Who Are We?

WHO IS AN INDIAN? THE ANSWER SHOULD have been simple enough. The country’s ancient identity, based in part on the faith of its original in­habitants, should have been part of the definition of Indianness. The run of democratic politics for the bulk of time since Independence had upended the possibility of a reasonable answer. Things are, however, changing and for the better. It is no longer taboo to say that Indian identity should have an element of faith in it.

The Law

The simplest answer is the one provided in the Citizenship Act, 1955, as amended from time to time. An Indian is someone who was born in the territory of India. Unfortunately, this is a contest­ed definition and a part of the Indian political system is loath to accept it. The matter has now been politicised way beyond what a well-run nation state should allow. Then there is the added weight of religion, an issue that is almost impossible to disentangle from the definition of Indianness. The salience of religion as a defining marker of citizenship has only increased over the decades.

The current ferment—blocking of Parliament’s working and the demonisation of the Election Commission of India (EC)—began over this legal, definitional issue and shows the extent to which politics determines what is an acceptable answer to the problem of identity. The controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar on the eve of Assembly elections there exemplifies the problem. EC’s logic to undertake an SIR is sound, legally and politically. Legally, a periodic revision of electoral rolls is mandated under Section 21 of the Represen­tation of the People Act (RPA), 1950. Section 16 of the same law prescribes disqualification for registration in an electoral roll.

The chief disqualification against inclusion in an electoral roll is that a person is not a citizen of India. SIR in Bihar follows the definition of citizenship in the Citizenship Act of 1955 as amend­ed in 2003. The original definition of citizenship was someone who was born in India on or after January 26, 1950. This defini­tion was tightened significantly in 2003 to ensure that children of illegal immigrants did not acquire citizenship. Introducing the Amendment Bill in Parliament on May 7, 2003, then Home Minister LK Advani had spelt out that one of the goals of the Bill was to prevent illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for Indian citizenship as well as making the acquisition of Indian citizenship by registration and naturalisation more stringent. The Bill also defined an illegal immigrant.

The Bill passed with some perfunctory opposition. But in the two decades since, the Opposition is up in arms and has laid bare a faultline in Indian politics: The Opposition wants a watered down definition of citizenship even if it does not state that posi­tion clearly. This is obvious from both its formal and substantive opposition to SIR in Bihar. A number of curious reasons have been dished out. For one, EC allegedly does not have sufficient time to check the claims and counter-claims for various prospec­tive voters in the short period of a few months. This proved to be unfounded as EC dispatched an army of enumerators along with representatives of political parties and completed the task within a month.

More ominously, the Opposition wants Aadhaar to be permit­ted as a document in support of citizenship. Aadhaar, as is well known, is merely an identity document. Normally, citizens alone should be allowed to acquire it. But as experience over the last two decades shows, a huge number of illegal immigrants—especially from Bangladesh and Myanmar—have acquired this document. EC, keeping in mind the law, has rightly opposed it. The Oppo­sition managed to persuade the Supreme Court that Aadhaar be allowed as proof of citizenship but the court, no doubt aware of the nature of the problem, asked EC only to “consider” it as an option in the list of docu­ments that could be used to put forward claims for inclu­sion in the electoral roll. The unstated but obvious fear of the Opposition is that Muslims would be ‘disenfranchised’. It is another matter that EC does not discriminate on the basis of religion and if certain reports are to be believed, the majority of those who could not provide the necessary documents were Hindus. But this does not come in the way of demonising an impartial and effective insti­tution like EC.

The 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act was necessitated in part because the question of identity—who is an Indian—had been politicised much beyond what could be considered acceptable even by the lax norms that prevailed in India. The quest for vote banks based on religion; the fear that the majority community had abandoned ‘secular’ politics; the temptation of letting in illegal immigrants from Bangladesh (and lately, from Myanmar) proved to be an irresistible political proposition. Poor immigrants from impoverished countries are more loyal voters than citizens who demand accountability. This politics has played havoc with the question of identity. At some point something had to give and that could not be the sacrifice of Hindu identity. But that journey was circuitous and winding.

Religion

The apotheosis of these political changes was the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 that allowed a fast track to citizen­ship for Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, and Christian minorities from Af­ghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—the three Islamic states, two de jure and one de facto—in India’s neighbourhood. It was a major redefinition of the basis of citizenship and, in fact, of who was an Indian. Indianness, for the first time, came close to being defined on the basis of religion. For all the intellectual gloss against CAA, the re­ality on the ground—demographic insecurity in key Indian states, an exceptionally hostile neighbourhood, and the never-ending salience of 1947 as a political marker—could not be wished away.

In the six years since CAA was enacted, India’s ‘secular’ intel­lectuals have thrown bell, book and candle at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian middle class, and the law itself. The results, in contrast, have been severe and in the direction opposite to what these intellectuals desired.

This sea change in defining Indianness did not come about merely with the passage of a single law. It was the product of a century of denial and attempted de-legitimisation of the majority faith.

A proper history of the process and the changes is yet to be writ­ten. What exist at the moment are tropes—and the key ones are of left­ist origin—invented to explain the vicissitudes of Indian secularism. The first one is that after Jawaharlal Nehru, successive prime ministers ‘accom­modated communal forces’ for politi­cal reasons. But this line of reasoning runs into various logical and historical inconsistencies and so, another one has been dusted off, after 2014. This roughly runs along the lines that the infusion of religion into the freedom struggle, at the hands of Gandhi, was the original sin of Indian nationalism. But this version, too, has a switch-like quality to it. It bestows almost superhuman qualities on Nehru as he managed to hold ‘com­munalism’ at bay and prime ministers after him could do little to contain the danger.

The actual process by which ‘civic’ nationalism unravelled after Independence was more complicated than what the tropes suggested. Even in its heyday, from 1952 to 1985, events were slow­ly reshaping how Indians viewed themselves. In far-off Assam, almost a century ago, Ambikagiri Raichoudhury—the foremost Assamese public intellectual of that time—had begun warning of the coming demographic disaster in the state. His observations about the influx of migrants from Mymensingh district into Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang and Nagaon and the dangers flow­ing from those changes were prophetic. Assam’s early generation of leaders, Gopinath Bordoloi and Bishnuram Medhi—both from Congress—knew about these dangers and did what they could to avert a disaster. But that was the age of civic nationalism and their party’s national leadership was in no mood to listen.

If communalism were indeed a danger, Assam would have fallen much earlier, say by the 1970s. But the path towards un­derstanding the importance of faith and indigenous identity took time. Assam was alien territory for Indian nationalism and remained in the grip of secessionist violence for more than two decades. As long as civic nationalism remained in command, alienation persisted in the state. It was long after Assam’s demo­graphic balance had been altered beyond recognition that the political situation in the state shifted towards a different variety of Indian nationalism, one that gave the right emphasis to reli­gious identity. Even after the passing of CAA, when there were violent protests in Assam, BJP remained in the saddle and won the Assembly elections again in 2021.

The changes in Assam were an important milestone in the redefinition of Indianness. That they occurred silently even as the underlying processes were dubbed as communalism by India’s intellectuals tells its own story.

What has been misunderstood, right from Independence, is the nature of Indian nationalism. Unlike the original nationalisms in the New World dating to the first quarter of the 19th century, chiefly in Venezuela, Haiti, Mexico, and Colombia, Indian nationalism was not “settler nationalism” as the one seen in those countries. It was neither a species of linguistic nationalism of the kind seen in Euro­pean states that emerged at the end of the era of political absolutism.

Indian nationalism, much like anti-colonial nationalism else­where in Asia and Africa, would have remained just that had it not been for the attempts to suppress the identity of the majority faith—Hinduism—right from the moment when independence was gained. That attempt backfired. The history of that process has led to comparisons with Israel, Ireland and Algeria, the three other examples of religious nationalism. But the comparison is facile.

It is true that Partition was based on religious identity. The intellectual dispute over the nature of that event is largely a func­tion of which side of the Radcliffe Line one is located. There are, of course, some notable and powerful exceptions on the Indian side that have persisted with the Pakistani line.

Had matters ended there, faith probably would not have entered the nationalist equation. But the multiple wars waged by Pakistan against India and the use of terrorists to keep India unsettled have contributed in no small measure to the changing nature of nationalism in India. Then there is ‘secular’ Bangladesh where the Hindu minority has always been in peril. These pro­cesses did not stop in 1947. Once a ‘Muslim homeland’ had been conceded, the founders of that country should have focused on nation-building. The past shows Pakistan and Bangladesh have blundered from crisis to crisis—all of their own making—but the blame has been apportioned to India. Both countries lack a positive sense of definition and define themselves largely as negatives of India. In India proper, the authentic definition of In­dianness—based in part on Hindu identity—had been stridently denied until very recently. From the massacres in Noakhali all the way to SIR in Bihar, a key part of the Indian identity is held up as a threat. That is the reason for the contemporary ferment over what constitutes Indianness and not some imagined fear of majoritarianism.

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