A NEW SORT OF FREEDOM
NARENDRA MODI HAS TAKEN INDIAN NATIONALISM TO THE 21ST CENTURY. HE HAS BUILT THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE AND CONTEMPORARY ASPIRATIONS
AS A RULE, GENERALS ARE NOT MEANT TO AGONISE OVER THE NATURE of the war they fight. In 1933, shortly after the bitter Civil Disobedience Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi had led to a complete breakdown of the relationship between the Congress-led nationalist movement and the British Raj, Jawaharlal Nehru posed a question which he left unanswered: “Whose freedom are we particularly striving for, for nationalism covers many sins and includes many conflicting elements?”
What prompted this self-doubt in the mind of one of the foremost leaders of the Congress is not all that puzzling. In 1933, Nehru was in the throes of his radical phase and deeply influenced by the socialist currents in Europe. In all likelihood, he perceived the struggle for Independence as part of a larger political struggle against economic exploitation and imperialism. The reality, however, was not as red as he may have desired. While the Mahatma kept his gaze firmly on a just struggle for Ram Rajya using non-violence, the message of nationalism translated in unique ways at the grassroots. It was not merely a question of whose freedom, but what sort of freedom.
To the masses, Gandhi was a saint who combined political leadership with a moral force. He provided the symbolic leadership. At the same time, the actual movement was viewed as a
battle for the liberation of Bharat Mata from a thousand years of slavery. The imagery of the nationalist movement—from chants of ‘Vande Mataram’ to the twinning of Bharat Mata with gau mata—was explicitly Hindu. This had been so since the beginning of the 20th century, when Aurobindo equated nationalism with the sanatan dharma and Lokmanya Tilak twinned the celebrations of Ganesh and Shivaji into platforms of self-rule. Religion, wrote historian William Gould in a study of nationalist mobilisation in the 1930s and 1940s, “helped to provide the necessary framework, space, discipline and mobilisation, and in the process the political meaning of ‘Hinduism’ was refined as an idea… (The) Hindu people were represented as being coterminous with the Indian nation”.
This didn’t imply that India was perceived as a land for Hindus—or what is now described as Indic religions. It meant that the understanding of Indian as essentially Hindu—used in the loosest and predominantly cultural sense—was part of the national common sense.
It is pertinent to recall this facet of the Indian nationalist legacy in the context of a raging debate since the 1990s. Contemporary ‘secular’ scholarship has attempted to demonstrate that the assertive Hindu mobilisation that began with the Ayodhya movement and which found some reflection in the elections of 2014 and 2019 was a sharp break from the ‘idea of India’ that had moulded India’s emergence as an independent country. This is highly debatable.
In any case, the invocation of ‘idea’ in the singular is deeply problematic. In a country as large and varied as India, there were multiple currents. There were enlightened constitutionalists such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale who felt that freedom had to be preceded by social and political modernity. They were wary of uncontrolled mass involvement in politics. Then there was the poet Rabindranath Tagore whose love for India’s folk traditions was accompanied by his sharp rejection of nationalism and endorsement of universal values. Some Muslim activists had misgivings over both the very idea of nationalism and even a united India. And finally, there were the likes of Periyar and B.R. Ambedkar with a sharp focus on social liberation, particularly the destruction of the caste system.
The India that regained its political sovereignty in 1947 was not born of a single idea of nationhood. It embraced many and, often contradictory, currents. The Nehruvian consensus that dominated the intellectual space till the 1990s was one of the important inputs. As was Hindu nationalism that, in political terms, was a subterranean current but held a greater sway over popular mentalities. Gandhi recognised the importance of forging a rainbow coalition and insisted that the first government of independent India should also include non-Congress notables such as B.R. Ambedkar and Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
In today’s India, the belief that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a political interloper who has muscled his way to the centre stage taking advantage of the venality and leadership shortcomings of the Congress and other ‘secular’ forces is prevalent in some circles. It is based on two questionable assumptions.
The first of these is the mistaken belief that the terms of India’s post-Independence narrative were set in stone and incorporated both the preference for a ‘scientific temper’ and the constitutional consensus. “The day of national cultures is rapidly passing,” Nehru wrote with astonishing certitude in his An Autobiography in 1936, “and the world is becoming one cultural unit….” The real conflict was between traditional cultures, often defined by faith, and the “conquering scientific culture of modern civilisation”. In practice, this implied that India’s civilisational heritage, while important as decorative trappings, was secondary in the
construction of a modern India. For Nehru, the big dams and modern steel plants were the ‘temples’ of modern India whereas the older temples of faith epitomised irrationality, superstition and regressive beliefs. For the Nehruvian, the acceptable Hinduism was abstruse spiritualism and high philosophy; the lived Hindu faith centred on rituals and caste-determined customs had no place in modern India’s public life. Indeed, the latter were perceived as an impediment to progress.
There was an associated belief in what has subsequently come to be known as ‘constitutional patriotism’. The idea, based substantially on post-War German thought, sought to define nationhood in terms of the Constitution. Rather than defining the rules that governed the conduct of public life, the Constitution was elevated to the status of a philosophy for the nation. In a curious sort of way, 1950 became India’s Year Zero. The Indian nation that preceded the Constitution was sought to be relegated to the archives. Instead, a modern India with only a tenuous link to the past was sought to be built. The second belief that defined the pre-Modi consensus was the abhorrence of Hindu ‘majoritarianism’. This meant that explicitly Hindu impulses, particularly in politics, had to be kept firmly in check, not least with the invocation of other identities such as caste, class and region and, of course, the philosophy of secularism.
The secularism that emerged in India was, however, unique. The constitutional guarantees for religious minorities were fetishised. In Nehru’s value system, according to his official biographer S. Gopal, “the problem of minorities was basically one for the majority community to handle. The test of success was not what Hindus thought but how Muslims and other communities felt…” As prime minister, Manmohan Singh further refined this principle into the assertion that Muslims had “first claim” on the resources of the state.
Since the mid-1980s, India has witnessed the development of an alternative nationalism based on an explicit rejection of these two pillars of the Congress consensus. The rapid growth of the BJP began in 1989 but it was only under Modi that the party reached a hegemonic status, winning a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha in the elections of 2014 and 2019.
The nationalist challenge that Modi has mounted on the earlier Congress consensus has, quite undeniably, a link with the traditional Hindu nationalism of the RSS-BJP. The invocation of Bharat Mata—implying the sacredness of India—and the equation of national unity with a cultural nationalism whose underpinnings are Hindu constitute the permanent backdrops. Equally, there is the belief that a strong state must be complemented by strong patriotic communities that combine productive existence with adherence to robust family values and samskaras. For the RSS-BJP, nationalism lay in the ability to articulate what Deendayal Upadhyaya described as the
‘Bharatiya chiti’—loosely translated as the soul of India. Its Hindutva is cultural and different from the codified political Hindutva that V.D. Savarkar advocated nearly 100 years ago.
Modi was a creation of this ecosystem but he hasn’t stopped here. He has extended the appeal of nationalism along the lines that Swami Vivekananda advocated at the end of the 19th century. First, he has linked nationalism with the notion of daridranarayan through a welfare programme that aims at delivering something tangible to the poor—cash for houses, clean cooking gas, toilets for every home, electricity connections in all villages and, now, a scheme to bring drinking water to the doorstep. More important, he has sought to instil this welfarist mission with a dose of efficiency and financial integrity. He has successfully equated corruption with a crime against the nation.
This approach has been supplemented by a single-minded pursuit of a modernist, technological vision. Nehru had this perspective too but Modi has been able to take it beyond the elite and link it to popular aspirations. Additionally, just as Vivekananda sought to enhance Hindu pride by reaching out to the West, Modi has sought to sell India as an assertive but responsible global power. As much as it has lifted India’s global image, it has led to a soaring of India’s self-esteem at home.
Modi has taken Indian nationalism to the 21st century. He has built the bridge between the freedom struggle and contemporary aspirations. The soul of India that once took pride in the charkha is now basking in the glory of a mission to the moon.
THE NATIONALIST CHALLENGE MODI HAS MOUNTED NOW HAS AS BACKDROP THE INVOCATION OF BHARAT MATA AND THE EQUATION OF NATIONAL UNITY WITH HINDU CULTURAL NATIONALISM