The nation, the state and the other: Hindutva's imprint on nationalism in India
Yogendra Yadav ('The nationalism we forgot', IE, May 27) stresses a familiar distinction between two nationalisms, one that emerged in the crucible of the Indian freedom struggle and another that he repeatedly calls 'European nationalism', specifically citing only Germany (presumably of the 1930s and '40s). He invokes a vivid label — 'belonging without othering' — to characterise the distinction. The nationalism pursued in the freedom struggle exemplified this label. The nationalism in Europe precisely did not, neither does the nationalism in currency in India today.
Much of the essay elaborates how this current form of nationalism in India has resulted in undermining the rights of citizens to speak critically of the government. Being a nationalism defined by hostility towards the other — both outside our borders as well as inside — it extends this hostility to its internal critics as well, viewing all criticism as treasonously aligning itself with the outsider. By contrast, a nationalism that refuses 'othering' in its understanding of belonging views its internal critics as enriching the plurality that such a refusal permits (in contrast to the 'uniformity' demanded by the very act of 'othering'). This latter pluralist nationalism was the worthy legacy of the freedom movement and Yadav concludes his essay by laying the fault for the rise of the offending nationalism in India today at the doorstep of what he thinks of as a secularised, internationalist, modernist ethos that was cultivated in post-Independence India, which eschewed all nationalism, thereby creating a 'nationalism' vacuum that is now filled by the Hindutva conception of the nation. It would seem, then, that for Yadav, the betrayal of the legacy of the freedom movement began with the secularised modernity adopted after Independence and that betrayal gave rise to its opposite, the religious majoritarian Hindutva nationalism of our present time.
Suhas Palshikar ('Who stole my nationalism?', IE, May 31) is right to accept the distinction between these two nationalisms and sensible too in expressing some scepticism about Yadav's diagnosis of its fault line. He holds more squarely responsible the contemporary perpetrators of Hindutva, but closes by tracing their nationalism to elements within the national movement more than a century earlier.
I'd like to briefly give the related genealogies of these two nationalisms because that will bring out why it is not enough to see the 'nation' as their main topic. The topic is equally — and inseparably — the 'state'.
Sometime in the mid-17th century in Europe, as a result of the rise of modern science, traditional justification of state power, as residing in the divine right of the monarch who personified the state, had lost its appeal. So, a new justification was sought, no longer in theology but in political psychology. At the same time, two developments occurred that shaped this revised justification. Since the Westphalian peace, a new entity had emerged (the nation) and power, whose locations had hitherto been relatively scattered, became increasingly centralised. In the centuries that followed, these twin developments conjoined and culminated in the fusion of the nation and the state, a fusion expressed by a hyphen: The nation-state. So, the political psychology that provided the new justification of state power took the form of generating a feeling for what was named by the left-hand side of the hyphenated conjunction (nation) and — because it was fused with what was named by the right-hand side of the hyphen — that feeling would legitimise the state. Much later this came to be called 'nationalism'. And the question was: How was this feeling to be generated?
Everywhere in Europe it was generated by a standard ploy: Find an external enemy within the nation (the Jews, the Irish, the Protestants in Catholic countries, the Catholics in Protestant countries…), despise it and subjugate it, and declare the nation to be 'ours', not 'theirs'. When numerical and statistical methods came to be applied to the study of society, notions of majority and minority emerged and the ploy came to be called 'majoritarianism' — and since these categories were often defined by religion, it was, in those cases, called 'religious majoritarianism'.
It is worth remarking that in tandem with this genealogy in Europe of one of these nationalisms is the genealogy of the doctrine of secularism. Nation-building exercises on the basis of such religious majoritarianism inevitably led to religious minoritarian backlash, and it was the civil strife created by this that gave rise to the doctrine of secularism, which blamed the influence of religion on the polity for such strife, and sought to repair the damage by articulating an outlook in which all religion (whether of the majority or the minorities) was ushered out from having any direct influence in the polity and the institutions of state.
I mention this point about secularism because the genealogy of the other nationalism can be presented by explaining why Gandhi showed no interest in secularist doctrine. His argument was quite straightforward. The doctrine is there to prevent a certain damage created by European nationalism and since that damage had not occurred in India, it would be slavish mimicry to adopt it. Indian society has, for centuries, been characterised by an unselfconscious pluralism of religions and cultures living side-by-side and so Indian nationalism will re-play this pluralism in inclusive mass mobilisations against imperialism — and both he and Nehru conspicuously sought to do so, especially with Muslims, both in the Khilafat period and later with the Muslim Mass Contact campaign. Secularism is only relevant when this unselfconscious pluralism has been undermined and replaced by the civil strife that warranted it in Europe. Moreover, since the strife came via a nationalism that was at the heart of a legitimation of a certain form of centralised state power, that very idea of a state should be shunned in India — Gandhi's innovations in thinking of governance in highly decentralised terms were as much part of his alternative nationalism as its pluralism that Yadav asks us to cherish.
It was those ideas of governance more than the pluralism that were dismissively repudiated by his own party in the years immediately after independence.
A word, in conclusion, about Palshikar's tracing of Hindutva nationalism to much earlier elements in Indian nationalism. We need in these matters a distinction between the notion of 'roots' and 'antecedents'. There were indeed antecedents to contemporary Indian nationalism in Mahasabhite (and Savarkarite) ideas of an earlier time, but to call them the roots of the present would require tracing an organic causal path that connects the two. No one has done that. The roots of contemporary Hindutva nationalism lie no further back than a few decades, starting with the respectability that the Hindu right gained in opposing the Emergency (which the centre-left abjectly failed to do), and also in the ferociously concerted and highly effective effort that it then made to combat the effects of Mandal in exposing how divided Hinduism was by caste.
Finding an external enemy (the Muslim) within the nation that all Hindus must oppose was that unifying move. No doubt there were antecedents to such attitudes during the freedom struggle but they were marginalised by the dominance of Gandhi and Nehru and though this certainly left unresolved questions, these do not amount to the roots of current Hindutva nationalism.
The writer is Sidney Morgenbesser professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
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