India's culture wars

Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is the epicentre of the ongoing culture battle in India. But the war goes far beyond JNU and the immediate triggers that have catapulted this famous institution into the headlines. The nub of the matter is an attempt to define who or what is “anti-national”. And this boils down to basics: The legitimacy of choice. Does reported slogan-shouting in support of Afzal Guru and dismemberment of India at an event in the JNU campus amount to sedition? Was the arrest of JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar warranted?

The legal battle over sedition, and the midnight drama on Tuesday, leading to the surrender of two other students, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, will boost the spirit of agitators on both sides.

However, one must not lose sight of the big picture. The vicious and divisive theatre of war that the country has become is reflected only a little in these ideological jousts.

Those who value choices in the way one thinks, lives, loves, views patriotism and conceives the nation are pitted against those who have been taught to demonise choices and who fervently believe that “sentiment of the nation” is only what they think it is, and that it is the only thing that matters.

Culture crusades thrive on fear and paranoia. Cultural crusaders typically create a climate of intolerance towards the norms and values of their cultural targets. In this respect, the JNU events are eerily similar to what is happening in the United States though the issues at stake differ.

Americans have been denouncing one another as blasphemers and traitors since the inception of the republic. Typically, the fault lines of culture wars in the US have been abortion, God, guns and gays, to cite a few telling examples. And it has often veered towards violence. Many doctors and abortion providers in the US have been killed by anti-abortion extremists in the name of right to life.

Now, the culture wars underpinning the 2016 elections, as many analysts have pointed out, boil down to a more basic issue: what does it mean to be a real American? Donald Trump stands in a really long line of cultural warriors who want to exclude this group or that group from the “real American family”. Mr Trump is the acknowledged heavyweight champion of culture wars in today’s America. In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, the Republican presidential front-runner called for closing down some American mosques and for creating a database to track all Muslims living in the US. When US President Barack Obama was calling on fellow Americans not to “turn against one another” in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, Mr Trump proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. Predictably Mr Trump would like others to believe that his brand of “nationalism” is the only one that counts.

Cut to India’s ongoing culture wars. We don’t have US-style presidential elections. Nor Donald Trump. But there is the increasing “othering” of liberalism, as Saib Bilaval, a JNU research scholar, puts it.

The argument of “anti-nationalism” is increasingly being made through insidiously clever use of cultural markers. So anti-nationalism in the context of JNU, the Indian Berkeley and an old bugbear of social conservatives, is not just chanting offensive slogans which sound secessionist. Anti-nationals are so labelled also because their lifestyle choices differ from those of self-styled nationalists. A Delhi police report on the controversial Afzal Guru event held in the JNU campus on February 9 claimed that students ate beef on the campus and worshipped Mahishasur instead of Goddess Durga. This was cited as an example of anti-national activities.

In a recent blog in the wake of the JNU controversy, prominent television anchor Zakka Jacob wrote about trying to convince a bunch of apolitical JNU students to come on his show. Mr Jacob says he was told that some of the students while attending another TV debate the previous night had been forced by a BJP spokesperson to say, “Bharat Mata ki Jai.” The students were scared that if they didn’t, they would all be branded as traitors and anti-nationals.

There is nothing wrong in chanting “Bharat Mata ki Jai,” but is this the only one way of expressing love for one’s nation? Isn’t it dangerous to reduce love for one’s nation to a slogan, actions be damned? As Mr Jacob notes, the mere utterance or the reluctance to utter a slogan does not make any of us any less Indian than the other.

Perhaps the most bizarre marker for anti-nationalism comes from the utterances of Gyandev Ahuja, BJP MLA from Ramgarh in Rajasthan’s Alwar district. Mr Ahuja shot to international infamy by alleging that JNU is a hub of sex and drugs where over 3,000 used condoms and 2,000 liquor bottles are found every day. These, along with thousands of butts of cigarettes and beedis, big and small pieces of bones, presumably left by meat-eaters, proved to Mr Ahuja that JNU was a den of “anti-nationals.” Oh! And they also, apparently, dance naked. The students, on campus.

In normal times, such remarks would elicit mirth. But in today’s charged atmosphere, when everyone, including journalists, have been attacked simply because they didn’t conform to a specific idea of patriotism and nationalism, this is not a laughing matter. It is also not funny when a lawyer proudly tells a journalist that he would consider throwing a petrol bomb at someone he considers “anti-national”.

The culture war is an effort to restrict our liberty. And most people do not like such restrictions, though they may not say so out aloud. This dislike of restrictions is the reason why conservatives have been the big losers when it comes to culture wars in the US, argues Stephen Prothero, noted religious historian and author of a new book, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage.

India and the United States are different. But the ongoing culture battles offer us a valuable lesson and an opportunity to whole-heartedly reject the fallacy of false choices and the pigeonholing of fellow Indians into pariahs and patriots.

Let the law take its course in the JNU row as in everything else. But how we live and love our nation, whether we are inspired by the anganwadi worker, the teacher, the Armyman guarding the borders, the factory worker or the artists and writers who nourish our souls, is really our business.

To rejig Pink Floyd, no Indian needs no validation from another Indian.