By presenting her arrest in Hubli as an irreconcilable clash between an Indian’s natural love for the national flag and the inauthentic Indianness of an Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, Uma Bharati and the BJP have yet again put the issue of Indian nationhood and citizenship on the agenda. Being Italian, say the Hindu nationalists, Sonia Gandhi can never be a true Indian. It follows that she cannot possibly love the tiranga tricolour the way India-born Uma Bharati can.
Underlying the Hindu nationalist position is a fundamental confusion, which needs to be straightened out. How does one define an Indian? Is an Indian citizen, even if born outside India, not Indian? Are millions of NRIs, ethnically Indian but citizens of other lands, really Indian?
On how a citizen is defined, there are two models available. Some nations are based on what is called the principle of jus solis soil; others on jus sanguinis blood. These ideal types are not perfectly realised anywhere. The best real-world examples of the first are France and the US; typical illustrations of the second would be Germany and Japan. Nationhood in the first model is defined in terms of a set of principles: liberty, equality and fraternity in France, and the five principles of the Declaration of Inde-pendence — liberty, equality, individualism, democracy and the rule of law — in the US. Anyone can be “French” or “American”, including, of course, ethnic Indians, so long as they demonstrably subscribe to these principles. Naturalisation is relatively easy in these countries. In the Olympic teams of France and US, naturalised citizens belonging to all sorts of races are present by the dozen.
The second model does not allow easy naturalisation, but lets ethnicity be the decisive, often only, factor in citizenship. Those born to ethnically German parents anywhere in the world can become German citizens without any difficulty, even if they have lost German as their language. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many ethnic Germans, who had lived there and come to speak Russian as their first language, migrated to Germany and became German citizens. In contrast, millions of Turks, living in Germany since the 1960s, including a large proportion born in Germany, are still “guest workers”. Only a small fraction have been allowed German citizenship. Japan has a roughly similar idea driving its nationhood and citizenship.
By celebrating and courting Indians who are citizens of other countries through the Pravaasi Divas, among other things, and unleashing political venom on Sonia Gandhi, who has been an Indian citizen since 1984-5 and has lived in the country longer, the Hindu nationalists are taking Indian nationhood in the jus sanguinis direction. Unlike them, the great leaders of the Indian freedom struggle — Mahatma Gandhi in particular — never defined the nation ethnically. Rather, they gave Indianness a cultural definition: those who accepted Indian culture, including foreigners, were welcome to be Indians. In Hind Swaraj, he argued that even Englishmen could be Indians so long as they accepted Indian culture as their own. “It is not necessary for us,” he said, “to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianised, we can accommodate them.” Extending the argument further and commenting on the relationship of the various religious groups to Indian nationhood, he also wrote: “If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in a dreamland. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsis and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen.” By the Mahatma’s definition, Sonia Gandhi is only ethnically Italian, but culturally Indian.
Ethnicity on the one hand and culture and nationhood on the other need to be conceptually distinguished. By accepting Indian ethos, making a family in India and living in the country, Sonia Gandhi has become an Indian in spirit and culture. Her ethnicity, as in the Franco-American model of nationhood and citizenship, has become irrelevant to a discussion of her culture and nationality. Indeed, by not only plunging in the political process but also campaigning in elections, she has passed a deeper test of citizenship: political participation. By Gandhian reasoning, she is both culturally and politically Indian. It should be noted that India’s constituent assembly, after a vigorous debate marked by some dissent, accepted the Gandhian idea of citizenship. An argument was made that Indians in South and East Africa had to be citizens of their adopted countries, not of India. There was a demand that they be given Indian citizenship.
None of what I have said above should be construed to argue contemporary India should be indifferent to NRIs. Thanks to globalisation and advances in communic-ation technology, the first decade of the 21st century is not the same as the 1950s. Frequent contact with the ancestral homeland is possible, and diasporas are today assets to many countries. In the highly competitive Western environments, the resounding professional and economic success of NRIs, many born and educated in India, is understandably a matter of pride in India. If they are willing to contribute to the lands they came from, there is every reason to embrace their goodwill, ideas, resources and energy. It will not only be unpragmatic but an utter folly to do otherwise.
But what’s a matter of defensible pragmatism should not be turned into an overarching principle. At the very least, NRIs are no more Indian than Sonia Gandhi is. In fact, they may be considerably less so. Despite strong ties, they have neither lived in India nor made a career there, nor on the whole have they campaigned in electoral politics. Only a purely ethnic definition of India would make them more authentic Indians.
Luckily, neither in India’s Constitution nor in the freedom struggle was India defined ethnically. Nor, for the matter, has India been a stranger to migrants over the many centuries of its history. By questioning Sonia Gandhi’s Indianness, Uma Bharati and the Hindu nationalists are getting India’s history, culture and Constitution remarkably wrong.
The writer is professor of political science, University of Michigan
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