by AKEEL BILGRAMI
The relevant issue today is not which is the good nationalism, inclusive or majoritarian, but whether one can have a democratic polity at all when the domain of civil society is increasingly diminished by the state’s actions
The Indian government’s authoritarian menace is generated from within a recognisable structure and network: a Prime Minister at its inspirational font with a long and sordid history of winking at his supporters’ violent crimes; a Home Minister ordering a half-cocked police invasion into a place of learning and ideas for which — to the extent that it comprehends them at all — his government has never had any respect; a familiar background of sinister policy-shaping and mobilising organisations that range from the paramilitary to the cultural spheres; and not least its recently energised laureates of goonish intimidation, young Balillas seeking to disrupt any public meeting in universities that expresses dissent or seeks protection for the country’s wide swathe of vulnerable groups: minorities, Dalits, women, and the working poor.
The rise of the ABVP
The last of these, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a nationwide band of seedy tormentors on the country’s campuses, goes back to the late 1940s, formed in part to fight communist influence in institutions of higher learning. Along with the rest of the Hindu Right, their participation in the movement that opposed the Emergency gave them a moral high ground, a high ground that politicians on the then more powerful Centre-Left surrendered because they lay down like doormats as Indira Gandhi and her immediate circle of advisers stamped on them and the liberties we had taken for granted since Independence.
One might think it is ironic that the ABVP, and the Hindu Right more generally, are now mimicking that very authoritarianism and thereby relinquishing the little moral high ground they had secured by their courageous opposition to the Emergency. But in fact there is no irony in this. What their current replication of the authoritarianism of the mid-seventies shows rather is that that opposition was never motivated by the higher ideals that were attributed to them. In other words, they never deserved the high ground they gained, in the first place.
In the last twenty-five years (notably coinciding with the years in which neo-liberal economic policies have been embraced) their numbers have grown enormously on campuses; and since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s recent electoral ascendancy they have paraded this numerical strength in the style of the Balilla in Mussolini’s Italy. These are the visible symptoms of the rise of right-wing nationalism. Someone with more space than I have here should explore the question (whose answer may well lie buried in the parenthesis above) no less relevant in India today than it was in Italy and Germany in the 1930s: what material dislocation, what psychological desolation, what submerged feelings of inferiority, prompt the young to embrace with such aggressive fervour so dark a nationalism as this?
Good and bad nationalism
In today’s Europe, which congratulates itself on having lived down its own dark past, even just the prospect of the electoral success of parties representing that form of nationalism has filled the entire spectrum of mainstream politics with dread, while in our country that form of nationalism has not only electorally triumphed but has become the political mainstream. Yet European governments, not to mention the United States, fawn over our Prime Minister as a hero who has opened up vast vistas of new opportunities. What this says about the victory of elite global economic interests over global political morality should be obvious to any alert political observer.
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