The activists who called for the break-up of India and glorified terrorist Afzal Guru lay claim to a different idea of nationhood. Indeed we are curious!
Now, what is that very different idea that strangely applies only to India? And only in convenient times? And something only a few self-styled smarties are privy to? In short, what is India and whose is it? Along with some inevitable fingerpointing let us also introspect aloud a bit.
My pen, paper, mobile phone, gadget and domestic appliances of indispensable daily use are all to be preserved but public property that are of greater utility to a larger populace need not be protected. My bike and car cannot suffer a scratch but State buses and trains can be broken and burnt at will.
The walls inside my compound can’t take a smudge or a crack, but public facades can be defaced and debased at will. My house must be squeaky clean sans stink but it can be garbage galore on streets. Even the insides of my small flat must be in order but only a few feet away, the corridors and stairs of my apartment complex can take any amount of paan beeda spits.
I am a relative, friend and neighbour but rarely a citizen. I belong to a caste, community, creed, a chosen political party and even to my cousin and his brother, but never to the country. I and mine are fine but we and ours are not.When it is ‘nobody’s nation’ in the individual’s mind, can we really blame liberals for being licentious with the idea of our nationhood? Still, I need more clarity on this novel, new idea of (non) nationalism that the progressive paragons are pompously peddling.
Now, they claim to be internationalists with global vision, their thoughts and ideas not confined to geographical borders nor their concerns and concepts restricted by narrow differences within humanity. Quite pious and praiseworthy indeed. But certainly not original. The very foundation of Hindu dharma is ‘vasudaiva kutumbakam’, the overall good and welfare of not just mankind but all life forms as part of a whole family. Still, pinching and plagiarising a pristine, popular wisdom and patenting and parading it as their own stuff is forgivable.
But the selective application renders their frontier-less fad farcical and most foul. Just a few testing queries will expose this hypocritical hype and hyperbole. First, if India is an abstract notion, not an actual nation, then how can and why should ‘it’ be broken-up at all? If the idea of India as a physical entity is wrong, how is Azadi Kashmir, with delineated areas, a logical idea? Even as a notion, if Indian nationalism is debatable and open-sesame, how can separatist Kashmiri nationalism be absolute and open-and-shut? Or for that matter, any nation and its nationalism?
Is this select liberal, global community which spans campuses and comrades here to Che Gueveras and Chomskys beyond aware of the world map which shows lines in land masses that are also called national borders? Are France, Germany, the huge Russia, the tiny Leichtenstein, the dots on the Pacific and Atlantic etc nations or non-nations? Almost every such mapped ‘nation’ has religion, culture or ethnicity of the majority as the common denominator for national identity. Now, just as India’s is negotiable, rather, non-existent, have the universalists formally proclaimed that all such norms of nationalism stand abolished and they will respect or regard none? By the way, have Communists here as courtesy communicated to China that China has ceased to exist?
Have these citizens of the global world informed their respective countries-that-are-not that they no longer subscribe to Constitutional nationhood? And that having forsaken this petty irritant called patriotism, they are now also voluntarily forfeiting their passports? Will they now travel abroad without visas and fight for entry in true liberal spirit? If indeed, the need to fill an immigration form arises, what will our elites who travel to exotic locales for seminars on global poverty, write under the head ‘Nationality’?: ‘No-longer Indian’ or ‘Globalist’ or ‘No nation in Particular’?
Of course, countries care a hoot for such nutty notionalists. Here stray anarchist voices have suddenly spiked since the BJP came to power. While their double standards on nationalism are India-specific, now it is also Modi-centric. There are many vested interests, here and beyond, who have use for these hired guns, mercenaries marooned in a morbid mental island, to fire at their prime target, the PM.
When a corrupt foreigner with dubious past and a very private public life was at the helm, the nation was hailed. But when a clean son of the soil with proven track record and a transparent personal and public life is heading, India has failed! When an entrenched lineage exercised power by proxy and patronage, the nation and its people were supposed to have thrived. But when a leader of a democratic party rules by majority mandate, this is suddenly nobody’s nation unfit to live in!
With such liberal leverage for falsehood, small wonder how ‘Hate-Modi’ has seamlessly shifted to ‘Love Afzal’. Tomorrow, their martyr could be Kasab; but never a Capt Pawan Kumar who died fighting terrorists in Srinagar last week or those who died in Parli attack or in Pathankot.
Should our dear nation suffer such abomination?
e-mail the writer at [email protected]