Times of India [India]
27th March, 2004
My Religion is not my Nation
by Anuradha M. Chenoy
Prime Minister Vajpayee has projected friendship with Pakistan as a sop for Indian Muslims. Deputy Prime Minister Advani has stated that Hindu-Muslim relations in India will improve if relations with Pakistan improve and that Pakistan-India cricket matches could play a role in improving relations with Indian Muslims. These are dangerous and divisive formulations. In such a discourse citizens are divided purely on the basis of their religious identity represented as two distinct communities in constant opposition to each other. Further, one group is being shown as tied to another hostile state that influences its collective opinion. All three implications of such statements are typically sectarian and disruptive.
While peace and confidence building with Pakistan is in national interest, the leadership of this country has again equated the Muslims as ‘outsiders’. If they are concerned about relations between the two communities in India, why must they depend on the goodwill of Pakistan? Why do they not address this internally? The reason is that such divisions apart from being a useful tool for raising a particular kind of religious nationalism masquerading as ‘cultural nationalism’, are useful just before a general election as the 1990 rath yatra proved. The minorities are constantly called upon to prove their patriotism, proofs of which are never seen as sufficient, and their loyalty questioned as they are persistently made to pay a price for this imagined disloyalty.
Such arguments of sectarian nationalism translated as Hindutva are based on the premise that religion and ancestry are the primary criteria for citizenship. The presumption is that citizenship is frozen in some imagined ancient time and that all internal differences collapse in the face of the ‘majority’ identity. History and reality are disavowed and deeper class, caste, regional, ethnic and sectarian differences within communities are glossed over to highlight imagined religious differences. It is for instance self evident that the Malyalee Hindus, Christians and Muslims who share language, territorial affinity, ethnicity and culture have more in common with each other than with the equally diverse Punjabis. Thus to present the Hindus and Muslims as homogenous and undifferentiated wholes in perpetual contradiction with each other, with relations between them hostage to friendship with another nation is not only mischievous falsification, but betrays a lack of elementary knowledge of the very nation they claim to represent.
In fact, the simplest definitions show that nations are made up of a combination of attributes, and a sectarian ideology that a nation can be based on just one characteristic like religion is a recipe for disaster, as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have shown. Authoritarianism, sectarian witch hunts, ethnic cleansing, and the break up of communities and nations inevitably follow. Further if our linkages to our state are based solely on religion why should politicians or select unrepresentative priests decide the shape and content of what is, say, Hindu or Hindutva? Should this be decided, if at all, by the elected sansad or an unelected ‘dharm sansad?’
History shows that a nation can lose or change any of its characteristics and yet remain a nation. The Irish, for example, lost their language but continued to consider themselves a nation and Pakistan was divided despite the base of common religion. Five Central Asian separate states were formed after the Soviet disintegration despite commonality of religion and history, because for them ethnic identity was more important than the other factors.
That is why Hindutva could never be the basis of collective Indian nationalism, because if it was, there could never have been the India we know today. In fact, religious nationalism is always antagonistic to collective secular nationalism. This is because religious nationalism destroys the pluralities essential to a viable nationalism. It was plural nationalism that has kept India together and enabled an institutionalized and robust democracy. This essence of Indian pluralism giving all citizens equal status and yet safeguarding their cultural and religious rights have been guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. Further democratic theory is premised on the realization that majorities are temporary. A non-BJP coalition may be in power one day, a BJP-led coalition another. Thus the protection of the rights of political, religious and other minorities is critical to democracy. Thus statements to the contrary violate the Constitution and the democratic process itself. They give a signal, that it is posed as normal and legitimate, to make insiders into outsiders and collaborators of hostile countries solely because of religious affiliation.
Statements like those made by the Prime Minister are translated by the ranks of parties and organizations committed to Hindutva into actions that punish the minority community as representatives of Pakistan. This happened in Gujarat where colonies where Muslims live have been dubbed ‘mini Pakistan,’ enemies to be legitimately attacked in an orgy of religious nationalism. Minority communities are thus forced to live in a state of constant tension and turmoil deprived of their fundamental rights, living on majority sufferance.
Such statements show a blinkered view of peace itself. Peace is viewed in terms of a peace constituency likely to deliver a positive electoral dividend. The ‘majority’ community is seen as one that can be manipulated to deliver votes either for peace or war whenever necessary. Peace in reality, is a process that involves compromises to create the essential confidence for all to arrive at a just and equitable solution. Not the best or ideal, but one both can live with and accept. For this the Prime Minister and his deputy must see themselves as representatives of a multi-cultural and plural society committed to a durable peace for all. This would be the true ‘raj dharma’ that the Prime Minister spoke of earlier in Gujarat.
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