India: Many Nations

From 'Open'

India is not one but many nations. “You can only speak of India in the plural,” as Dr Shashi Tharoor puts it in his article in the Open magazine’s Freedom Issue dated Aug 22. There are many Indias, he says, making up what India today is. There is too much diversity in this country: languages, cultures, religions, races, and so on for it to be a monolithic nation. Slogans such as One India, One Language, One Religion are not only absurd but also chimeric.

Among many other things that make India different from other countries, Tharoor mentions that the country’s civilization gave birth to four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, 85 political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato. Where on earth would you find a country in which a Roman Catholic political leader of Italian origin making way for a Sikh man to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim President? [2004 scenario]

India has no majority community, Tharoor argues. All are minorities in India one way or another. If you are a Brahmin, you belong to 10% of the country’s population. If you are an OBC of the Yadav variety, you are in the minority group of 15%. There is no monolithic or monocultural Hinduism in India. A Tamil Hindu has little in common with a Haryanvi Hindu. Culturally a Malayali Hindu and a Malayali Christian will have much more in common than a Malayali Hindu and a Bihari Hindu.

Tharoor finds a telling symbol for India from his constituency. “In Thiruvananthapuram,” he says, “there stands in Palayam the towering St Joseph’s Cathedral, diagonally across from the Juma Masjid, while a few metres down the street is one of the oldest and most revered temples to Ganapati. That is India.” It is that India with its unique charm that is under threat today from the supporters of majoritarian nationalism.

The Frontline magazine too has a Freedom Edition dated Aug 26. It carries, among many other things, an interview with Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of the Father of the Nation and eminent historian. “In old age,” says Gandhi, “I am witnessing a fearsome assault on my boyhood dream. What wounds me the most is the silence from the top about cruelties on the ground.” The cruelties are perpetrated in the name of a religion and nationalism. Vigilante groups and TV channels are creating norms in present India. There are parallel governments running in most states with the tacit support of the Union government.

As Tharoor finds a symbol from Palayam, Rajmohan Gandhi takes his symbol from the Ashoka Pillar that Modi unveiled recently for the new Parliament building. Instead of the original lions which evoked reverence, now we have four snarling lions which evoke terror. This terror lies at the very roots of Modi’s ideology.

India is not really independent, Rajmohan Gandhi thinks. His grandfather would have agreed because the Mahatma did not equate freedom with liberation from colonial rule. Freedom of the spirit was more important for him. Unless every single Indian is free at heart, Independence has no meaning. Liberating India from mutual ignorance, mutual dislike and mutual fear may turn out to be harder than liberating India from the British rule, says Rajmohan Gandhi.

Most periodicals have dedicated their latest issues to celebrating the country’s 75^th anniversary of Independence. The weekly, Malayalam [published inn Malayalam by The New Indian Express group], has a long article titled ‘From Nehru to Modi’. It argues that Modi has taken India from Nehru’s secularism to a narrowminded theocracy or ‘religiocracy’. This latest regime favours just a few people, in fact, argues the article. Some religious leaders and a handful of capitalists are the only gainers of the system though it strives to give the impression that the majority community stands to benefit enormously. Look at the present Lok Sabha and see the number of billionaires and criminals there. Ours now is a government of the rich and the criminal.

The article bluntly states that a Prime Minister who constantly preaches about his commitments to his people is in fact scared of simple criticism so much so that too many of his critics are in jail now. Democracy dies almost every day in the country in many forms: from horse-trading of elected politicians to stifling all forms of opposition. The Malayalam article concludes thus: “This country belongs to farmers. To ordinary workers in the villages. To the starving millions in the countryside. To those thousands who can’t afford an alternate pair of dress or proper treatment in good hospitals, to those who don’t even have proper homes to sleep in. A leader who thinks that he is the only leader and all others are his subordinates is not a genuine leader. And Indians must remember that their thinking faculty is not to be kept in a refrigerator.”