The collective grief that binds Indians

the collective grief that binds indians
(NOTE: This is a reprint of an article that was published in the INDIA TODAY special edition dated August 20, 2007) 

In the early 1950s, Milovan Djilas, the famous intellectual of what was once Yugoslavia, said with utmost certitude that India would not last the decade as a unified nation-state. It gives me a sense of perverse pleasure that while Yugoslavia was slashed to bloody bits and has now disappeared without a trace, India is still around and good for many more years.

The very existence of India and its coming into late middle age convincingly demonstrate that the textbook notions of the nation-state are grossly in error. The belief that European nation-states came into being because they were fired by the energies of a single language and religion is wildly off the mark. At the time of the French Revolution, less than 18 per cent of the population spoke French. When Italy was formed, Massimo d’Azeglio said that now that Italy was made it was about time to make Italians. It is said that less than 2 per cent of Italians spoke Italian at the time of its nativity.

Instead of such facts doing the rounds, we were subjected to stylised versions of the western nation-state that made us a little shamefaced about the prospects of a united India. Our colonial masters consistently sowed this doubt in us for it justified their plotted manoeuvres at divide and rule. Before they were finally relieved of their burden, they issued the dire warning that the “men of straw”, who were succeeding them, lacked the stuffing to govern India. Communities and castes would soon fall upon each other without the restraining hand of the British. Soon, India would break up into bite-sized pieces and any memory of its once unified past could hardly be served up with any conviction.

As if on tap, riots broke just before and after the declaration of Independence, lending credence to the view that India’s career as a nation-state was over even before it got started. Sadly, a large number of Indian scholars too bought into this line of thinking and won a fair amount of praise from the western press and academia.

But India fought off the so-called fissiparous forces with relative ease. In the initial years, however, even the stalwarts of the Independence movement were a little unsure of themselves. This is not surprising, given the din around them predicting India’s imminent collapse. That is why, when the cry went up for linguistic states in the early 1950s, many Congress leaders opposed it, but with one eye on the political barometer. They had not quite forgotten that from the 1920s the national movement had promised such linguistic states once India became Independent. To recoil from the suggestion now did not quite sit right with the popular urges outside that had already taken to the streets.

But after Bombay state was bifurcated into Gujarat and Maharashtra, and after Haryana and Punjab were carved out of the old Punjab, and so on, the worst fears of the centrists were easily allayed. Once these states were formed, their protagonists returned to routine politics. The motley coalitions that they had established for this cause soon came unstuck. The campaign was over and it was time to bring the posters down. It was not as if the success at establishing linguistic states would give their protagonists second wind to press on for a sovereign Maharashtra, Gujarat or Punjab, as some feared they would. The matter ended there and the heat of the partisans had turned cold.

The delay in the formation of linguistic states was quite unnecessary. Those at the helm of affairs should have known better than to drag their feet at a genuine democratic demand to be governed in one’s mother tongue. But the reluctance to live up to its earlier promise was because the Congress leaders in Delhi half-believed what was being said about India’s fragility. In hindsight, we should congratulate ourselves that linguistic states were formed or else we could have headed for a full time civil war as in neighbouring Sri Lanka.

India defied the mythical tales about nation-states from the start. The ambitions to live up to the one national language format were shot down because of strong opposition to Hindi from the South. Hindi was later reinstated, but only as an official language, and that too by a slender majority. But there was practically no opposition to the newly enshrined law that secession would hitherto be treated as a crime against the State (with a capital “S”). When Sardar Patel calmly went about adding to our territorial possessions by integrating swathes of princely India, where was the opposition to it?

Nehru and others had earlier deposed before a number of British missions, should any section demand secession from the Indian Union later, then that should be respected as a variant of the right to self-determination. But after the reality of Partition, they firmly locked their large, bleeding hearts. From now on the State came down heavily against those who dared disturb “a blade of grass” or a “grain of soil” in our sacred land. And there was no significant voice of demur against such decrees from any quarter.

There is really no yellow brick road to an ideal nation-state. Each sovereign country arrives at this denouement through routes that are peculiar to its history, cultural makeup and, of course, geography. Italy, Spain and France, and indeed, Britain too, did not follow the popular make-believe stories of the perfectionist route to a nation-state. They all differed in their own way, but western commentators have conveniently forgotten their own pasts.

It is indeed impossible to say what keeps a nation-state together. After reviewing piles of literature, Hans Kohn concluded that a nation-state is a nation-state when it sees itself as a nation-state. It is hard to better this pithy aphorism for it puts all analytical attempts to dissect nation-states to rest. Why did Sikhs not support Khalistan? There is no rational answer to this. It is not as if Punjab would economically keel over if it seceded from India. There are dozens of small states that are landlocked and are doing famously. If Kohn were asked, then he would probably say that Sikhs did not want Khalistan because they did not want Khalistan. And that was it.

Ernest Renan once advised students of nationalism to stay away from sociologists, and more particularly, ethnographers. This is good counsel because scholars of this ilk are most comfortable in detailing differences and not similarities. As differences sell better and make more interesting copy, these academics revel in measuring distances between people. A nation-state is a putative unity, but how is this achieved? In my view, Renan gave us the only convincing answer to this question. In the ultimate analysis, argued Renan, after all is said and done, it is collective grief that binds a nation-state together like nothing else.

In other words, nation-states thrive better on good enemies than on good friends. America’s grief was once Russia, or Cuba, and, most recently, Iraq. Britain set sail on choppy waters looking for its grief and found it in the frigid Falkland Islands. India’s grief is Pakistan, and Pakistan reciprocates this sentiment in turn. This is why Renan went on to say that thinking nationally was a wholly different enterprise from thinking rationally, and the two can hardly coexist.

When I go for my field trips to different parts of south India I often ask poor, half-lettered people there whether Punjab should secede, or Kashmir break away. Their response nearly always is, “No”. Though these impoverished villagers may not know where these places are on the map, may not have even the vaguest idea about our Constitution, and yet, squatting in the shade of their mud huts, they don’t want any more Partitions. Such is the profundity with which the formation of Pakistan has been seared into our national consciousness. The trauma of 1947 has consequently equipped us, as a nation, to trace imaginary lineaments of the State, even though we are frequently unable to draw the line between the “rational” and the “national”.

In spite of India’s proven record of resilience, there is a constant stream of western academics that visit India only to find fault with our people. They argue that India does not have what it takes to be a sustainable nation-state for the masses are unaware of who the prime minister is, or the functions of the President, or the basic principles of the Constitution, and so on. I would like them to carry out similar investigations in the US or the UK for I wager they would also find people there too who are ignorant of the provisions of their respective Constitutions, and many would not even know the names of their prime minister or President.

A famous American TV talk-show host once took his camera to the streets of Manhattan and asked New Yorkers about the significance of July 4, America’s official day of Independence. He got the strangest answers. One said that on this day the ducks fly back home; another believed that this was the original Halloween day. One of them came close and got kind of warm when she said that on July 4 America had won a war. The TV host showed immediate interest. “Against whom?” he asked. The answer, very tentatively, was, “Against Canada?” On the strength of this can we then say that America is an inauthentic nation-state? After all, many Americans failed a simple general knowledge test in the most cosmopolitan city of their country.

It is better then to be more forgiving of frailties in other nation-states and more respectful of how each of them gets its flag to fly. There is no “best practice” as to how nation-statehood is achieved. But all successful nation-states end up in converting their territory into sacred soil. Like sankhya, it is better in such cases to begin with an analysis of the effects and not the cause. If we use the effects test then India comes up on top as a successful nation-state. Our wars with Pakistan and China have sacralised our territory repeatedly. When we have border tensions we come together regardless of political differences. When India helped in dismembering Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh, even CPI(M) parliamentarians boisterously broke protocol and decorum right under the Speaker’s dais.

Clearly, we have a strong nationalist sentiment in India, but that, in my view is not enough. We need to foster a sense of citizenship and that is the crucial test that lies ahead. The debates should no longer be about India’s unity. India has proved itself and shown its detractors to be wrong for 60 straight years. We now have to prove ourselves as a nation-state that respects “citizens” and not just “people”. There are no majorities and minorities, no insiders and outsiders. The rich and poor have equal rights as citizens as they can access public goods at quality levels regardless of the accident of birth. When that happens India will be democratic in truly substantive terms.

Can we overcome our national grief and look beyond Pakistan and the Partition? Perhaps we can, though not yet. Once that happens, a new alignment of forces will have to be in place. In this fresh configuration we will not be arguing about nation-states any longer but about “knowledge-states”. The European Union is haltingly showing us the way in this regard, but we have still a long way to go even there.

But when we finally reach that destination it will be a huge relief. We can, at long last, finally rid ourselves of the savage histories of our collective pasts that nation-states find so inspirational.

—Dipankar Gupta wrote this article as a professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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