All nationalisms have a tendency to manufacture enemies

WE have a new Parliament House for a ‘new’ India. One would have thought that the shift from the older Parliament — the site of glorious history, from the making of the Indian Constitution to Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech and the profound and civilised parliamentary debates often laced with humour — would be marked by an auspicious celebration, such as public commitment to the Preamble to the Constitution. Instead, we witnessed an ugly outburst by the BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri that tarred a fellow MP, Danish Ali, and his community. Two of Bidhuri’s party colleagues laughed when he abused Ali! All conventions of a civilised debate were torn to shreds and flung on the floor of the House.

The easy use of abusive terms in the precincts of Parliament, and the confidence of Bidhuri that he will not be hauled up by his party leadership, offers food for thought. Since when did Indians begin to flourish and luxuriate in the sort of language that members of the ruling party and their supporters use against fellow citizens? We do not have to look far for the answer. Every text has a context, and the context of hate speech is hypernationalism that targets the Muslim community for deeds committed by Mughal rulers centuries ago. This ideology has worked well for the ruling party. This is the tragedy.

The problem is not only right-wing nationalism; it is nationalism, which has been seen by many scholars as a malignant ideology because it is based on selective history. British historian Donald Sassoon writes that the best historians have always been aware of the danger of myth-making. Athenian historian Thucydides wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War: “Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible.” The effect of history in the hands of pseudo-historians, who with scant regard for the tools of the historian — evidence and methodology — write solely for their ideology, is explosive. We can no longer distinguish between myth and history. We become victims of pseudo-historians who, feeding into the party project, become peddlers of hate. This bears out French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire’s belief: “Truly, whosoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.” This brings us to the complex issue of how societies should remember the past. The task of scholars is not to dish out quick sound bites, but to tell us where our societies have come from and where we are headed. Understanding the present requires an understanding of the past. But the past is shaped by the present — the victor’s history, as it were.

In The Invention of Tradition (1983), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger elaborate on the way politicians fabricate traditions to bolster the prestige of their community. They called it the ‘strategy of commemoration’. We have become familiar with these strategies in our times: renaming of roads and cities, construction of gigantic statues to memorialise certain historical figures and the relegation of others to the sidelines of memory, construction of temples, elaborate rituals, the open identification of the leadership with Hindu traditions and symbols, the constant references to 1,000 years of colonialism, and demonisation of Islam as well as Christianity.

We live in an age where every policy is dressed up as a public spectacle with garish illuminations and lavish fountains, even if a majority of Indians do not have access to clean drinking water and electricity. Never before has politics constituted a spectacle in quite this manner. The spectacle serves not only to consolidate a majoritarian identity, but also to hide poverty, misery and deprivation. Nationalism shapes the present through selective memory and the invention of tradition. It also functions as the proverbial fig leaf to hide bile, hate speech of the kind we heard in the Lok Sabha, targeting of minorities and suppression of civil liberties.

A society has to remember the past because if we try to forget and repress the past, at some time it will erupt in our consciousness as a sickness of the body politic, as Sigmund Freud warned us. We must learn to accept the past, acknowledge that terrible things were done to people, and pledge that these will not be allowed to occur in our times and in times to come. But this is only if our ruling class allows us to reorder the politics of selective memory, and recollect a time when communities did live together in some degree of civility.

Right-wing nationalism is particularly toxic, but we must remember that all nationalisms have a tendency to manufacture enemies and create fictional unities. We cannot fight one nationalism with another. We will have to remember Rabindranath Tagore’s warnings on nationalism and the alternative he offered — cosmopolitanism. In Ghare Baire (Home and the World), Tagore spoke of nationalism as a pernicious ideology the West had exported to India. Violence and killing (and hate speech) become normal when the individual sacrifices himself to an abstraction, and nationalism is privileged over righteousness and conscience. “I am willing,” says Nikhil, the protagonist of the novel, “to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right… To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.” This is the ultimate critique of right-wing nationalism that privileges hatred of a manufactured enemy over all that India has held dear — non-violence and tolerance.