Nation unmasked

Certainly he is not the abiding image of this decade. Look back and you see how the politics of hate, the philosophy of revenge, was struck out of the national text by men who had realised the inevitability of co-existence. When in the heart of Europe ethnicity rewrote the concept of national identity, it was a moment of reckoning for an entire continent’s civilisational smugness. Barbed wire and graveyards became the signposts of national self-determination. But Bosnia and Kosovo, despite the bombs and body count, came out of the ethnic war without the banner of `Hell is the other’ Bosnia, Middle East, Ireland, Chechnya… no, it was not the end of history. But it was not the end of the world either, for war-fatigued men, at the end of itall, realised the redundancy of adversity, sought out the uses of reason. The nation survived the rage of the nationalist.

The nation survived the scripturally manufactured God also. The problem is always with the votary, not with nationalism or religion. And India is destined to triumph the rage of the masked man.

After all, the statement of the 90s India was about the resilience of the national spirit. And it was more than that subterranean statement from Pokharan. Uranian may not have enriched Indian nationalism. The Indian, permanently let down by the politician, put his faith in the realism of his nation, which he believed could not be undone by the worst of the politician. He saw the party of national liberation falling apart in the absence of fresh oxygen. The vital centre of Indian polity today belongs to no singular redeemer: the triumphant nationalist party has become a facilitator of cohabitation. To be fair, the party is not exclusively subordinated to the Hindu adjective. In a confidentnation of diffident politicians, the idea of nationhood is the eternal survivor. No masked man can change the script.