[Reader-list] Nationalism after Social Science

[bhrigu at sarai.net]

Nationalism after Social Science
---------------------------------------
"It's taken me some time to respond to this mail, precisely because I had to
 be certain about what can be an appropriate response.

 Despite all doubts, all 'ifs' and 'buts' about the 'reality' of secularism
 in India, I have no doubt that the place for minorities (and all others) is
 here.  It is in the confidence to celebrate difference without prejudice,
 to struggle together to obtain decency & security and in the desire for a
 peaceful way of life.

 This is not an agenda for a programme.  It is a reiteration of faith in the
 future of a country and its people." 

 Awadhendra Sharan


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I felt I should respond to Deepu (Awadhendra Sharan)'s mail, which I see as 
something new and interesting that has been said in the context of this reader 
list. It can be read and perhaps even criticised as a naïve 'reiteration of 
faith' in something a lot of people have developed the profoundest doubts 
about, but I choose to read it otherwise.

What excites me about the posting are two things - who says it and where it 
has been said. Let me begin with the second. The speech context is that of 
this reader list (and that is of central importance. I don't think there is 
any other forum, where I would be confident enough of the politics of the 
community of speakers/listeners to make the sort of argument I am making here. 
Neither would i have paid as much attention to the above posting as i do now, 
had it been said anywhere else). Within this reader list, I would say that the 
critique of the nation-state has been variously understood and espoused. The 
political position that 'solutions' will follow once we dismantle the ideology 
of nationalism, has often been taken - sometimes a bit too easily.   

Let me move back to the first question - who made the utterance? This further 
interests me since I know the speaker personally. The stance taken in the 
posting is not wholly 'rational'. Strictly speaking, it is somewhat untenable 
within the framework of contemporary social science. And I find that exciting 
- someone who is very aware of Dalit Politics, who knows very well that in the 
most progressive circles of intellectual and activist discourse, this is the 
day and age of transnational solidarities, the rainbow coalition - a person 
who has read Partha Chatterjee, Subaltern Studies, the works - and understood 
each of these better than I probably ever will, can still say something like 
this. How do you categorise and think about this sort of sentiment? 

 Hesitantly, since anything to do with the nation has been misunderstood and 
misused to such disastrous effect, I would call this 'residual nationalism' 
i.e. nationalism after social science (let me also clarify that I am using 
'social science' to signify a set of ideas that critique the nation-state. 
Meaning you need not even be aware of the existence of  Benedict Anderson or 
Partha Chatterjee, you can also have experienced those ideas or lived them in 
ways very different from that of reading). 
In the context of the sub-continent, this 'residue' would mean holding on to 
some notion of the 'idea of India', after that idea and its practice have 
taken a severe beating, and that beating has been fully deserved - 
politically, theoretically and morally. I would give this residual nationalism 
a self-critical, pragmatic, and positive tone. This is a nationalism which is 
aware of the seething inequalities and conflicts which make up the real and 
imagined space of India. It is a careful nationalism, which knows that any 
form of identity, when over-privileged, can rise, like an A.R.Rahman crescendo 
and leave violent silences in its cymbal crashing climax. At its best, it is a 
situated form of openness - one that supports the transnational coalition 
against practices within itself but knows that the members of that coalition 
need a place to stay once the Durban conference is over, and that place can, 
within the present political geography that makes up the world, only be within 
the constructed boundaries of particular nation-states. This is not an 
argument for the maintenance of the status quo. Instead, it is the confidence 
in oneself (and the ability to redefine what constitutes oneself) that 
undergirds useful, transformative politics.  
   

I experienced 'residual nationalism' a few weeks ago when writing an email, 
the relevant section of which I have attached below. The background for the 
email is as follows: A Pakistan born, British national who was, and still 
remains, one of my closest friends wrote me the following statement - "I have 
been following the events in Gujrat and it is my conclusion that India is a 
racist country." In the one year I spent studying in London I had spent many 
evenings with him and on several occasions he had mentioned the 'plight' of 
Muslims in India to me. He was also quite upset because the parents of the 
Hindu girl he was seeing, had recently expressed their strong displeasure at 
their relationship on the grounds that he was Muslim and was born in Pakistan. 
He told me how surprised he was that urban, educated and well-to-do Indians 
could hold such prejudices. Here is the mail I wrote him: 

Dear yyy,      
You know, I was thinking about what you said, about xxx's parents being 
hostile to you and actually, I am not that surprised. What I have slowly begun 
to realise is that if there is any 'tradition' in the subcontinent, then it is 
one of mutual hostility over any kind of difference - caste, class, region, 
language and above all, religion.  I am beginning to think that Secularism, 
and communal harmony is something that has been a myth or more accurately, a 
dream. Not only a liberal, modernist one but one that has existed in different 
strands of thought for the past many centuries (recorded for instance in 
various genres of poetry dating back hundreds of years). This dream 
unfortunately, has never been able to acutalise itself in the face of 
recurrent suspicion and hostility between Hindus and Muslims alike. But there 
is a difference between a more harmless kind of mutual dislike and active 
murderous violence (ashis nandy's new book deals with precisely this question. 
He has written about Cochin where according to him, 3 different religions have 
co-existed, disliking each other for the past many centuries without a 
recorded riot or violence of any sort). 

Riots, like in Gujrat are shocking and shameful and the present situation in 
India under the BJP and the Sangh Parivar is particularly horrifying and 
increasingly so in the last few months where we have seen government inaction 
quite clearly in the face of maddening amounts of evidence. For instance, the 
mainstream media, the National Human Rights Commission, and many many other 
organizations have blacklisted the police force, the Chief minister and other 
members of the Gujrat government and demanded its immediate dismissal in 
various reports. This has not been done at all. Instead the BJP has started 
using even harder rhetoric.  A law has recently been passed called the 
Prevention of Terrorism Act, which gives it the freedom to pretty much arrest 
anyone they want to. Despite all the protests from mainstream opposition 
parties, dharnas by schools, universities, NGO's (some of which I took part 
in) things have been getting worse and worse. 

Having said all this I would still strongly disagree with what I think you 
mentioned in your mail which suggested some kind of endemic 'racism' in India 
against Muslims. The word 'Racism', as a kind of sustained situation of 
disadvantage in various spheres of life can be used to some extent I think in 
relation to Dalits, who have faced discrimination over several centuries, but 
not so easily for others. I might have made an argument for some form of 
secularism about a year ago, but post-Gujrat I don't think I would. This, 
despite the fact that in private and government schools in India, you still 
are taught to believe that all religions are equal, the constitution 
guarantees freedom to practice whatever religion blah blah. What I mean is 
that I grew up thinking that secularism is the natural way of things and 
religion is a very minor thing, slowly to realise that wasn't exactly how it 
worked. I would however, also argue that this form of wished-for-equality and 
goodwill is not a complete lie - there have been presidents, prime ministers 
and political leaders in India of various genders and religions, as opposed to 
say, the U.S. which has never had a non-white, non-protestant, non-male 
president. 

Anyway, to get back to the point, firstly, it would be more accurate, I think 
to talk about it in sheer numbers. The only country with a larger number of 
Muslims in the world is Indonesia. As has been said many times before, India 
has more Muslims than Pakistan. Given the density of this population, it would 
be quite difficult to talk about 'Muslims' as any one kind of people. But that 
is a common social science argument that we are both well aware of, so I won't 
use a tack that I know you would expect me to use. 

At a very basic and somewhat obvious level, if we were to look at the singular 
category of 'Muslims', we could say that in India, the leading films stars and 
scriptwriters (and at the popular level, these are perhaps the most 'public' 
of all personalities) are Muslim without anyone referring to or thinking about 
them as such, there are muslim TV personalities, leading academics, news 
anchors and reporters in all the leading newspapers and channels, 
industrialists, well-to-do upper-middle class people and people in all sorts 
of classes, vocations and geographical areas within the country.  Most of 
these people have as much in common with the people killed in Gujrat as I do, 
and have lived reasonably stable lives without threat and have continued to 
have as much freedom of speech as anyone else. 
If I was to leave aside all social science warnings against categorising 
people with any one identity or using a term such as 'common man'  (and you 
know how much I dislike that term) the question I would ask is this - is the 
hypothetical Muslim person in India any worse off than the hypothetical Muslim 
person in say Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran or Iraq? I would think probably 
not and it could even be argued that this 'average' person in India would be 
freer to do and say things in terms of criticising the government than in many 
of these other places which have had shaky democracies, weak economies, very 
strict codes of conduct and an extremely exploitative and small elite class.
 
Also consider what is usually referred to as the polar opposite of the 
countries I named above - U.S.A, with the privileges in terms of freedom of 
speech and demeanour afforded to most of its citizens. The first 100 years of 
its existence, and subsequent periods when it consolidated and amassed a great 
deal of wealth were characterized by two of the most heinous crimes ever known 
to humanity - the genocide of the Native American population (and we wonder 
why they support Israel!) and the enslavement of the African-Americans, which 
continued for well over 2 and a half centuries. Consider also (and this is a 
history you are much more aware of than I), the indignities that continue to 
be handed to immigrants in European countries and the struggles for the 
recognition of 'difference' there. Consider then, that the subcontinent has 
had just slightly over 50 years of self-government.       

Anyway, returning to India at present. I could also argue that a party as 
lumpen as the BJP feels the need to have Muslim members in important posts and 
in its cabinet (Omar Abdullah, Sikander Bakht) but that can be quite an 
eyewash so let me not stretch that too far. I think at present where things 
become really dicey is on the margins of political activity, as soon as it can 
be subsumed under the rhetoric of 'security'. And that is one of the problems 
with the BJP that no one knows how to deal with and which is becoming 
increasingly worse. What I mean is that under the BJP, a jehadi in Kashmir or 
any sort of Muslim 'dissident' (and the BJP has been able to stretch the 
definition of a dissident quite liberally) has a far far greater chance of 
being arrested than an equally violent RSS or Bajrang Dal member in Orrisa. 
However, we should also consider that the BJP and Hindutva in its more 
mainstream avatar, is a relatively recent phenomenon, not more than about 10 
years old. Before that there was a 40 year period when the government and 
state policy tried quite hard to propagate a kind of modernist secularism as 
the 'correct' form of belief. This has not always been easy because the more 
insidious Hindu Right has a much longer history. There were pressures for 
instance, even on Nehru to declare India as a 'Hindu' state after Pakistan was 
formed as an Islamic nation but these pressures were resisted at the level of 
state politics until relatively recently. Further, even in the present 
situation it is not as if the BJP has some kind of uncontested, dominant rule. 
At the state level, they are now only in power in 3 states - Gujrat, Himachal 
Pradesh and Goa.  What one hopes is that they will lose the next general 
election and some kind of backlash to their form of identity politics will 
start. I mean, I have no great conclusion to make but what I would say is that 
on the whole things are pretty bad, probably worse than they ever have been 
but I would certainly argue against the fact that India as a whole is 'racist' 
towards 'Muslims'. Islam, in many different forms, has and always will be an 
intrinsic part of India (Hindi, the national language, to take one of a 1000 
examples, was pretty much invented by Amir Khusrau in conversation with 
Nizamuddin Aulia).  

What is much harder to deal with is the phenomenon of the riot, in all its 
devastating horror. Historically, there have been periodic riots, on not 
necessarily 'religious' grounds, in Gujrat and other parts of India and 
Pakistan for centuries. What is scary at present in India is that a party like 
the BJP has managed to gain a lot of ground and help organise a lot of the 
violence (on the other hand, what is encouraging is that the much larger media 
presence, particularly TV has made it much harder for them to pretend that 
nothing happened, which was the case with the Congress anti-sikh riots in 1984 
and the emergency in the 70s). Believe me, there has been widespread shock, 
disbelief and anger within India about what has happened and there are many 
people trying to fight against it. In whatever small and inconsequential way, 
I consider myself one of them.

Love, 
Bhrigu