Skip to main content

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 75th 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.” 


PS. Written for Indispire Edition 418: one nation, one identity , one emotion... and I thought it was unity in diversity... #azadikiamrutotsav

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Excellent post, Tomichan-bhai!!! Such voices as mentioned here must grow louder and grow in number... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Yamini. Today's papers carry reports that the Constitution of Hindu Rashtra is being completed. non-Hindus will have no voting rights.... We do need a lot more sane voices.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...

Stories from the North-East

Book Review Title: Lapbah: Stories from the North-East (2 volumes) Editors: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih & Rimi Nath Publisher: Penguin Random House India 2025 Pages: 366 + 358   Nestled among the eastern Himalayas and some breathtakingly charming valleys, the Northeastern region of India is home to hundreds of indigenous communities, each with distinct traditions, attire, music, and festivals. Languages spoken range from Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic tongues to Indo-Aryan dialects, reflecting centuries of migration and interaction. Tribal matrilineal societies thrive in Meghalaya, while Nagaland and Mizoram showcase rich Christian tribal traditions. Manipur is famed for classical dance and martial arts, and Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh add further layers of ethnic plurality and ecological richness. Sikkim blends Buddhist heritage with mountainous serenity, and Assam is known for its tea gardens and vibrant Vaishnavite culture. Collectively, the Northeast is a uni...

The RSS and Paradoxes

The oldest racist organisation in the world is all set to celebrate the centenary of its existence. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded in 1925 with the specific goal of unifying the Hindus in India under a religious and cultural banner. The Indian Independence struggle that was going on in full force at that time was no concern of the RSS. Though it gave the liberty to its individual members to take part in the struggle, the organisation’s official policy was to stay clear of it altogether. That was only one of the many paradoxical ironies that marked the RSS which was a nationalist organisation that cared little for the Independence of the nation. Today, the Prime Minister of India is a man who was trained and nurtured by the RSS. Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book on the paradoxes that underscore the personality of Mr Narendra Modi. The RSS and paradoxes go hand in hand, if we take Modi as a specimen of the organisation’s great achievements. Tharoor’s final asses...