The Return of the Nation

THE NATION IS back, and whenever it makes Who Are We? a compelling story in today’s politics, the so-called modernists who believe in the absolutism of the constitutional state squirm. It’s even more apparent in India where “the birth of the nation” and “nation building” have been powered by two contradictory sentiments. The struggle for India’s freedom, apart from the theatre of resistance, was an intellectual enterprise with the nation at its core. Did we manage the freedom, during the formative years of “nation building”, by being defensive about the nation itself? Or even by making it a taboo by the state’s consecra­tion of the secular? In the pursuit of the Nehruvian New Man, the nation was as much an undesirable as religion. Here again, modernists are likely to dispute: the idealism of the freedom struggle must be differentiated from the prag­matism of statecraft. The nation was bound to return with a counterargument—and endorsed by political power.

When Narendra Modi in 2014 became the event that would change India—and begin a conversation about the return of the Nation with a capital N and a state governed with a nationalist mandate—it was the most definitive rupture in the Indian story as told by those who claimed ownership over “modernity”. Modi seized the argument by portraying himself as a moderniser, and his principles of governance rooted not in the “glorious” past but in the future. There was no need for him to explain the cultural content of his modernity; Modi, the event, was self-explanatory. It was the revenge of the nation; it shattered the idyll of the secular state, which, in no way, represented the innate cultural cohesiveness of India’s secularism. It was the vote of the nation against the imper­sonalised state, where cultural identity was reduced to a slogan—“unity in diversity”.

The vote of 2014 has a backstory. Before the Great Galvaniser came to the scene, there were daring inter­ventions by nationalists who emphasised the cultural adjective to their identity. The Ayodhya movement, as a cultural statement, was not a return trip to mythology; it was more than a struggle for the restoration of a homeless god. It was the end of an impatience. Was it the moment when the politics of the Indian right became a covenant between the nation and Hinduness (or Hindutva)? If the Modi momentum brought out the definitive expression of Hindu nationalism, it was not something that needed to be sloganised but felt. Modi is not a frequent user of the H word to characterise his nationalist goals. It’s an organic part of his political self—and it’s what makes the change on his watch a profound cultural statement.

The moment we live in is a dispute only for those who deny the change its cultural con­tent. It’s a pity that only national­ists are interested in analysing the arc of Indian nationalism. For some in the opinion class, it is still not a cultural expression but an illiberal march of democracy. It’s not that they are intellectu­ally resistant to the intrusion of the nation into the conversations about identities; for some of them, the nation continues to be an artificial entity exaggerated by the frenzied imaginations of illiberal democracies’ obvious beneficia­ries: what they call the populists. (It’s a different matter that some of us have begun to call any popular politician a populist. So much for the evolution of isms.)

At a symposium in Udaipur organised by India Foundation that I participated in over a weekend, what emerged from the arguments about India’s nationalist traditions was a cultural clarity on the question of who we are. As in India and elsewhere, a nation finds its validation in civilisational memory. At the symposium, the Hindu Nation, or Hindu Rashtra, was not a religious Ruritania, ahistorical and anti-modern. It was an argument without an end, and it could not have been anything else considering the idea that concentrated the nationalist’s mind the most was the eternity of Hindu­ism as a civilisational story, not as a scripturally linear religious story captured in the Book.

In the RSS portrait of the Hindu nation, India being its geographical manifestation, as spelt out in Udaipur, “Hindu” as a nationalist adjective only emphasises cultural lineage, not religious exclusion. RSS, as the name itself suggests, exists to serve the nation, and its definition of the ideal is not a call to reject diver­sity, which, after all, reflects the cultural flexibility of unity. On the eve of RSS’ centenary, such lucidity and confidence in the portrait of the nation tells some­thing about the evolution of the organisation itself. Defying the stereotype, which partly comes from enforced invisibility, RSS has joined the debate on national identity, and the Hinduness of which will determine the future of politics, as if what the citizen of the Hindu Nation needs is not persuasion but reminder.

Nationalism is not a linear progression, and in the land of little traditions, it makes multi­plicity and unity interchange­able. The absence of homogene­ity, the aesthetics of the many, in the argument of Hindu national­ism, is a testament of cultural confidence. Maybe, as the cura­tor of the symposium said, India must develop its own sense of national arrogance. What he meant in a lighter tone was that India need not be defensive about the cultural ancestry of its nationalism. Perhaps it takes an Israeli to tell Hindu national­ists why adjectives are meant to be emphasised. A philosopher of national conservatism, he traces the origin of Western nationalism to the Bible. The tribes made the nation. The journey didn’t end in the promised lands; it continues to fulfil the unrealised promises of the nation. And he tells me he can’t understand why Hindu nationalists are hesitant to call themselves Hindu nationalists. A Jewish nationalist knows the power—and the obligations—of the adjective. Still, as a national conservative, he is aware that the question persists: Have conservatives really succeeded in conserving the nation? I think it resonates beyond America and England and Israel.

An idea in power doesn’t mark the end of an argument; it only intensifies the conversation about the idea itself. The dismantling of the ancient—the dilapidated social­ist structure—is followed by the establishment of a new thought system. If the thought is as old as Hinduism, and if India is the nation that thinks modernity is enhanced by civilisational memory, can we afford to miss the enormity of the change?

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