German wife of my dear friend, a Christian Priest epitomized the ethos of a ‘Syrian Christian Kochamma’. It haunted me when the ‘Lebanese Muslim’ husband of my cousin started enjoying ‘Red-Fish curry’ with tears in his eyes.

Is there anything called Indianness? How much Indian am I? What makes me an Indian? What are the factors that determine my Indianness? – The questions at the base of our national feeling go on.

Nationalism and National Feeling – National feeling is closely related to ideology. An ideology can be defined as a comprehensive and mutually consistent set of ideas by which a social group makes sense of the world^[i]. The concept of national feeling and interests emerged with the evolution and arrival of nation states in the world scene during the modern period of world history. National feeling draws its ethos from the cultural history and moral heritage of the state. National feeling helped in the evolution of nationalist movements which often targeted the foreign elements in its vicinity. Indian nationalist movements got accelerated impetus at the colonial canon. Nationalism in India has come as an activity opposed to the colonial rule and it moved towards the expulsion of the colonial power and gaining independence.

Nationalism implies the coalescing of smaller groups into a larger inclusive identity that incorporates the lesser ones. The coalescing includes that of the territories of the smaller groups. It refers itself back to a shared history of all those that constitute the nation^[ii]. Indian national feeling gave birth to the ‘Secular Democratic Nationalism’ at the dawn of our Independence. It was ideologically inclusive of castes, color, gender, creed etc. Thus Aryan blended with Dravidian; Saurashtrian sat with Angami in the Parliament; Topo studied with Aiyengar; Kaur shared the same meal of Masih from Indian Railways Catering Services; Ms. Cherian nursed Choudhary in AIIMS. The credentials of our “Secular Democratic Nationalism” continue.

But India has been described as a land of stark contradictions. There is a rich India and the poor India; urban India and rural India. But perhaps nothing beats the schizophrenic dissonance between ‘ideating’ India and ‘implementation’ India^[iii]. Though our secular democratic credentials loom large before our eyes, the erosion that has happened to these values is at an alarming phase.  The recent decades of Indian history has witnessed an array of events that has been doing large scale damage to our democratic and secular ideals. Those events pose the real challenges in defining our ‘Indianness’. A deeper understanding of these challenges and our timely response to these is the need of the hour.

1. Legitimization of communalism – The recent demand by the communal forces for scraping the word ‘secular’ from the preamble of Constitution of India reminds us how communal we have become over the years. Over the years the electoral politics and other forces in India succeeded in making our localities and spheres communal than ever before. Religious communal organizations have appropriated the label of nationalisms – thus gave birth to Hindu, Muslim and Sikh nationalisms. Though they are not nationalisms, but fundamentalist exclusive religious identities, they are now referred to as nationalisms. Thus Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League have been masqueraded as nationalist movements. When nationalism is reduced to identity politics and priority is given to a religious community, those who are outside the ‘community’ become the ‘other’ and consequently discarded from the society.
2. Pandora’s box of Electoral Politics – Individual and factional ambition and the greed and calculated fickleness that it engenders, has played its part in colouring electoral politics in India^[iv]. Electoral politics has been diminished to   populism rather than implementation of democratic principles. Rather than ensuring equality and justice, electoral politics is more concerned in recent years to woo the emotional and popular religious sentiments of people. If we, as a voter, examine the composition of NDA, its ideological coherence becomes evident. BJP, Shiv-sena, Shiromani Akali Dal, Asom Gana Parishad are natural ideological allies as their politics is based on a common premise: the belief that religious minorities should be hegemonic in their home territories.  The two issues that are burning our electoral politics over the past two decades are the building of Ram temple on the ruins of Babri mosque and the extension of reserved quotas to Other Backward Classes on the strength of the recommendation made by the Mandal Commission.
3. Stereotyped Identities – It’s a high time to doubt whether the government apparatuses themselves are stereotyping identities of communities, organizations and religions.  The NGOs that uncover the government failures has been labeled as Anti-national, evident from the concerns raised by MHA against Green Peace India. A couple of years back some terror suspects caught by Mumbai police were taken to the media covering their faces with fresh Keffiyeh – red-white head-gear worn by middle-eastern men was the epitome of stereotyping. Recent years, the vocabulary of illicit, illegal and unauthorized have become synonyms intended to criminalize religious and linguistic minorities. Muslim is used as a synonym to anti-national by the Hindutva forces, as they themselves identify as the ‘majority community’. Worse is the regional minorities’ concern. The typical chauvinist Indian man perceive a North-Eastern girl as the object of his sexual tantrums.
4. Terrorizing the Other – Hostility has grown in our land over the years, whether it is govt sponsored or religion – validated. People of this land live as they are refugees. Voice of dissent is often responded with iron wrists and armed forces. Disagreement is treated as traitorous. Dalits, Adivasis live in no-man’s land. Fake-encounters are on rise than ever before.  Being soft is seen as week. A conscious attempt is made by forces to portray ‘the other’ as anti-national, anti-social, illegal and immoral. The uprising of naxal-movements should be read in these lines. Living cultures of living communities has been hijacked by the dominant systems, though this make no sense at all, as culture relates itself to social groups and their self-expression.
5. Global Players – We cannot close our eyes towards the global changes happening. The changing gender roles, sexual equations, class movements, peoples’ movements, economic contours are to be addressed locally. Our decision makers have become more distracted by the irrelevant and inappropriate.  Indian national interests have been diminished to the interests of a handful of business tycoons. Whether it is FDI or Arms procurement our systems have become puppets in the hand of a few global players.
6. Religiousity Vs. Spirituality. Religiousity is different from religion. The end purpose of religiousity is seldom worship per se, but is more often the means of demonstrating wealth and power. Religiousity binds the gullible with superstitions and ensnares them with the false promises of fake-gurus thriving on media attention and magnanimous donations.  These days ‘entrepreneurial holy men’ have become the stalwarts of our democracy and spirituality. One has only to see what Hindutva and the sangh parivar has done to Hinduism, what the Taliban and ISIS have done to Islam, what the supporters of Khalistan have done to Sikhism, and what the Goa Inquisition has done to the local catholics.

At this juncture,  where a ‘Culture of the Sepulchre’^[v] is propogated, the aam aadmi cannot afford to be silent and numb. We can no-longer afford to ignore the strong symbiotic relationship between the afore-said concerns and our national feeling. We cannot shelter ourselves and our children from the real face of India anymore. We need to be open to the heritage that our nation has owned from the dawn of civilization. Our heritage is not restricted to hidebound relics; rather it is a living history in which we partake everyday of our lives.^[vi] At mid night on 15^th August 1947, independent India was born as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed ‘ a tryst with destiny – a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends and the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance’.^[vii] The national identity is born out of a blend of complex concerns and eternal wisdom.

We have to address the paradoxes in our everyday lives by participating and struggling forward. The recent movie ‘piku’ depicts young woman who moves on different planes simultaneously, addressing mundane with the spiritual with equal gusto. Our identity is a complex phenomenon, which has to be evolved consciously and jointly, addressing different issues, confronting a myriad of realities, dreaming the wild-ecstasies and living together with people of living cultures. The recent challenges to my national feeling accelerate me to my greater ‘roles’ in this country.