Whew! All is not lost. The future seems safe in the hands of student leaders like Kanhaiya Kumar. Charged as an anti-national on the basis of doctored videos the blockbuster speech he delivered on his return to the JNU campus and his extremely sensible views make him the hero the country needs right now. Meanwhile, let’s sort out who an anti-national is. Right now, anyone can be called an anti-national. So who exactly is an anti-national?
Since doctored videos, fake tweets and rabble-rousing anchors, didn’t help, I went to the the dictionary. The Oxford dictionary said an anti-national was one who was “opposed to national interests.” Rabindranath Tagore has taught me to be very suspicious of the idea of nationalism. At the dictionary again. What exactly does “nation” mean? “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture or language, inhabiting a particular territory.” The word comes from the Latin natio, which is from the verb nasci, meaning “born”. So are we a nation?
Certainly not, don’t be foolish. We are a country of the sons of Ram, of course. But then there are the sons of Babur. Then there are the Christians and others. The rest is all of us, children of Ram. Er, well, almost. Psst! There are others too, who can’t be the children of Ram, no, of course, not, chhi! But I can’t quite recall where these low caste chaps sprouted from... Dalits have a very different bloodline. What? The tribal lot? I am not sure, really, but not from Ram, no. They have always been around, you know.
Clearly, we are not all of common descent. The north differs from the south, the west differs from the east, mainland India from the islands and mainstream India from the Northeast and tribal India. Third, do we have one common culture? God knows we tried, but the roots of these Indian cultures are too strong, their plurality impossible to smooth out. And what a host of races, tribes, regions, religions we have. So We remain distressingly multicultural.
Fourth, do all of us inhabiting our state speak the same language? You must be joking! There are almost 800 languages in India, of which 24 are officially accepted as strong languages. So how can a country that does not meet any requirement of nationhood claim to be a nation? And if we are not a nation, how can anyone be anti-national?
Nationalism stems from an imagined bond that we in India never really had. It is a contrived idea that cannot contain our motherland. A century ago, in 1917, Tagore had rejected the idea of a nation because it attempted to make a population into a soulless organisation that can only serve political purposes. Thirty years before India became free, Tagore told the West: “You who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom to this fetish of nationalism...” Besides, India was too diverse to be one nation.
Not much has changed. Does the dalit and the upper caste man who can kill him for harming a cow have equal ownership of this nation? Do the farmers who kill themselves when they can’t pay back a bank loan of a few thousands share the same nation as the corporates who have loans worth billions waived? Do the tribals of Bastar who routinely face rape by security forces, have no access to justice and have any protest silenced by fake encounters live in the same nation as Mumbai’s glitterati?
Our realities are starkly different. Delhi’s view of the nation is very different from the view from the Northeast. In the saffron nation, Nathuram Godse is a hero, Afzal Guru a terrorist. In the non-saffron nation the killer of the Mahatma is no hero, just a murderer. In Kashmir Guru is not a terrorist but a victim of judicial murder. In the saffron nation, Mr Kumar can be jailed as an anti-national just for being at a rally where someone shouted objectionable slogans, but Kuldeep Varshney, the saffron leader who offers on TV and FB a reward of Rs 5 lakh for cutting off Mr Kumar’s tongue, roams free.
If we do want one nation we need to go by one fundamental reality and belief system. We need to go by the Constitution. Not sidestep it ever for reasons of politics, economy, tradition or custom. As long as we don’t doggedly accept the Constitution as our primal truth, we cannot be a nation. Except as a nation of anti-nationals.
