The classical Greeks were obsessed with identity. They called themselves civilised and others ‘barbarians’. Identity is the monochrome membership that shapes society. India has Aryans and Dravidians. America has natives and settlers. The ‘othering’ that secular intelligentsia frets about after Narendra Modi came to power, and the Sangh’s attempts to decolonise and de-culturise all non-Hindu influences irrespective of merit, is a social identity movement powered by politics. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, is a response to India’s post-Independence secular identity crisis.
New India wants a new identity that leaves the old liberal order behind. The BJP defines India as a Hindu nation, and that’s not going to change. The secularists who governed India until 2014 never tapped into the fear of Hindus; they tapped into the fear they themselves created among Muslims about the hovering Hindu threat. India’s Partition politics gave equal weight to both communities, which was seen as a travesty by Indians who were driven out of their homes, lynched, raped and slaughtered. Identity erases individuality, which is the tragedy of all women who were gang raped during the Partition riots, not because who they were as individuals but what they represented.
Social identity is a conflict zone without winners; a Ukraine of the mind and an Auschwitz of the heart. MK Gandhi’s political ambition to promote Nehru, and his sabotage of Jinnah contributed to the creation of Pakistan; it also formalised the ‘other’ trope in modern India. Howling against the CAA and posting chronology memes disguise the larger issue of national identity. India is a majority Hindu nation. It was before, and after, and during Islamic and British conquests.
The Christian missionary calling to convert poor tribals, the Saudi money that poured into building mosques and madarasas, the jetsetting, money-grabbing NGOs promoting their interests and the governments that supported them were the paradoxical gardeners of the great banyan tree of Hindu nationalism whose fruits are the anti-illegal immigrant legislations of today.
The CAA cannot be confined to the Indian context, however. It echoes an universal mood that outsiders are unwelcome, since they corrupt local culture. Liberal prime ministers and presidents of the UK, US and Europe have allowed hate-spewing mosques, defacing of synagogues and pro-Palestinian lynch mobs in their cities. This has placed the migrant Muslim in the nationalist crosshairs. Both in White countries and in India, the Muslim crossing the border is the invader, not just an immigrant. The Right everywhere owes its rise to this new fearsome distinction.
The Social Identity Theory formulated by Henri Tajfel and John Turner notes that an individual’s self-image derives from the social categories to which they perceive themselves as “belonging”: family, clan, sport, musical world, religion, caste, etc. The social psychologists pointed out that personal identity is determined by an individual’s personal goals and achievements, while social identity is based on the goals and achievements of the groups they belong to.
Add the social cognitive theory to the volatile mix, and you have people processing information and internalising responses “to situations based on observations, even when they do not experience them firsthand, and adapt them to their own contexts”. Deportation of Rohingyas is one such example of ‘other’-isation—a historical backlash of community protectiveness which had been consciously or subconsciously suppressed so far. Immigrants arrive seeking a better life, also bring supplanting cultures. The ‘other’ is history’s heckler of identity in the theatre of the favoured. This election is just the matinee show.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com