The makings of a second republic?

By Amitabh Ranjan

When the Prime Minister of India, sporting a longish white beard in saffron vestments, prostrated himself in Ayodhya on August 5 this year and was part of the bhoomi-pujan to consecrate the ground on which a magnificent Ram temple will come up, with State assistance and on the ruins of a 500-year-old mosque which was brought down in full public view, the message was never meant to be subtle. Many have rushed to suggest that the battle of preserving what Rabindranath Tagore termed as the ‘idea of India’ has been lost.

Notwithstanding an apex court order as the culmination of a long-drawn legal battle, many commentators have believed that the Modi government has already inaugurated a ‘Second Republic’ by upending the key assumptions of the first. The event that came in the backdrop of nullifying Articles 370 and 35A; enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law for the first time making religion as the marker of its raison d’etre; and an attempt to go ahead with the National Register of Citizens, was seen as the final nail in the crucifixion of the long-cherished ideal of unity in diversity.

Shashi Tharoor’s latest among his copious offerings, The Battle of Belonging, runs through six sections and 38 chapters and revolves around one key concept—what is India’s collective imagination, and also, what it should be. The question is: Who we are? This is one existential debate that is on top of the mind of most Indians.

For the author, the Indian nationhood and challenges to it today are not abstract intellectual concepts for academic debates about nationalism. They have critical implications for the everyday lives of millions of Indians.

The range of scholarship that Tharoor offers and his delineations of key ideas are superbly impressive. The book is not something that the reader should pick up and finish in one sitting. Not even two, or three. It should be read minutely, and reflected upon.

Setting the tone for the debate, Tharoor at the outset discusses seemingly similar concepts of patriotism and nationalism. Similar, because the Hindutva brigade would have you believe that. With the kind of clarity few can match, the author tells you how patriotism is more inclusive than nationalism and more in consonance with Indian pluralism.

He then identifies nine categories of nationalism and zeroes in on two, which together provide the point of reference for the larger debate—civic nationalism versus ethno-religious nationalism.

Originating from the teachings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the former is driven not by political legitimacy determined by ethnicity, religion, language, culture or any of the immutable trappings that people acquire from birth, but from the consent and active participation of their citizens, as free members of a democratic polity.

The second has a number of subsets and variants—linguistic, cultural, territorial, religious, revolutionary and civilisational. While this inheres in the body, civic nationalism inheres in the mind. Today, with the ascent of a ‘Hindu-Hindutva-Hindustan’ sentiment in the ruling circles, the country’s nationalism is being forced to change into a combination of religious, linguistic and cultural nationalism.

In the attempt to realise the vision of Savarkar and other Hindutva ideologues, the edifice of ethno-religious nationalism is being relentlessly constructed in the Modi government’s second term. This is in stark contrast to the civic nationalism that India’s Constitution makers, all of them colossus public figures, expected us follow.

The tell-tale signs are frightening. In his essay, Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco identifies 14 common factors of fascism. Eco says these factors are all to be found to a greater or lesser degree in ‘Eternal Fascism’ and the world must be vigilant whenever they arise. “The green shoots of every one of the factors in his list, alas, have begun to sprout in India”, particularly in Modi 2.0.

But the ideal we have cherished since we gave ourselves a guiding tome to build a nascent nation, unparalleled in its novelty and span to preserve its age-old traditions, can’t be so fragile as to wither away under the Hindutva juggernaut that we have witnessed in the past six years, especially drunk as it is of an unprecedented majority in its second term in the only State-preserved temple that this country should have—the Parliament.

The author says in the epilogue, this book is a call to action by those who see the merits of civic nationalism, to rise to defend it against the repressive depredations of those who wish to set the clock back to an ancient era that, in fact, never existed outside their fevered imaginations.

As KS Komireddi says in his book Malevolent Republic, unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

Komireddi ends the book with a verse from the poet Abdul Hayee who wrote under the name of Sahir Ludhianvi who, in an audacious act of reclamation, left Pakistan to live in India. It will have the right resonance in the context of Tharoor’s book. The English translation runs like this:

“That time is past, that epoch is bygone,

When there was the clamour of two nations;

From this land are gone the people whose dream was segregation;

Now all Indians are one, now all Indians are one.”

If we don’t pay heed to Sahir, there will be no trace of India in the not too distant future. That question mark in the headline will become infructuous.

(A former journalist, Amitabh Ranjan teaches at Patna Women’s College. Views expressed our personal.)

The Battle Of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, And What It Means To Be Indian

Shashi Tharoor

Aleph

Pp 462, Rs 799