A billion heads, one thought. Or two: national and anti-national. So, in a way, India has achieved unity in diversity. Even the strident critics of the Modi regime fall into what seems to me a trap that automatically replaces intellect with morality.
Considering that everybody has an opinion and he or she is seemingly free to articulate it, we may flatter ourselves that we are talking about many things. In fact, we are talking about only two things: are you a patriot, or a traitor?
This leads to a kind of moral relativism, a difference of attitudes stemming from your prejudices, based on religion or faith, which enables one to approach an issue with an already set and ‘superior’ opinion. It is precisely this that Allan Bloom talks about in The Closing of the American Mind.
It is a disease. But there is a reassuring ease in the disease. Our democratic discourse invariably devolves to the binary of patriotism and treason. People and events must fall into one or the other of these two baskets. There are people such as Shashi Tharoor who try their best to raise issues to a higher level. But they are few.
Let me explain what I mean by the closing of the Indian mind by taking a few events that dominated the news just last month or so.
The outspoken Mahua Moitra, currently facing allegations of lending her parliamentary password and login ID to Dubai-based businessman Darshan Hiranandani so she could raise questions on his behalf in parliament, recently tweeted: “Where is the national interest when you used a Chinese national and a UAE national and three offshore companies to over invoice Rs 13,000 crores of coal?”
The Indian Right’s position is that attacking Adani is anti-nationalist as the Adani group is contributing to a new, developed India. The company likes to be seen as a part of India’s growth story. And that to find faults with his business model amounts to being anti-patriotic.
Moitra’s assumption is that she is as much, if not more, a nationalist as the person she attacks, because his nationalism does not hold up to scrutiny of his Chinese connections and interests, for instance. We must recall here that everything about China in India just now is anti-patriotic. But the real issue is fair practice, not nationalism. The term nationalism just serves to instil fear in the debate.
A week or so before the Moitra controversy erupted, Hamas launched a rocket attack on Israel, killing hundreds and causing Israel to launch a counteroffensive that killed and maimed even more. The debate on Indian social media, a mirror to the ‘thinking citizenry’, immediately spun the war around, equating Hamas and Palestine with Muslims (bad people), and Jews and Israel with India (good people).
The predictable politics of polarisation was that if you defended Palestine, you were against India—and therefore, Hindus. If you stood up for Israel, you were a patriot because Jews were fighting Muslims, terrorists are mostly Muslims, and India is vulnerable to terrorism. Given this nationalist equation, how empowered are you to take a nuanced position that condemns Hamas’s actions but holds Israel responsible for the volatility in Gaza?
Again, at a Pakistan versus Australia cricket match in Bengaluru, a Pakistani fan tried to cheer for his team. He was immediately discouraged from doing so by the law, a policeman. A patriot, then, influenced by the current nationalist surge into thinking he is doing the right thing. The patriotic policeman is unable to recall that only weeks ago, Indians in the stands at the Asian Games in China were cheering for their team. By his logic, the Chinese would be nothing but seditious in their gesture of accommodation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India is ready to host the 2036 Olympics. Is it? India would be ready for the Olympics when the average troll gets it into his or her head that anybody can root for any country in sports. It is an individual choice, not a constitutional principle. No law says I cannot cheer for another nation. To read treason in these things is to look at the world and ourselves with an extremely defensive mindset.
At an engineering college in Ghaziabad, a student came up on stage at a cultural show, greeting the audience with ‘Jai Shree Ram’. A lady professor got up and shooed him off, saying it was not proper. Perhaps she thought she was being secular, thinking the greeting offended students from other religions.
The scene went viral. Social India came down heavily on the professor. The essence of the outrage was that if you could not say ‘Jai Shree Ram’ in India, where would you say it? In turn, it meant that the professor was anti-national. The hitherto sophisticated professor, fearing her job was on the line, went on social media and confessed that she was a “Sanatani Brahmin” born in the “Brahmin kul”. The video showed her against a backdrop of several decked up Hindu gods. In short, she was saying she was a Hindu nationalist and therefore genetically capable of doing no harm.
Should schools and colleges be a place free of gods? In a truly secular and sophisticated country, that ought to be the case. Hindu, Muslim or Christian, keeping your gods at home, away from the campus is a sensible thing to do. Which was why in another column for another news outlet I had once argued for banning the veil in a college in Mangaluru. The portal dropped the column—and the columnist—as it believed I was promoting anti-secular views.
Almost every major discussion in India can be seen through the binary of national and anti-national. We are no longer discussing issues. We are discussing the patriotism of things. We are discussing the closing of the Indian mind.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B