For the past few months, a lively debate on nationalism has
been resounding in the print and electronic media ever since its
Leftist-liberal segments discovered a new national hero and iconoclast in
comrade Kanhaiya, who seemed intent upon supporting every strand of separatist
sentiment in the country. He was arrested but soon released under media
pressure. Some senior lawyers and mediapersons said the slogans in the
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)—calling for the breakup of India and murder
of Supreme Court Justices who sentenced Afzal Guru—were not sedition. They did
not incite violence. Kanhaiya returned to triumphalism in JNU. Leftist
professors and students soon held tutorials on nationalism that were broadcast
all over the country. A nation state, they said, is the collectivity of its
people. Nation states are constantly evolving. So people are free to come and
go. Kashmir, thus, is free to walk out of this circus. So is Nagaland, Manipur,
Mizoram. The Maoist supporters of JNU would like them to go. Where will this
exodus end? What if the ghettos of Saharanpur, Meerut, Azamgarh, Hyderabad,
parts of Kerala wish to secede tomorrow? So be it, said the Leftist tutorial.
What then is a nation? A throng of commuters? Steven Grosby,
professor at Clemson University, wrote, “A nation is a territorial community of
nativity. One is born into a nation... (it has) great extent of territory (and)
also a relatively uniform culture that provides stability and continuation over time.” French scholar
Ernest Renan wrote, “A nation implies a bounded, territorial community of
customs and laws.” So a nation state is not just a collection of people (free
to come and go), it is people plus a sharply defined territory.
We are Indians because we were born in the territory of
India, to parents who were citizens of India. India is, therefore, our homeland.
Barack Obama could become the US President because he was born on its territory
(in Hawai). The Leftist assertion that territory has no role to play in
defining a nation state is astonishing. Impermeable borders are a hard fact of
life. Can the Leftists enter Pakistan or the US without passports and visas?
The Indian Constitution enjoins upon its citizens the duty to respect and
uphold the nation’s unity, integrity and sovereignty—concepts that the Leftists
seem to hold in contempt.
The term nation, therefore, refers to both a land and its
people. The nation is a social relation with both temporal depth and bounded
territory. It persists over time and cannot be destroyed by walkouts. National
consciousness is sustained by rituals, symbols (flag, emblem, anthem, parade)
and a shared history. Parents transmit to their offsprings not only genes, but
also cultural memes—the cultural inheritance from a distant past, their
language, customs, religion etc. Citizenship, that is birth within its
territory, is recognised as the primary criterion for the membership of a
nation. Armies fight and die to defend the sacred concept that is territory and
its people. You cannot carve out slices at will on the whims of an Umar Khalid
or a Kanhaiya. Patriotism is the love that one has for one’s nation. It is not
a lumpen trait.
Nation states emerged from the treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
They had defined borders whose transgression could lead to war. They were
likened (in the realist conception) to billiard balls that clashed against one
another. The state had the monopoly of
violence within its territory. It effectively disarmed the population and
created armed forces to protect the state and its people.
No other nation has had the idea of its self-hood and
identity so comprehensively destroyed as India’s was. Over two centuries years
of colonial rule saw a concerted campaign to eradicate unity and destroy a
pan-India identity. After the revolt of 1857, the British identified every
fault line in India to divide and rule its people. They laid heavy emphasis on
caste. John Risley held the first caste-based census in 1872 to fracture its
people. They equally exploited creed and gave separate electorates to the
Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits. India, they said, was never a nation
state—just a cauldron of castes and creeds perennially at war with one another.
It needed an external power to enforce the idea of “imperial justice” between
the warring castes and creeds and ensure law and order. Indians, they said,
were squabbling savages incapable of governing themselves. The idea of India as
a nation was as preposterous as the idea
of the equator as a basis of nationhood.
The leaders of the freedom struggle tried hard to forge a
pan- India identity beyond caste and creed. Pity is that the pygmy politicians
of post-Independence India have fallen back to the fault lines to create vote
banks. In the process, they have weakened
the idea of India. The current Communist cacophony over caste and ethnic
fault lines seeks to openly break up the country. And to do this, they exploit
the freedom of speech. We need a rational debate on this vital subject.
By Maj. Gen. (Retd) G D Bakshi
gagandeep.bakshi@yahoo.com
Courtesy: The New Indian Express
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