Years before the Rushdie affair, I called on Mr. Shahabuddin once at his parliamentarian’s bungalow in Delhi to discuss foreign policy, but all he wanted to talk about was the percentage of Muslims in the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary. Yet briefly the secular Indian diplomat emerged: “My daughter asks me,” he admitted, “Daddy, how can you even think like this?” Quite. But Shahabuddin did think like that, and at one point lost what little credibility he had with secular liberals by calling for a Muslim boycott of India’s Republic Day celebrations (“unki jumhooriyat,” he was quoted as saying: “their republic”). Though not all Muslim politicians have felt obliged to tread so sectarian a path, for the most part Muslim political leaders have derived their strength and influence from their position as Muslims, i.e., as members and representatives of a minority community.
This was, of course, not true in other fields of endeavor: religion was irrelevant in the advancement of military, business, sports, and cultural figures from the Muslim community. Air Chief Marshal Latif could not have risen to the top rank in the country’s air forces except by being a superb general officer; Mohammed Azharuddin’s seven-year-long captaincy of the Indian cricket team was a tribute to his indispensability as a player; the cinematic triumphs of a variety of unrelated Khans was based entirely on their box-office appeal; and M. J. Akbar became India’s youngest editor on the strength of his journalistic brilliance. The extraordinary Zaki family, which in the early 1990s boasted three generals in the Indian army and a senior air force officer as well, proudly speaks of its eight generations of soldiering; and the scientist who developed India’s first long-range missiles and continues to lead this most sensitive defense program is also a Muslim, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. In such cases, Indian pluralism worked neutrally, by ensuring that religion was not a handicap or an obstacle to career advancement — indeed, that it was no factor at all.
Politicians from other religious minorities in India usually transcended their confessional identity: the Christian George Fernandes built his career as a socialist firebrand, his Christianity irrelevant in all respects, while the Parsis Minoo Masani and Piloo Mody articulated free-enterprise views devoid of any explicit Zarathustran inspiration or content. And some subsections of Indian Muslims have not, generally speaking, fallen prey to communal politics: the Dawoodi Bohras, a prosperous community of traders and professionals, is famed for being largely apolitical. Nonetheless, the fact that a substantial religious minority of Muslims, projecting its political hopes and fears on the national scene in the wake of Partition, developed a communitarian identity was not in itself surprising. What is curious today is that, in Hindutva, a credible political movement (and one can speak of a Hindutva movement, despite its fragmentation into many rival organizations) has sprung up that seeks to convert the religion of the “majority” into an identity for mass mobilization. It is the result not just of mass sentiment but of diligent organizational work by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Shiv Sena, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, particularly the first, which has abandoned the traditional Hindu emphasis on self-realization for a collective operational Hinduism of early-morning drills in khaki shorts, social service, and volunteer work after natural and man-made disasters.
Such a movement has arisen, at least in part, as a reaction to Muslim resurgence and Sikh militancy, which has seen the killing and expulsion of Hindus from parts of Kashmir and Punjab; but it has become possible because of the nature of the strategy pursued by the Indian state since independence on the identity question. Indian federalism is based on the recognition of linguistic identity; the states were reorganized in 1956 to group the speakers of each language together into a political unit. The issue of caste identity was, as we have seen, dealt with through the world’s oldest and most far-reaching affirmative-action program. And the same willingness to shore up identity was manifest in relation to India’s religious communities.
Thus the ostensibly secular Indian state granted major concessions to its minority religions, organized not just as religions but as social communities. “Personal law” was left to the religious leaders of each community to maintain and interpret; the state passed no law to alter or abridge Muslim Personal Law, even though Parliament, through the Hindu Code Bill, radically transformed Hindu society in these areas as early as 1956. Educational and cultural institutions of religious minorities are subsidized (in some cases almost entirely funded) by state grants; these include even explicitly religious schools. Muslim divines and preachers routinely receive government grants, and the government disburses considerable sums annually on arranging for them to travel on the annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, despite the fact that a political party organized on religious fines had partitioned the country, the government did nothing to discourage political mobilization on the basis of religion, so that the rump of Jinnah’s Muslim League not only continued to be active in independent India, but even became an electoral ally of the Congress Party.
If Muslim politicians developed a vested interest in minorityhood, the Indian state evolved a vested interest in its perpetuation: support the leaders of the minority, pre-empt their radicalization vis-à-vis the state by giving them no cause to fear it, and so co-opt them into the national consensus. When objections were voiced on religious grounds, as over the Shah Banu alimony case, the state rushed to appease the most conservative elements in the minority community Instead of keeping an “equal distance” from all religions, successive Indian governments came to “equal engagement” with each of them, offering subventions both financial and political to their leaders. This was not particularly secular in any sense of the term, but secularism is what we — not knowing any better — called it for fifty years.
As the eminent Harvard economist Amartya Sen put it, “Secularism as it is practiced in India . . . reflects the sum of the collective feelings of intolerance of the different communities and is not based on combining their respective capacities for tolerance.” Perhaps inevitably, some Hindus have begun to see the disadvantages of their “majority-status. The secular state, they say, openly favors minorities but remains neutral (or, as with the Hindu Code Bill, interventionist) in regard to the majority; so what price majorityism? The classic instance of this realization was the request of the Ramakrishna Mission, an active group of Hindu missionaries who both perform social service and provide theological guidance, to be classified as a minority institution under the tax laws. Arguably it was another government policy—the approval of the Mandal proposal for reservations for the “backward classes” — that gave impetus to the agitation that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, as Hindu leaders sought to put mandir (temple) before Mandal. The secular Indian state has come to be seen by many Hindus as an instrument to control, divide, and rein in the Hindus, while perpetuating the self-assertion of the minorities (and by this is almost always meant one particular minority, the Muslims). Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP leader who briefly became prime minister after the 19% elections but failed to win a majority in Parliament, put it bluntly to The New York Times: “If you go on talking about ‘Muslims, Muslims,’ and ‘minorities, minorities,’ you injure the Hindu psyche. People start asking, ‘Is it going to be a crime to be a Hindu in this country?’”
Liberal Indians can well say, as I have often done, that the Hindutva reaction to Muslims as a community is misplaced, because most believing Muslims are also patriotic Indians, and because one cannot tar a collectivity in reaction to the excesses of a few. But the problem is that the good intentions of the Indian state — by granting privileges and exceptions to the Muslims as a community, and thereby treating the community politically as if it were a monolith — have made such a reaction possible. Too many Hindus now fail to draw a distinction between the bearded Muslim priest preaching sectarianism or even separatism on religious grounds and the bearded Muslim priest who merely sees his faith as a vital personal anchor in a troubled world. Both are objectified politically in the same way, and the
nationalist discourse suffers accordingly.
To some degree, the workings of Indian democracy, which remains the best guarantee of Indian pluralism, have served to create and perpetuate India’s various particularisms. The Hindu-Muslim divide is merely the most visible, but that within Hinduism, between caste Hindus and the former Untouchables and now between the upper castes and the lower intermediate castes — the “backwards” — is actually transforming Indian society in ways the founding fathers did not anticipate. The uses of caste as an index of eligibility for affirmative action and as an instrument of political mobilization have, in particular, made today’s Indians more caste-conscious than ever before.
This damaging consequence of well-intentioned social and political engineering means that, in the five decades since independence, we have failed to create a single Indian community. Instead we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. What makes us, then, a nation? At a time when, across the world, more and more ethnic, religious, and cultural groups agitate for separation from larger political entities that subsume them with groups unlike themselves, this question is particularly relevant.
Amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out a congeries of principalities and statelets, the nineteenth-century Italian novelist Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio wrote memorably, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Oddly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought: “We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.” Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Travancore peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, his nationalist movement did.
Nations have been formed out of varying and different impulses. France and Thailand are the products of a ruthless and unifying monarchy, while Germany and the United States are those of a sternly practical and yet visionary modernizing elite. Italy and Bangladesh are the results of mass movements led by messianic figures, Holland and Switzerland the creation of discrete cantons wishing to merge for their mutual protection. But it is only recently that race or ethnicity has again been seen as the basis of nationhood, as has become apparent in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
Most modern nations are the product of a fusion of population groups over the centuries, to the point where one element is indistinguishable from the next. The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan pointed out, for instance, that “an Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. However, [he] . . . is neither the Briton of Julius Caesar’s time, nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist’s time, nor the Dane of Canute’s time, nor the Norman of William the Conqueror’s time; [he] is rather the result of all these.” We cannot yet say the same of an Indian, because we are not yet the product of the kind of fusion that Renan’s Englishman represents: despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in the cities, Indians still largely remain endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi.
So India cannot claim ethnicity as a uniting factor, since what we loosely have in common with one another as a generally recognizable “type” we also have in common with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Maldivians, and Nepalese, with whom we no longer share a common political identity. Looking again at foreign models of the nation-state, many scholars have pointed out that the adoption of Christianity by both conquerors and conquered helped the creation of the Western European nations, since it eliminated the distinction between ethnic groups in the society on the basis of their religion. But this is not an answer to the Indian predicament, for most of India’s Bengalis and Punjabis share a common faith, and are still distinct; and equally important, more than 150 million Indians do not share the faith of the majority, and would be excluded from such a community (as nonChristian minorities among immigrants in Europe feel excluded today from full acceptance into their new societies).
A third element that has, historically, served to unite nations in other parts of the world is language. In Europe, conquerors and conquered rapidly came to speak the same language, usually that of the conquered. In India, attempts by Muslim conquerors to import Persian or Turkic languages never took root; instead, the hybrid camp language called Urdu or Hindustani evolved as the language of both rulers and ruled in most of north India. But Hindi today has made very limited inroads into the south, east, and northeast, so linguistic unity remains a distant prospect (all the more so, given that languages like Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil have a far richer cultural and literary tradition than the Hindi that seeks to supplant them). One of the more remarkable political events of 1996 was the sight of Prime Minister Deve Gowda, a southerner with no knowledge of Hindi, delivering his Independence Day address from the traditional ramparts of Delhi’s sixteenth-century Red Fort in that language — the words having been written for him in his native Kannada script (in which they, of course, made no sense). Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India: the fact that the country can be ruled by a man who does not understand its “national language,” the fact that he would make the effort to speak it nonetheless, and the nature of the solution found to enable him to do so. One of Indian cinema’s finest “playback singers,” the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sung his way to the top of the Hindi charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him to read, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.
Language and religion have, around the world, proved themselves an inadequate basis for nationhood. More than eighty countries profess Christianity, but they do not seek to merge with one another; the Organization of the Islamic Conference has more than fifty members, who agree on many issues but do not see themselves as a single nation. As for language, Arabic makes meetings of the Arab League more convenient, no doubt, but has hardly been a force for political unity; Spanish has not melted the political frontiers that vivisect Latin America; and England and the U.S.A. remain, in the famous phrase, two countries divided by a common language.
A more poetic suggestion made by Renan, in his famous 1882 speech “What Is a Nation?” is that historical amnesia is an essential part of nation-building, that nations need to forget the horrible price they have paid in the distant past for their unity (the union of northern France with the Midi in the thirteenth century, he pointed out, followed from a period of warfare, massacres, and terror that lasted nearly a hundred years, and yet France is an archetypal nation, one whose people are almost unanimously conscious of being French). “The essence of a nation,” Renan wrote, “is that all individuals [in it] have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” That is true of India, though we Indians are not as good at for getting as we should be. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.
Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language (since we have at least seventeen or thirty-five, depending on whether you follow the Constitution or the ethnolinguists), geography (the “natural” frontiers of India have been hacked by the P
artition of 1947), ethnicity (the “Indian” accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians), or religion. Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land. This land imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once. Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream; we have given passports to our ideals. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of “the narcissism of minor differences,” in India we celebrate the commonalty of major differences. To stand Ignatieff on his head, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is political will: the will among the inhabitants of a nation to work together within a single political framework. Such a political will may not necessarily be unanimous, for there will always be those who reject the common framework for narrow sectarian ends, and every state has a duty to defend itself against such elements. Democracy rests on the premise that government occurs with the consent of the governed, but in the face of sectarianism and secession — the attempt to obtain political sovereignty for an ethnic community — no nation can allow its strongest principles of democracy to become its weakest link But if the overwhelming majority of the people share the political will for unity, and if they can lookback to both a past and a future, a nation can indeed be said to exist whatever the diversity it comprises. This is the case with India.
Renan argued that a “nation is a spiritual principle, the outcome of profound complications of history.” Nehru, as we have seen, echoed this vision in his own discovery of India. Renan also spoke of “the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage one has received,” as the animating principle of a nation. Though his views were first expounded more than a century ago, a fact that his vocabulary sometimes betrays, it is worth citing Renan again:
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