A different nationalism: Let's go back to our Constitution

Indian Express

3 hours ago

Written by Rahul Govind
I will have to respectfully differ with the arguments of Yogendra Yadav and Akeel Bilgrami on nationalism. Bilgrami speaks of the 'unselfconscious pluralism' characterising 'centuries of Indian society', as reflected in Gandhian nationalism ('An alternative nationalism', IE, June 16), while Yadav maintains that once the modern Indian state is taken as a successor to Indian civilisation, the task is to define its 'cultural traits' ('The rediscovery of India', IE, June 5). Nirmal Verma is offered as a starting point for imagining a 'positive nationalism' that could save Indian civilisation from its 'inner disintegration' under colonialism (and the post-colonial state). This despite Yadav acknowledging that Verma 'hints at Hindus [being] the custodians of national unity and integrity', that he 'equivocated' on the role of Islam in Indian civilisation and exhibited a 'pronounced unease, if not denial, of the question of caste inequality' ('A critic of the modern Indian mind', IE, June, 17). Is this the beginning of a rethinking, or is this, instead, a pale reflection of the majoritarianism of the times?
Indian nationalism drew on India's past, but drew equally from a global heritage involving ideas such as popular sovereignty and fundamental rights. Even after the Gandhian intervention and mass nationalism in the early 1920s, several factors led to the nationalist agenda, including critical reform on land and caste. This broadening of the terrain of struggle over social and economic rights was not sui generis to the initial Gandhian intervention. It was due to popular movements, and figures like B R Ambedkar, as well as Communists and Socialists. The crowning achievement was the Indian Constitution, which enshrined ideals regarding fundamental rights and universal franchise as well as social protections and land reform.
Seeped in our consciousness of Indian nationalism is Gandhi's humiliation at the hands of racists on that infamous train from Durban to Pretoria. Much less known is Ambedkar's experience in Chalisgaon in 1929, in the midst of the national movement. As a part of a committee, appointed by the Bombay government to investigate caste oppression, he alighted at the railway station of Chalisgaon. When he was about to start his journey towards Maharwada, 'the quarters of the untouchables', he couldn't find a single tonga. After an hour or so, when he got one and paced towards his destination, the cart crashed, the horse bolted, and he was, in his own words, 'thrown down on the stone pavement', which resulted in a fractured leg and serious injuries. The accident occurred because the driver had never driven a tonga before. He was forced to do so because no tonga driver would agree to seat a Dalit in his carriage. In the same text, Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar writes of a doctor refusing to attend to a Dalit's wife, resulting in her death.
Just two years before the Chalisgaon incident, Ambedkar had the Manusmriti publicly burned in response to upper-caste attacks on Dalits who had drawn water from a public water tank. This kind of response against Dalits organising to access public spaces, schools, roads, and temples was not unusual. At the Mahad Satyagraha, Ambedkar invoked the ideals of the French Revolution, as he was to do in his Annihilation of Caste. Caste oppression was more fully addressed by the national movement because of popular campaigns around rights to representation, land and identity by figures like Ambedkar, who combated inherited legacies of discrimination using a global vocabulary of democratic rights. The inclusivity of the national movement, therefore, was not a civilisational inheritance. In the 1930s, Gandhi too invoked the 'secular' in the context of untouchability and temple entry, just as he came to accept the demand for a Constituent Assembly, a wholly 'modern' idea.
There is a view that caste oppression was not native to our civilisation, but was imposed by the colonial state. Even if we credit the British with unmatched capacities in collective hypnosis, this argument cannot be taken seriously. Certainly, the British had no intention of establishing equality. But it is patently false to attribute caste violence and its hierarchical social arrangements solely to the colonial state, denying any role to Indians or Indian history. That caste hierarchy was a social and political reality before colonial rule is well established. Notwithstanding the riches of India's heritage, it would be historically inaccurate to think that one could find there a grammar for universal franchise, popular sovereignty, and justiciable fundamental rights, those distinctive features of our Constitution. This grammar emerged from a global conjuncture, and cannot be traced to any one historical or civilisational heritage, whether 'Western' or 'Indian'.
The idea of a nation-state may be taken to be a political form where the nation, or the people, exercise sovereignty, expressed by institutional protocols such as elections, and regulated by norms such as equality, fundamental rights, including gender rights. The emergence of these ideas, including equality and liberty, cannot be understood without reference to revolutions such as the ones in France and Haiti. But these ideals were not intrinsic to some a priori nation called 'France', and it was not long before Napoleon reestablished the empire and slavery. Such ideals were not institutionalised in any 'Western' country, 'internally' or 'externally'. One can speak here of violent empires, not nation-states, arguably until the post-Second World War order.
The contention that the ills of the day are caused by a small 'westernised' elite, and that one has to reach back to a corralled history, civilisational past or the nationalist movement to address contemporary challenges, is to misunderstand the past as much as the present. Nationalism ought to be judged good or ill depending on the extent to which it embodies popular will and universal values such as equality. Struggles over representation, caste, gender, federalism and welfare in the post-colonial state have parallels with the national movement as well as with those the world over, simply because a particular language of rights and constitution-making emerged in modernity. It is to the Constitution and a modern global heritage of rights and values that these movements turn. The benchmark of nationalism can only be the Constitution, a revolutionary and transformative document, not the echo of an ever-existing civilisational heritage.
The writer teaches History at Delhi University