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Totalitarian nationalism is taking shape in India

This breeds xenophobia, chauvinism, violence, tyranny and is bad news for Christian, Muslim minorities
Totalitarian nationalism is taking shape in India

Student activists of a Hindu nationalist organization shout slogans against a state government’s alleged pro-Muslim stand. (Photo by AFP)

Published: April 13, 2016 08:43 AM GMT
Updated: April 13, 2016 08:43 AM GMT

In several ways, one can trace different hues of nationalism in India.  But in recent days, the nation seems to be challenged with a totalitarian form of nationalism.

Notions of nationalism and anti-nationalism have become a discourse in media, with some drawing clear lines between people, separating those who are with the nation and those who are deemed as not to be one with India.

With such lines drawn, people are bracketed as anti-nationals, often based on fluid, trivial and almost irrational grounds.

One’s food habits, love life, slogans one raises or refuse to raise, strangely become a basis to mark people as nationalists or anti-nationalists. Hindu religion and culture is being identified with the nation and nationalism. It looks at all those who do not accept Hindu cultural hegemony as anti-national.

Within this framework, democracy seems ruptured and hollowed out by a totalitarian nationalism. And since this remains uncontested, is profoundly discomforting.

This exclusionary sort of nationalism can steadily lead to the collapse and death of liberal democracy in India.

Prior to the start of the nationalism debate, the nation witnessed a spate of events that showed some Hindu groups' inability to tolerate differences in opinion, culture and faith expressions.

There were umpteen media reports on attacks on Christians, and how hardline groups were passing orders banning Christian worship and mission work in Indian villages.

Christians along with Muslims have always faced allegations about loyalty to religious authorities outside the country. Sometimes, Christian responses to growing poverty and injustice are being misconstrued as allurement attempts for conversion.

Though, India has not shown any significant growth in the number of Christians, the issue of conversion has always been an explosive issue in our country.  

Also, there have been attacks on book publishers, murders of atheists and rationalists all because they had a different, non-conformist, viewpoint.

The danger that nationalism poses in this atmosphere of intolerance is deeper.  The hostilities that emerge from intolerance has put on the mask of nationalism to the extent that one can shout certain slogans and indulge in vandalism or beating up fellow Indians, and yet seemingly remain above the law.  

Some lawyers admitted publically before media that they beat up a person in a New Delhi courtroom just because he refused utter a patriotic slogan.

The hooliganism in the New Delhi courtroom is not just an isolated incident but is also a symbolic instance of what religious minorities have been facing regularly in this country.

Everyone condemns violence, yet violence when combined with nationalist slogans suddenly transmutes into some kind of patriotic action and instantly gets defended and legitimacy from several quarters. That is a danger.

That is why India should critically watch nationalism in all its guises because it can degenerate into xenophobia and mindless chauvinism, justifying organized violence and tyranny.

The wide diffusion of an intolerant totalitarian form of nationalism cannot but leave us terrified, as the very idea of India seems to be crumbling right in front of us.  

The prospects of a rising tide of totalitarian nationalism are bad news for Christians and other religious minorities in India.  

Steady loss of diversity in Indian culture through a crafty homogenization has been successful in projecting Indian Christians as foreigners in their own country.

This state, of being in exile in one’s own home country, will only accelerate in the coming days if totalitarian nationalism gains acceptance and legitimacy.

No one disputes that several forms of nationalism were evident in pre-independent India. However, it was an aspiration for a nation free from British colonial rule that brought together a form of nationalism that rose above the differences in culture, language and religion.  

 

Members of India’s largest Hindu nationalist grassroots group that wants to turn secular India into a Hindu theocracy. (Photo by AFP)

 

But when nationalism tries to superimpose the aspirations of one segment of society, we are in danger of creating a new form of colonization from within, one that projects the majority as rulers and minorities as subjects.

Nationalism is a doctrine invented by Europe in the 19th century and borrowed by our country. It was naturalized, appropriated and assimilated and given an Indian context.  The colonial British two-nation theory that emerged resulted in the partition of India based on religion — Hinduism and Islam — something that is still afflicting Indian society.  

Hence, it is not surprising that some ultra nationalists bracket some people as anti-national, sometimes based simply on mere food habits, and want them to go to Pakistan.

Sometimes, we also hear ultra nationalists speak of Indian Catholics implementing an agenda coming from Rome that aims to destroy India’s Hindu culture, and therefore are seen as anti-nationalists and should move away to Rome.

Although baseless, such statements when repeated find acceptance among some people, especially among the ill-educated and simple villagers.

This indicates that we in India are traveling on a ship whose inhabitants throw people they deem anti-national into the ocean.  The ship that is moving in search of a nation is allied to the mad ship that Michel Foucault, a French philosopher portrays in Madness and Civilization.  

This seems to stand out in the way we have witnessed how dissent is being silenced and stifled with the strong arm of nationalism by the present regime that has not refrained from using the state apparatus against student protests at different universities in our country.  

Impatience and resentment against a nationalism that teaches us lessons of hate is growing among young people in the country. Besides, an attempt to promote Hindu hegemony through syllabuses and administration, seems to be an attempt to police and crush free-thinking students by branding them as anti-national just because they challenge a certain ideology.  

A number of incidents in the recent past across the nation typify the way totalitarian nationalism has hijacked democracy in India where the denial, deprivation and erosion of democracy masquerades as nationalism.

Such developments in the country should only strengthen Indians’ resolve to resist and defeat a totalitarian nationalism that wounds India’s democracy, undermines its constitution and denationalizes Christians and other minorities.   

Victor Ferrao, is professor of Philosophy in Rachol Major Seminary in Goa Archdiocese and is a social commentator for local dailies in this western Indian state.

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