Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: On Emergency and nationalism, a debate that blinds us to the future

Take the debate over Indian nationalism. What work is it doing in our present context? Its primary function now seems to be boundary-setting: To distinguish the “good” from the “bad” nationalism. But the assumption that we must all operate within the horizon of nationalism remains unchallenged. The frame persists: Are you the right kind or the wrong kind? This framework, however, only reinforces the grip of nationalism on our political imagination.

There are three dangers in this enterprise — two historical and one ethical. First, as political diagnosis, this project is fraught. There is no easy mapping of morally good ideas onto virtuous political outcomes. “Good” nationalisms have often carried their own blind spots — and left their own corpses. “Bad” ones have tapped into suppressed histories. It is wishful thinking to believe that fixing nationalism will resolve our political crises.

Second, the search in the past often fails to properly historicise the past. To put it bluntly: We cannot build a future by relying perpetually on the crutches of whichever figure we admire — Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, B R Ambedkar, Ram Manohar Lohia. They did their own thinking, made their own judgements, acknowledged their own limitations. We can draw from them, even think with them. But they cannot substitute for thinking now, in and for our moment. In any case, we must ask: Are the debates we are having the ones the next generation ought to inherit? Much of our nostalgia is for “roads not taken”. But those roads are closed not merely due to ideological error. Their closure demands deeper diagnoses of present transformations.

But the ethical worry is this. Take the dozens of important issues which divide us, everything from free speech to the nature of our development to our geopolitical environment. The problem with the idea that we somehow need to get the nature of our nationalism right before we tackle these issues is that it morally obscures what it is at stake. Rather than fixing good and bad nationalism, let us talk directly about the issues and values at stake. How will the “right” nationalism give an answer to the question: What are the boundaries of free speech? How do we combat practices of discrimination that still exist? How do we defend a free society? Should personal laws be allowed? How do we create a sustainable, inclusive, vigorous growth model? The more nationalism, good or bad, colonises our imagination, the more obscure our answers to these questions become. Fixing the right kind of nationalism is not just irrelevant, it has become a dangerous form of diversion, producing a performative politics on all sides.

As far as I can see, there is only one question to which the nationalism debate might be relevant. This is the communal question, the place of minorities in India, an imagining of India where all communities with their histories have a place. But even there, it is morally obfuscating to mediate the debate through the category of nationalism. There are two simple ethical principles at stake: No member of any community should be targeted simply for being who they are, anywhere. We should not care what “nationalism” this principle fits into. If this principle does not move you, the right kind of nationalism is beside the point. And second, we need a conversation about the values on which our social contract will be founded. Do we imagine India as a zone of freedom, where each citizen is protected, from both state and community power to the maximum extent possible? And do we create the material conditions for citizens to effectively exercise this freedom? If we embrace these moral principles and objectives, the issue of communalism goes away. The more we tie ourselves in knots over finding the right kind of nationalism, the more values will get obscured by historical debates.

The Emergency was a dark episode in Indian history. It raises profound issues of accountability. But has not most of our public discussion on the Emergency been, not an act of historical reckoning, but a diversion from the present? The BJP’s use of it is politically understandable. It simply uses it to exonerate itself from creating a regime of poisonous and insidious control that will, in the long term, prove even more damaging. But even for non-BJP folks, the recourse to the Emergency now functions as a kind of psychological exoneration to passivity. All sides are guilty. Saying that authoritarianism is one of those cyclical things has become a way of escaping the gravity of the present.

All societies have relied on a usable past, something that both secures continuity in time and can be a source of pride, as a way of being in the world. But only if you have a future horizon can you construct a usable past. What is disquieting about this moment is the sense of a loss of the future. Yes, we hear of Viksit Bharat 2047 — a technocratic dream built of roads and metrics — but this is a future shorn of moral imagination, obsessed still with the past. But the ideological response to that has also been to play on the terrain of the past. It is telling that the one patriotic song that now seems completely out of time, as it were, with no resonance at all, is “Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat purani, naye daur me likhenge milkar nayi kahani.” This is truly ironic for a country whose population is so young. It is doubly galling that in an era of economic, technological and moral change on such a planetary scale, we still want to remain stuck in the Seventies. The past, indeed, increases, as the future recedes.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express