Identity and separatism: the politics of ethno-nationalism

The Hindu
March 26, 2008

Identity and separatism: the politics of ethno-nationalism

by M.S. Prabhakara

Barring the Left, political parties including the Congress in most parts of the country have been exploiting identity grievances.

. — Photo: Ranjeet Kumar

Ethno-nationalism is not confined to one State… The picture shows Bihari workers arriving in Patna after being forced out of Assam

A most curious feature of identity movements promoting an exclusivist ideology with language, religion, caste, ‘ethnicity,’ race and any other coordinate one may devise, including, perhaps, at some point gender, as the focal point of such mobilisation is that almost all of them eventually split into mutually hostile factions. Such is the nature of the beast. Perhaps such is also the law of nature for, natural organisms too eventually split and reproduce themse lves in newer forms. However, the dislocations as may be inherent in natural evolution do not as a rule violently and immediately impinge on human societies. This is not so with identity movements, now modishly known as mobilising of ethno-nationalism, and their obverse, separatism, that of their nature are prone to violent atomisation.

Such mobilisations are not unique to Assam and its neighbourhood. For instance, the Dravidian separatist assertion with secessionist undertones that now lie buried deep predates independence. This is now represented by several mutually hostile structures, crypto-secessionist, ultranationalist, some even with rationalist and socialist pretensions. The mobilisation of the ‘hurt Telugu pride’ was a crucial element in the consolidation of Telugu nationalism. Following the inescapable split, this ideology is now appropriated by the Congress leaving the Telugu Desam Party with no agenda. Much the same has been the case with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra where the original and its clone are now engaged in competitive chauvinism. Spending the last seven months of 2007 in Bangalore, I was struck not merely by the similarity of the grievances articulated by organisations claiming to defend the vital interests of the land (Karnataka) and the language (Kannada) to what is now the common currency of identity mobilisation in Assam and its neighbourhood, but also by the fact that the noisiest structure promoting Kannada exclusivism had split, with the other faction no less virulent and exclusivist.

The most successful of such mobilisations based on religion, with an imperilled identity (Islam under threat) as the rallying cry, was the movement for the attainment of a separate nation of Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. That nationalism could not survive its success for even 30 years.

The fact is, barring the Left, political parties including the Congress in most parts of the country have been exploiting identity grievances, adept at playing the ‘regional’ or ‘national’ card depending on whether they are in power or out of power.

A common, indeed necessary, feature of every such mobilisation is the Other, the hated and reviled Enemy seen as the root cause of one’s own perceived diminishment as well as of one’s larger environment. However, the identity of this Other is not always the same, constant. The small restaurateur and pavement trader from the south, mainly Karnataka and Kerala, who was the Enemy for the Shiv Sena over 30 years ago, has now been replaced by that even more generalised ‘north Indian’, the Bhayya, seen as the cause and effect of Mumbai’s urban decay and squalor, and has indeed come to symbolise its quintessence. While for the present the Tamil stands at the apex of the oppressors in the imagination of the Kannadiga, with other neighbours lower down the line, increasingly this spot is being allotted, as in the current demonology of the Shiv Sena and its clone, to the ‘north Indian’, crowding out the Kannadigas from Bangalore and other cities.

Two other features are shared by such movements of aggressive identity assertion. They are all profoundly anti-democratic; and following from this, their methods are necessarily coercive, eschewing reasonable debate of the issues and grievances involved. It would take a courageous person to question the increasingly widespread opinion in Karnataka that the State and its people have been served short by the Union government on issues of their vital concern, like the sharing of the Cauvery waters and the recognition of Kannada as a classical language. The daring dissident is straightway put in the doghouse. It is not accidental that on both these issues the DMK whose support is crucial to the survival of the UPA government, is seen as the villain of the piece, though there is little difference among the various factions of Dravidian nationalist articulation on these issues.

Not all such assertions are inherently anti-democratic, as some Indian ultra-nationalists argue. For instance, by acknowledging the uniqueness of a people’s resonance to their language, the very essence of their being, and by providing such a language identity a political and territorial space, the Union government by its Reorganisation of States in 1956 responded, however belatedly, to what was essentially a democratic demand, something that had been built into the very structure of the freedom movement as part of the anti-colonial struggle.

This did not, however, admit any kind of exclusivism, nor was it counterposed to the broader inclusive Indian nationalism. The anti-colonial struggles had not yet become merely ossified memories. Half a century down the line, this is not the case. Many developments, local, national and international, affecting the economy and society consequent upon the policies of successive governments have contributed to the transformation of what was once a legitimate inclusive democratic aspiration into an exclusivist and coercive ideology, feeding the sense of diminishment and deprivation where narrower and narrower definitions of identity going under the rubric of ‘ethnicity’ now determine the identity discourse.

For instance, the now apparently irreversible transformation of labour, in particular the unorganised labour, into another marketable commodity freely traded cross the state and, increasingly, also across national boundaries poses new challenges to the old concepts of the nation state as well as to the more limited space defined and determined by a people’s inviolable identity – an almost mystic sense of being what they are and articulated in terms mentioned at the beginning of this essay. That those who exploit such anxieties about the increasing threat posed by the rampant outsider in their midst are also among those who exploit the opportunities opened up by this dynamic of forced and closely monitored mobility of unorganised labour does not in the least mitigate the pain and worse of its passive victims. The terrain of struggle is full of pitfalls, holds false promises. Yet, ‘ethnic mobilisation’ is now a flourishing growth industry not merely in Assam and its neighbourhood, but also in most parts of the country.

The difference between the killing, with their hands tied behind their back, bearing the message, ‘Go back to where you came from’, of Hindi-speaking labourers brought by contractors to work on building projects in Manipur, and the chasing away of Hindi-speaking youth seeking to appear in Railway Recruitment Boards tests in Guwahati and Bangalore by competing local youth is only one of degree. Coercive violence takes all kinds of forms.

Those who scoffed at the Indian freedom struggle, not all of them White Colonel Blimps, used to ask the supposed argument stopper question: But is there an India and are there Indians? The question is even now asked by some authentically native intellectuals for whom India is merely a ‘colonial construct’, the dismantling of which is a revolutionary duty. The logical extension of such reasoning, at least in Assam, has been the asking of a similar question: Who is an Assamese? Nothing seemed sillier than this question when it was first raised, even when it was solemnly debated in the state Assembly.

However, given the trend and direction of ethno-nationalistic assertion and mobilisation in virtually every part of the country, it may not be long before similar questions are asked about even the narrowest and most insular definitions of oneself. Put simply, to divide is to multiply.