Monday, 05 Oct, 2009
Munish Narain Saxena (Munish Chacha to us) had ferried Maulana Hasrat Mohani on his bicycle’s rickety carrier through many a dusty village to campaign for the Communist Party of India of which both were sympathisers. The Maulana was a member the Muslim League too. Jinnah and to some extent Gandhi regarded him with awe and suspicion. The Maulana’s Haj would never be complete without following up with a visit to Mathura and Kashi, regarded as holy to Hindus.
He once told Munish Chacha in his nasal twang: ‘Hindustan ka Musalaman communist ho sakta hai, aur wo communalist ho sakta hai. Wo nationalist nahi ho sakta hai.’ (An Indian Muslim can be a communist or a communalist, but he cannot be a nationalist.) The logic of the Maulana’s claim has never been made clear to me. He was a grudging member of India’s Constituent Assembly, where he tried hard for India to be modelled after the Soviet Union. The fact that he was a communist sympathiser and a member of the Muslim League at once holds a possible clue to his aphorism which otherwise does not seem to contain much evident logic.
Munish Chacha surmised that Comrade Mohani might have been alluding to the reality that the bourgeois classes, which create nation-states, were in severe deficit among India’s Muslims. The absence of a major bourgeois leadership within the community, and the domination of feudal satraps within their ranks could offer a possible insight into the Maulana’s mutterings about nationalism. Most Indians, particularly those Muslims who have done well for themselves over the years, would contest the Maulana’s implied definition of nationalism. Perhaps he didn’t mean it. Perhaps it was just a witticism, which, as a popular poet, he was prone to indulge in.
Last month I had occasion to listen to more interesting ideas on nationalism. Dr Mubashir Hasan, Z.A. Bhutto’s finance minister and a peace activist now, was visiting Delhi for the release of a book on partition by Prof Bimal Prasad. Speaking at the occasion, he said he found little difference between organised religion and nationalism. The latter was a gift of Europeans, chiefly the French, to the world.
Dr Hasan argued that the motto of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was bestowed by the bourgeoisie to the peoples of Europe by the French Revolution. ‘Under the social contract they had evolved, citizens owed the highest loyalty to their nation-state for which they lived and were also prepared to die. They were nationalists. The nation was sovereign and it was answerable to none. Dedication to the principles of nationalism was akin to a dedication to a political religion.’ I realised that Dr Hasan had in fact written extensively on his quaint thesis.
In his view the ideology of nationalism that took root in Europe and North America emerged as a new religion in form and content. The religion of yesteryear got split into religious and what came to be termed as secular components. The religious component became a matter of the private faith of the individual. The newly emerged nationalist faith took over the secular domain. The nation-state replaced the church in claiming the highest loyalty and devotion on political, social, economic and cultural questions. The national constitution acquired the sanctity of a sacred text. National heroes emerged more easily than religious saints used to be recognised in earlier times. There were national causes, a national destiny, national will, national honour, national flag, national struggle, national days, national pride, national culture, national language and national dress. National armies came into being to fight national wars to claim national victories and produce national martyrs.
‘The nationalist faith demanded that that the nation-state constituted a kind of holy unit,’ Dr Hasan wrote. ‘Each nation was sovereign. It was a law unto itself. It could do no wrong. Its superiority over all other nations of the world was a matter of faith. Each nation had a destiny. Each nation had its distinctive culture, indeed, for larger nations a distinct civilisation which was superior to all others. A nation’s territory was sacred soil and to be defended at all cost with all the armed might that the national economy could possibly allow. The nations lying across the border must be considered potential enemies. Each nation must covet as much territory as possible and extend its political and economic influence over the territories that lie within other national boundaries.’
Dr Hasan speaks softly, and his views are crystal clear. To him this new brand of nationalism permits a nation to commit violence on another nation without any sense of guilt. Conquest through violence legitimised all. ‘Wars, there had always been. But before the era of nationalism, wars between states were fought by kings through professional armies. The professional soldier could fight for a king today and against him the next day. The people were not expected to be a party to a war. In the era of nationalism wars became national wars. One people are supposed to be fighting another people. To kill in the name of the nation was sacred.’
In other words, in a nutshell, all nation states are essentially violent and in being so they are not any different from organised religion of yore. To get anywhere near Dr Hasan’s definition of a nation, India must transcend claims of it being a non-violent polity. This is not going to be difficult.
The north Indian festival of Dussehra observed last week was as good an occasion as any to feel the contours of a violent people, not the least because the prime minister himself led the procession to burn the effigy of a learned Brahmin king who had gone astray. The occasion is also observed as Vijaydashami when arms and weapons are worshipped. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was reported to have propitiated the gods of war before an entire arsenal of the most modern weaponry his government has. The ritual would make Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy something of a misfit. Moreover, there is hardly an Indian god or goddess, barring perhaps Saraswati, the goddess of learning, that is not depicted with a weapon in or on both hands.
The imagery of Muslim hordes with swords unsheathed juxtaposed with the equally armed Crusaders would look tame before some of images of violence worshipped in India. So Dr Hasan’s first condition of primeval violence mutating into a secular form in a nation-state appears to have been met in India. As the film lyricist Javed Akhtar is said to have remarked when he was offered the peace prize at a function in Patna to celebrate India’s non-violence: ‘Historically, we were never a non-violent people. If Gandhi became an apostle of peace, it was because we needed his non-violence to cleanse us, like you need soap to clean the blood stains on the hands.’
Dr Hasan’s second important precondition for a nation-state’s evolution – the presence of an organised religious institution, akin to a church – could have posed problems for India. This is because there was no single Hindu church that dominated all others. In some ways the Ayodhya-temple project has created the grounds for a grand unification of diverse belief systems that have passed for Hinduism, into a Semitic-style overarching institution. The project is well poised to yield results. Nehru had sought to circumvent this shortcoming – the transition from a church to a nation-state – by importing the trappings of a nation-state from existing western models. But he would run into trouble with religious atavism.
If Maulana Hasrat Mohani’s belief about nationalism is true, particularly its interpretation by Munish Narain Saxena, whereby he blames the absence of a robust bourgeoisie for the absence of nationalist fervour among Indian Muslims, it should apply in equal measure to Pakistan. Is it not the tussle between entrenched religio-feudal classes in both countries and a relatively small urban middle class (far smaller in the case of Pakistan), which is holding up the transition towards a secular nation-state?
At present India defines its secularism as sarv dharm sambhaav – equality of religions before the state. The western model, on the other hand, requires the state not to be an arbiter between communities – helping with Haj subsidies here and armed protection or procuring Chinese visas to carry out pilgrimages there – but to confine itself purely to secular administration. Until that comes about the chances of nationalist fervour getting expressed in religious terms would continue to pose a dilemma for our countries with unsavoury consequences for the state and its subjects.
