On an Air India flight from Delhi to Mumbai last week, I heard an announcement that puzzled me because it was so out of place. I cannot remember the exact words, but the gist was that the Indian Constitution was born on January 26, 1950, and that it was after this that Indians had been guaranteed democracy and fundamental rights. Why did we need to be told this on a flight? What kind of absurdity was this? When I asked myself these questions, I realised that I had come upon yet another example of the neo-nationalism that has sadly come to define India now. Here, let me confess that I have a distaste for those who feel the need to wear their nationalism or patriotism as badges of honour. Too many people do these days, and I have not met one who was not a big fat bore.
For a while now, I have been meaning to discuss in this space the difference between real patriotism and pseudo-nationalism. Since this column appears today on India’s 75th Republic Day, I believe the time is right for such a conversation. In my view, examining the absurdities and dangers of neo-nationalism has become necessary because too much aggressive, angry nationalism is being passed off today as patriotism. It is not. There are many differences of which, in my view, the biggest difference is that patriotism cannot be weaponised and nationalism most certainly can and has been.
In recent years, it has not just been weaponised but become enmeshed with Hindutva and been used to target Muslims to the point that their patriotism has been questioned in a noxious, ugly way. No real patriot would question the patriotism of another simply because his faith is different to his own, but today’s neo-nationalists do not hesitate to do this. Nor do they hesitate to declare openly that in their view Muslims cannot be true patriots because their religion comes from elsewhere and their sacred places are in another country.
As someone who is old enough to remember an older, gentler India and those older Republic Day parades in that first decade after Independence, I would like to say that something vital and wonderful has been destroyed by weaponised nationalism. That first decade was a time when everyone who lived in Delhi could come and watch the parade. I remember that in my childhood we used to walk to it, armed with picnic baskets filled with hot drinks and hot parathas, and, because it was nearly always rainy and cold, we would be clad in our warmest clothes. I do not remember if there were VIP enclosures then, but I do remember that if we arrived early enough, we would get seats not far from the Prime Minister.
What is more important is that it was a time when everyone was a patriot and real nationalism (not the pseudo kind) was seen as something that had helped India win freedom from our colonial masters. Nobody made any distinction between who was a patriot and who was not because it would have been considered extremely rude. Since then, much has changed, and it has changed for the worse. India has in far too many ways become a harder country than it used to be because of the rise of neo-nationalism. When did this start to happen?
There are political pundits of my acquaintance who believe that this happened after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. I remember that it was a bit earlier and it had everything to do with religion. It is hard to say whether it was political Islam or reckless politicians that encouraged religious Hindus to start setting off on ‘yatras’ for one reason or another. Nearly always, these religious excursions left Hindu-Muslim riots in their wake. And it was not just Hindu politicians who were responsible but Muslim politicians as well.
Today, our problem is neo-nationalists who mix aggressive Hindutva with aggressive nationalism causing a sickness that has seeped like poison into the veins of India. These neo-nationalists are people who think nothing of killing men they suspect of killing cows. And they think nothing of openly denigrating everything that they associate with Islam. It is not just semi-literate thugs who have become victims of neo-nationalism. There are senior ministers in the Modi government who are rabid neo-nationalists and who do not hesitate to make clear that they think all Muslims are bad people.
What I personally find deeply repugnant is that educated, supposedly civilized, Indians have also become victims of neo-nationalism. In fine hotels and elegant drawing rooms in Delhi and Mumbai, I seem constantly to run into people who do not hesitate to admit that they believe Muslims and Islam are the root cause of all the problems in the world. In Delhi, the same people who in an older time took pleasure in listening to Urdu poetry, now speak of how it is important to rid Hindi of all words that came to us from Arabic or Persian. The more idiotic among these believe that Urdu is a foreign language that came to us with Islamic invaders.
All of this has quite simply gone too far. It is time for our political leaders to be held to account for the damage they have done and to remind them that spreading poison may win a few elections, but it is destroying India.
