:: Saturday, July 20, 2002 ::

Reimagining India:

[Conrad, your ideas on nation and nationalism has sparked me to think about some of the emerging trends in the idea of India that I thought I would share...]

The idea of India that has colonized our minds is an idea tied to a modern territorial state. The Indian state is new, but it has sought to use a set of ancient cultural artifacts (i.e., shared religious experiences, common linguistic origin, common experience of struggle, and forgetfulness of internal struggle) to lay claim to an extended territory that also serves as the foundation for an overarching "national" unity designed to bridge a manifest plurality. Moreover, in contrast to previous modes of goverment on the sub-continent, the Indian state has aimed to project its influence in a relatively homogenous manner across its territory and up to an arbitrary boundary line left by the preceding colonial regime.

The Indian state claims that it must assert its domination over the territory inherited from the British Raj or else the nation itself will unravel. In essence, the maintenance of territorial integrity is the key that holds fissiparous tendencies of various religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups in check. Despite this imperative, the application of the modern territorial state concept has not been a success in India. After numerous wars and even the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, India's borders are little more secure now than they were at Independence. More importantly, it is questionable whether many subjects within the union identify the Indian state as their source of personal identity.

An alternative mode of governance that has grown-up quietly in the shadow of the territorial state is now emerging around the world, and it holds the potential to reshape the idea of India. Whereas the modern state sought to produce and regulate relationships between a set of subjects and a territory, the alternative mode of governance involves the establishment of a field of efficient and productive relations between states, investors, consumers, corporations, and financial institutions. Under this alternative mode of governance, the aim is not the preservation of territorial integrity or even the imposition of uniform laws over a given territory. The aim is to use tactics and even laws as tactics to arrage things in such a way as to promote the economy as articulated through a set of conventional indicators. The preservation of territorial integrity is important only to the extent that it is a factor in risk management -- claims to territorial sovereignty are not self-sufficient; the possession of territory is not a value in itself. The goal of the state is to use its monopoly of legitimate violence to produce the low-risk conditions deemed necessary by foreign investors and domestic consumers. At times, the reduction of risk may involve military deployment at other times it may involve suing for peace. The guiding logic of this alternative mode of governance is not peace but risk management.

Examples of this rising alternative mode of governance can be seen throughout the emerging markets. Emerging market countries increasingly articulate and measure themselves through internal and external assessments. In particular, external assessments by international financial institutions and private credit rating agencies have become critically important for garnering the foreign investment and international assistance necessary to stimulate the economy. The ultimate aim is simply to maximize economic growth as measured by conventional indicators especially the annual percent change in the gross domestic product.

What does this alternative mode of governance imply for the idea of India? First, it privileges the coastal cities over the interior and northern borderlands. Soon, Kashmir may no longer be the symbolic "head" of India, the new "heads" of India are in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. These cities are not just the old beacheads to the interior used by the East India Company, they are the staging ground for India's re-entry into the global economy. For good or for ill, the new India is emerging from its costal cities not from its villages or its scattered exotic/peripheral dependencies. As peripheral spaces decline in the idea of India, so should the need to occupy those territories by force.

Himal Magazine's famous "upside down map" of South Asia, from their January 2002 issue on "Reconceptualizing South Asia" emphasizes the new coastal orientation of the subcontinent.

Second, the emerging idea of India is gradually becoming detached from the territory within the subcontinent to emphasize relations between the subcontinent and other regions. The state is already trying to forge links with non-resident Indians (NRIs) around the world, and the state is increasingly dependent upon remittances by Indians working in the Middle East. The idea of India is increasingly about linkages between people rather than the relations within a particular space.

I believe in the next few years we will see a decisive struggle over the idea of India. The territorial state is becoming increasingly incompatible with the risk-management state. Indians will have to decide which way to steer their country. It is not possible to simultaneously maximize growth and maximize security in a vast territory dotted with conflicts. I believe India will eventually choose to give full autonomy or even independence to "disturbed" areas. L.K. Advani's recent cynicism on the continued unrest in Kashmir after so much nuclear brinksmanship, tends to show how hollow the Kashmir issue has become. I don't think that giving up regions that are reluctant to be part of the union means the sub-continent will collapse into anarchy. To the contrary, I believe that peripheral regions which are granted independence/autonomy may eventually choose to re-link to the Indian union in a loose confederacy if India's re-engagement with the global economy results in prosperity and poverty reduction. Thus, the stakes are high, but I think a choice will have to be made and given the failures of the territorial state model... I believe Indians will choose to rethink the idea of India.

:: Vikash Yadav 3:43 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Idea of the Nation in an Era of Capitalism:

Models wearing the designs of Tarun Tahiliani file onto the runway at the Bollywood Fashion Awards, Friday evening, June 28, 2002, in New York. The awards, named after the Indian "Bollywood" film industry, featured Indian and Indian-inspired fashion as part of a weekend of events celebrating Indian pop culture. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

Vikash, Jason, I believe you both raise some excellent and key points in your discussions on the issue of racism and nationalism (see: An Apology owed) and the impact of Capitalism on Culture (see: Coke is It? and Thoughts on the Cola Wars). I want to try and explore some themes which will enable me to try and tackle both these issues in one go and to discern some of the linkages between these two different discussions: both of which raise concerns I find both pressing and disturbing and the claims they lay upon our attention are very powerful and deserve a simultaneous hearing. I especially would like to consider the related themes of racism and nationalism and how the relationship between the two has changed from their rise several centuries ago to our own period.

The Forgetfulness of Nations:

In early European Society the image of race/stock was a key motif of the nation, according to the OED, and only later did the idea of a people formed through a common history assume more importance. The etymology is significant as it implies the centrality of race to the idea of the nation or the irreducibility of the nation to race, still binds the idea of the nation closely with race. Sometimes race provides a nation with a putative basis for unity in other cases it provides the semblance of unity through other means such as language, religion or collective memories. A populace united by race was thought to be single rather than multiple, bound together fundamentally rather than superficially and readily recognisable to others through visible sings. The supposed basis of this nation may reside in a single race, religion or language or through a shared history/constitution but the form of unity is largely inspired by the traditional imagination of race. This resonance between two very different forms of unity explains why the motif of race is so often invoked by nationalists when the nation is seen to be facing severe threats to its existence.

Of course problems abound. Even if race forms a paradigm for the basis of imagined nationhood, the idea of a unified race itself is a highly dubious one. Every time somebody tries to organise the elements and boundaries of a particular race the historical record tends to confound the attempt. Today many Liberals would probably see race as a fable through which a people might consolidate their unity rather than the paradigm of what that collective unity as such looks like. This leads to the problem of unity as the basis of the imagined nation – once race forfeits its place as the basis or form of nationhood what material exemplars of unity now sustain the image of the nation ?! A nation can’t simply refer to a peaceful state where people simply tend to obey the laws of the place most of the time.

These issues are not new ones and perplexed nationalist thinkers who were involved in the attempt to provide an adequate theory of Nation-building. Renan provides a good example of this school: he took the nation as an essential element of citizenship in a modern state. Without the bond formed by nationhood, citizens would be unwilling to risk death to defend the state or to fight for its glory. And without this will to sacrifice, the state could not sustain itself. But Renan could not clearly define what the nation was. For Renan, the nation was a form of unity but a unity not necessarily based on race, religion, and language. Indeed he finds race to be a dubious basis of nationhood because its purity so readily dissolves under the scrutiny of the critical historian. “The truth is that no race is pure, and that to base politics on ethnographic analysis is tantamount to basing it on chimera”. A common religion often forms the basis of a nation but not always. Even a common language is not entirely necessary, as the experience of Switzerland shows. The unity of a particular nation might be formed out of any combination of these elements as long as they are supported by two other ingredients: the possession of a rich heritage of memories and the actual desire to live together. Shared memories of sacrifice and a common will in the present form a vital part of the basis of nationhood for Renan. “A long past spent in toil, sacrifice and devotion” is the basis for this shared memory – refined by the remembrance of enemies it faced in the past and its victories over them. Time, therefore must move slowly for a nation to be. A common fund of memories forged over long, slow time and a current will to express that inheritance in the future: these for the crucial constituents in the soul at the centre of a nation.

Renan notes two other factors. The first is that not only race but also any memory upon which a nation is based could be pluralized, eroded or rendered uncertain by critical history. So every nation, whatever the elements upon which it is grounded requires it national memory to be selective; this is the key behind Renan’s comment that it is important for newly emerging nations to get their history wrong. As to roots of most political formations are based upon deeds of violence; forgetting the violence through which unity has been forged out of variety is critical to the imagination of the nation. But this also means that any element previously rendered unnecessary by Renan might now return as a possible source of unity. A nation might be based on the unity of race, a unity grounded in the forgetfulness about the multiplicity from which it was formed. Renan himself says that something similar occurred in 19th century France, with its modern origins in the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics. The nation is founded in the forgetfulness of the arbitrary violence and exclusions from which it was forged: the foundational moment as deconstructionists assert is always a moment of violence, but for the idea of the nation to endure this violence must be covered with a veneer of beneficence and innocence.

Renan’s conception of the nation is useful for us today because it indicates how the idea of the nation can be undermined. As the tempo of history quickens, the fog of forgetfulness needed to form a united entity out of multiplicity will not form easily. The shape of the unity grounded in forgetfulness is crossed with cracks by the effects of violences in the past. A good example is Chomsky’s recollection of seeing the nameless graves of Amerindians in a former reservation and reading on the headstones of how the Amerindians had given their lives to bring the American nation into existence. The unstated ironies implicit here were lost on most of the tourists who visited the site. Unsettled issues of race, caste and religion still provide a disturbed background to the amnesia of mainstream nationalism in most contemporary nation-states. Nomadic capitalism also has a corrosive impact on the experience of the nation; especially when this nomadism of investment, consumption, and production both compromises the spatio-temproal conditions of nationhood and forms part of the self-definition of the nation. Forgetfulness here not only forms the basis of nationhood as described by Renan, but also creates the hidden threats to it. The nation’s ability to forget is always an incomplete one and this provides the sources of anxiety, threat and loss that perpetually haunt the quest for nationhood. Nations are often haunted by the effects of this haunted past and their failure to completely eradicate them from the imagination. This, indefinite sense of insecurity at the centre of the nation may be part of the reason, why the internal constituents defined by nationalists to be enemies of the people are usually figured as volatile and nomadic – Jews, Gypsies, unpatriotic men, recent immigrants, indigenous nomadic tribes etc.

Renan leaves many of these questions unanswered. He insists that a nation is essential to unity -, that national unity is essential to a healthy state, and that sluggish time fosters unity. But he does not address the shape and tightness of unity itself or the effect of speed on the composition of a nation-state. He is too involved with examining the commonalities of his time and how they have been formed through long, slow historical processes that he forgets to probe further into the spatio-temporal conditions of nationhood itself.

The Liberal Vision of the Nation:

Renan epitomises the conservative nationalist – in his willingness to sacrifice the rights, happiness and vitality of some to the comfort, superiority and honour of others, yet liberals too have a particular vision of the nation. JS Mill is one important exemplar of liberal thought on nationalism and nations. Mill honours individuality, tolerance and active participation by people in their own governance but he delimits this by his models of civilisation, secularism, progress and nationality. Examining Mill’s secularism and liberalism allows us to explore the subterranean channels by which these two lines of thought define and delimit one another.

Civilisation for Mill is an advanced mode of living and governance. Generally growing out of a Christian culture, it equips people with the discipline, character, disposition to regular obedience and appreciation of rule of law necessary to representative government. Needless to say not all “peoples” are susceptible to this civilising process. In Mill’s view Civilisation is something given to “peoples” one people at a time, over “centuries of time”. It involves a long, slow, progressive process of discipline that renders a people capable of regular obedience, restraint, respect for rule of law, and a streak of independence. While Mill is himself a secularist, it is a secularism deeply reflective of the Christendom from which it emerged. Thus, in Mill’s view, peoples such as the Egyptians and the Chinese who chanced upon some of the prerequisites of civilisational progress were unable to press it very far forward on their own.

Civilisational development is crucial to a possible world of democratic nation-sates. Creative minorities within each monotheistic people provide the critical sparks that propel the nation towards "further improvement”. So only a particular kind of nation enables individuality. That means that the parameters of Mill’s concept of individuality and rights are fixed in advance by the civilisational shape of the nation in which they occur. The operational boundaries of individuality, rights and justice in other words is set in advance by the parameters of the liberal nation. It is these very same boundaries that are being challenged by the extended pluralism and the acceleration of pace that mark the secular states of today in the West. It is pertinent to note then, that a minority for Mill is usually a creative constituency above the general run of the population in terms of culture, intellect and education but they are a part of the people in its major linguistic, religious and moral heritage. Mill further postulates the role of “secular intellectuals” as crucial counterpoints to the weight of public opinion, religious authority and bureaucracy in the modern nation-states of Europe. The prophets and intellectuals he invokes, though, invariably belong to the “people” or the “nation” they agitate against.

This civilisational development, though uncertain and never inevitable, forms the backbone of Mill’s version of historical progress. This precarious line of historical development points to a world of “peoples” ranked according to their levels of civilisational attainment. Mill supposes the world of his time to consist already and for the most part of territorially separate peoples. His quest for representative government collapses if this initial presumption of a world of territorial peoples were to be removed or questioned by events.

The idea of biological inheritance seems to move in and out of Mill’s account of national unity, but a world of peoples, nations, races and tribes each shaped by stable interaction over a long stretch of time on the same territorial space, is always prominent. In those cases where “ a people” occupy the same territorial space, they deserve to have their own state. “Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force there is a prima facie case for uniting all of the members of the nationality under the same government”. This sentiment is a powerful protest against Empire (note Mill’s own experiences as an official for the East India Company) but says nothing of those cases in which a variety of constituencies are divided along numerous dimensions in the same territorial spaces.

The image of the people themselves is not clear in Mill’s liberal thought. He remarks “a Portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between themselves and others”. It is this unity and commonality that makes them “desire to be under the same government”. What is of interest here is how indeterminate the ideas of unity and commonality are to the image of a nation. The centrality of these uncertain ideas to Mill becomes more conspicuous when you notice how often they are invoked without clearer elaboration.

In considering the various sources of unity, Mill uses the language of commonality, identity, community and collective to imagine nationality, but does not explain how tight, centred or close identity must be to be identity. It is this constant combination of indispensability and uncertainty within the image of the nation that sets it up to be a condition to be remembered but never fully known, pursued but never completely present. The idea of the nation is therefore marked by the sense that the density of its centre is both always essential to its existence yet always insufficiently available and elusive. This distinctive combination in the ideal of the nation makes the state particularly vulnerable to takeover attempts by constituencies who claim to embody in themselves the unity that is necessary to the nation but so far absent from it.

Mill employs the nation to explain political rule by a state but he also refers to a long period of political rule on the same territory to explain the formation of a nation. This appears directly when he uses the phrase “national history” to help explain how a nation comes into being. Mill’s analysis of this process of nation-formation is two-dimensional as it ignores the intraterritorial differences within constituencies and obscures in Renanesque fashion the violence upon which the current idea of the nation is based: it is based on ignoring the temporal dimension and concentrating on the physical and spatial dimensions, erasing the memory of such past violence. The credibility of Mill’s story of progress relies on such cartographies of forgetfulness and does not explore very actively the indeterminacies and hybridities circulating through the unity citizens represent themselves to have or probe critically the idea of unity itself. Mill possesses the intellectual tools to pursue these questions as his thinking on freedom, individuality, participation and tolerance shows but he does not apply these categories to the idea of the nation because he presumes the nation to be an essential condition for their existence. This advanced picture of the nation espoused by Mill as the basis for representative government produces a liberalism divided against itself. While Mill sees such a division as enabling freedom if approached in the right spirit this liberal ideal hides a certain lack at the heart of the nation. This constitutive lack at the centre of the nation provides an open temptation for bellicose constituencies to occupy it, and by doing so claiming that it embodies in its ethnicity, faith, loyalty to the past and/or commitment to the true source of public morality – the missing essence of the nation. I will build on this concept in linking these ideas of the nation to the modern instability of nationhood.

The Lack at the Heart of the Nation:

Drawing upon these themes I think may help us examine some of the current instabilities we see in the expression and practise of nationalism, especially in its most virulent forms. Recent history is littered with trends that exemplify these tensions: Civil wars have replaced wars between states as the most common forms of war and cultural war without military portfolio extends the range of strategy available to warriors of the nation, the acceleration in the tempo of change in the realms of capital investments, cultural communication, military practice, tourism, population migrations and identity formation. This acceleration has stimulated the experience of historically contingent elements in those ethnic, religious, gender, linguistic and moral identities that shape social life and has opened up to contestability assumptions about the nation and being previously prized. Therefore while the nation may seem indispensable to the democratic state, its actual attainment keeps on retreating into the future and the experiences of contestability and accelerated change foster reactionary pressures to sanctify the traditions of nationhood that have been challenged or disturbed.

The key observation here is that the nation is something that has been or will be but never is at any actually existing moment. Its most fervent advocates today imagine it to be something that has been lost (e.g. conservatives in the US who may hark back to a Golden Age of WASP dominance, Hindutva nationalists who like to envision a Pre-Muslim and Pre-colonial powerful and prosperous Hindu Rashtra) and must be reinstated. Its promise of future unity is defined less by positive exemplification than by marking a set of constituencies who deviate from it in need of assimilation, correction, punishment or elimination (the attitude towards immigrants in many western countries, especially groups such as Arab Muslims reflect this trend witness the debates over assimilation in the usually liberal Holland and the riots in northern England leading to anti-asylum seeker rhetoric). The pursuit of national unity is founded on decisions of exclusions and punishment, whereas its achievement is predicated on the end of arbitrary violence – the BJP’s demonisation of Muslims and its urges to the religious minorities that they must “behave responsibly” in order to live in a Hindu India fall into this category. The forgetfulness of the nation exists along several dimensions: forgetfulness of past violence on which it is grounded (e.g. the violence of sectarian and linguistic conflicts within the “Hindu” community) and concealment of the constitutive lack always subsisting at its centre by holding a set of devalued constituencies responsible for that lack.

When nationalists in the US, for example, demand laws to punish flag burners, they expose unconsciously the lack at the centre of the nation. The rage engendered by flag burning expresses anxiety that the flag covers up the hole at the centre of the nation and it functions to fill that hole with a symbolic substance. The rage in effect was already there before a flag was burned. To burn it is to uncover for a moment the emptiness at the centre of a nation; to punish burners is to allow a set of angry, white, Christian, male patriots the right to occupy that vacant centre and to embody in their being its otherwise uncertain directives. Flag burning and the punishment of flag burning coalesce to reveal the lack in the nation and to mobilise constituency energies to cover it through occupation. And I would also draw an analogy between the concept of lack in this sense and the Ramjanmabhoomi issue in India that proved to be such a successful mobilisational tool in the hands of the BJP. The Ayodhya temple became a vehicle that expressed powerful sentiments of fear of lower caste assertion, economic insecurity, fear by the propertied classes of a breakdown in law and order and a desire for social mobility amongst different social groups in India in the late 1980’s. Such groups were heterogonous but by enlarge tended to be Hindu, upper/middle caste, north Indian and not from those at the bottom of the income state. The issues which such constituencies were mobilised against betray their deeper fears: reservation in favour of discriminated groups, political uncertainty with the arrival of coalition governments and a new form of plebeian politics that paid less respect to the formal institutional rules of parliamentary bourgeois democracy. The destruction of the Babri Masjid also exposed the charade of secularism and a communally neutral state; as it demonstrated the ineffectiveness and the unwillingness of the supposedly secular state and legal norms to protect the rights of a religious minority in fact as the history of the Ayodhya temple conflict shows the failure can be traced right back to the Nehruvian state as the smuggling in of Ram idols into the mosque and the subsequent protests on the site took place with the connivance and negligence of the local and district administration immediately after independence and was used rather than rebutted by the Congress government of the 1950’s.

A Sadhu, or Hindu holy man, dances past an Indian paramilitary soldier in Ayodhya, India Thursday March 14, 2002. Hindu priests and fundamentalists have insisted that they will pray near the ruins of the Babri mosque, which is at the center of a nine-year dispute between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus said they would dedicate stones or pillars that will be used in a temple they hope to build where the mosque once stood in the northern city of Ayodhya. (AP Photo/John McConnico)

Hindutva activists knew very well what they were engaged in the Ramjanmabhoomi movement was not a physical or actual claim to recover a material, historical space that had been lost but an attempt to recapture the symbolic space vacated by the collapse of the old Congress dominated project of state-building, hence statements such as those by Murli Manohar Joshi, who insisted that even if the Supreme Court ruled against the building of a temple or if the Archaeological Survey of India found no evidence of a Ram temple where the mosque stood, the temple construction would still take place as it was a “ a matter of faith and people’s belief which was superior to any laws passed in parliament or the existence of any scientific proof”. Such arguments were common rebuttals to secularists who showed with considerable detail and care the problems in the assertion that a Ram temple existed on the site. The problem was that such attempts by secularists mistook the intentions of the Hindutva movement and took their claims of a Ram temple at face value; when in fact the strength and purpose of such claims rested less on any legal precedent or the existence of physical evidence but in the ability to mobilise discontented constituencies and religious motifs which carry a powerful resonance in Indian public imagination for their won political ends – in this they were quite successful.

The leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, Ashok Singhal, above, and Paramhans Ramchandra Das, the leader of a committee to build a temple in Ayodhya, India speak Friday March 15, 2002, after two pillars for a Hindu temple were carried through the streets. Police detained more than 18,000 Hindu nationalists throughout India, fearing that plans to hold a Hindu ceremony near the site of a destroyed mosque in Ayodhya could trigger new religious violence. In a compromise aimed at defusing the crisis, police escorted a priest and two temple pillars _ carried on marigold-decked bicycle rickshaws _ through this tense northern Indian town as hundreds of chanting supporters crowded its narrow lanes. (AP Photo/John McConnico)

Attempts to re-nationalise the nation as the Hindutva activists tried to do foundered on its own particular obstructions of race, caste and region, preventing the BJP from forming a government on its own. However, pressures for such re-nationalisations have not abated, current trends such as Globalisation do nothing to dampen them: rather it foments drives by constituencies marginalised (or afraid of being marginalised) by the global market forces to reinstate the image of the nation to compensate for those losses. The problem is that these compensations typically involve blaming vulnerable constituencies outside the imagined parameter of nationhood for the loss of jobs and so on, when very effects are generated by global capital forces that must be met by state, regional and global counter organisations. The demand to re-nationalise intensifies as the possibility for its achievement weakens: hence the rhetoric of the “angry Hindu” and accusations of the state “pandering to minorities” ignoring the actual social fact of Hindu dominance and the relative backwardness of most minorities in India. Behind much of the anti-Muslim violence in the 1990’s were also accusations and feelings of rising Muslim prosperity from putative flows of income from the Middle-east and it is noteworthy that the BJP is the only party that seriously uses swadeshi rhetoric in its public pronouncements (though its actions are very different) and objects to the cultural aspects of foreign capital (captured in the slogan of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch: “Computer chips not potato chips”). This echoes as Vikash has pointed out an older Gandhian rhetoric but in a very particular way, insisting on selective appropriation rather than outright rejection of the benefits of modernity.

A Sadhu, or a Hindu holy man, looks at a web site at a cyber cafe in Allahabad, India, Jan. 20, 2001. (AP Photo/Press Trust of India)

There are two basic elements in contemporary attempts to re-nationalise the imaginings of the nation. There is the element of identification with the centre, where affection or allegiance flows from the members to the symbolisation of what they all share. A modern nation after the pluralisation of Christendom is thus said to allow citizens to be attached to something larger than the family and more palpable than an abstract philosophy or ideal. This explains how a hint of the divine and the universal so readily attaches itself to the particularity of a nation. The nation as the soul of the state renders the state more than an instrument for private interests or an apparatus through which laws backed by coercion are concocted. This soul of the nation provides a point of potential belonging and allegiance for minorities who seek to be assimilated to it.

There is also the nation as a field of cultural symbolisation. A good example is the Rousseauian vision of the nation. Rousseau wants people to share rough equality of circumstance so that the events of history will be experienced in a similar way by all citizens. When the troubles of some become transparent to all, no constituency is tempted to deceive others or to pretend that their troubles are false. Rousseau consolidates political symbolisation through a common centre in Poland by calling for a national style of dress, religion, family authority, and language, memories of victory and defeat and foreign “peoples” to despise without hating. Economic equality also plays a role for Mill in the logic of national symbolisation but a common language, memories and victories and defeats play the largest role. These two threads of identification and symbolisation are woven into the imagining of the nation. If one is pulled out the other is likely to dissolve as well. The anxiety of nationhood then is the feeling that its fabric is always becoming too loose, too weak and unable to carry out its functions. The nation is always on the verge of loss. Living in an era where the organisation of time and space fragments the lived experience of nationhood, while the nation monopolises the political imagination of identity and symbolisation; means that one lives in an era when intransigent constituencies press each state to re-nationalise itself by attacking its enemies internal and external held responsible for the experience of a lack where the centre is supposed to be.

Secularists tend to convert the idea of a national centre into that of a public sphere. They then respond to the various moments in the politics of becoming that seek to purge the centre of evils such as racism, discrimination against tribals, gender bias and religious conformity by pulling more and more elements out of the centre. The centre now becomes reduced to a common constitution or a set of generally stated rights. This results in the clinging to the old logic of the nation while removing much of its historical layers and presents secularism as weak and unreliable defender of national culture to staunch nationalists. When people now experience uncertainty at the centre they are likely to blame the hegemony secularism and liberalism for these failings and some are then likely to present themselves forcefully as ethnic, religious and linguistic embodiments of the national tradition that has been allowed to lapse. The thinned out centre becomes an invitation to occupation by aggressive and jingoistic groups that claim to embody in themselves the national vitality in need of restoration.

Waging War in the Name of the Nation:

The symbol of the nation is the core image, which is used to mobilise support for any war. The image is also directed at specific core constituencies by the propagators. I would argue it binds intense feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and resentment to the memory of a lost nation/past. Opponents to this kind of nationalism tend to misread the spirituality behind it and end up by invigorating it, to the extent that they themselves participate this emotional spirituality, their calls for restraint and caution in its pursuit fuels charges of weakness and uncertainty against them. Whenever individuals speak of "the American people" or the "Hindu Rashtra", or "Christian values", "Hindutva" they are summoning up a spiritual image of the nation in which each regular individual is a microcosm of the nation. The nation is a macrocosm of the regular individual; the regular individual is the microcosm of the nation. The church/temple, nuclear family, school system, media and universities are the institutions called upon to maintain each primal unit as a reflection of the other - this can be seen by the attempts of the BJP to gain control of the educational institutions on coming to power, the familiar row over the kind of history taught in textbooks at secondary level, the control of media images e.g. women news presenters having to appear in Saris instead of Salwar Khameez and with blouse length of a certain type and the RSS's preoccupation with culture (it is often defined by its supporters as a cultural organisation).

Phrases such as the "Hindu nation" (or indeed the "American people") speaks at once to a general yearning for identity between individual and nation and conveys the idea that a diverse host of individuals, perhaps even a majority fall outside this essential unity. It sustains the fantasy of an ethnic, religious, linguistic centre under grave duress and thereby marks as immoral and weak the pursuit of a pluralistic culture with diverse social groups and divergent sources of morality. In a country such as USA, where the diversity amongst groups such as non-European immigrants, state bureaucrats, homosexuals, church leaders, atheists, liberal academics and journalists and secularists, each such grouping contains a large number of people who deviate in various ways as individuals from the idealised image of the Nation of regular individuals. While such an assortment of different groupings might seem strange and a motley collection of unconnected different groups; what all members share is the fact of deviation from the national norm of the regular individual. The crucial corollary is that any individual initially marked by one or more of these ascriptive liabilities can become a full-fledged member simply by asserting aggressively the conventional code of the nation: which in the American case I would think would be – individual responsibility for your own fate, unfettered faith in the capitalist market, belief in a moral god, the readiness to obey those who embody the spirit of the nation (usually certain elected leaders, especially the President and anyone in uniform), commitment to the opportunity society, opposition to the welfare state, support for family values, identification with the military as the ultimate guarantor of the nation, commitment to normal sexuality, and the collection of all these dispositions under the general heading of common sense. Such a strategy is generically sceptical towards the state, fervently committed to the authority of a nation of regular individuals, and selectively disposed to state action when it patronises the nation by waging a cultural war against those who internally deviate from the code of regular individualism and externally against those who pose a threat to the common sense values of such a nationalism or the Idea of the nation.

The problem is that the empirical reality in all countries, both the US and India is that a whole host of trends and factors undermine such an identity. Changing patterns of immigration, acceleration of speed in communication, globalisation of capitalist economic relations: all act to change racial, ethnic, religious and sexual identities that inhabit us and in balance to this the putative spiritual/imaginary unity of the nation is constantly invoked when such identities were stable and transparent and that the threat to this “national culture” will die a horrible death unless such a fictive past is reinstated. Of course, there has never been a time when the nation was intact and today the invocation of a nation of regular or homogenous individuals essentially catalogues a majority of the populace into diverse deviants in need of correction. The drive to realise this ideal of the nation entails extensive programmes of social engineering and punishment doomed to fail in producing their putative end. The problem for radicals and reformers is that the failure of such cultural attempts to purify the nation is very compatible with the success of these campaigns in disabling the state from acting to support the economic and cultural conditions of pluralism, secularism, human development and socio-economic progress.

Common sense evocations of “the American people” or the “Hindu Rashtra” are held together by the political designation and cultural segregation of constituencies that negate it; the promise of a return to a nation lost is kept alive by militant campaigns against those groups and dispositions said to be responsible for the loss e.g. Muslims, Christians, foreigners and other marginal groups. However, behind all the nationalist sentiments there rests some uneasy alliances: some targets are politically unavailable. Agents of Capital for example should not become central targets, even they more than any other group are involved in the forces of change that scramble the common sense of the Nation. Capitalists can remain a protected species either because of a general faith in the market as the primordial mechanism of automatic regulation and individual freedom is the key that enables the nation to be turned against the social activism of the state (this I would argue is the case in the USA) or as in India, many vital spheres of exchange and production that impinge most directly on peoples’ lives are outside state control and those sectors that are under state control come under attack to failing to live up to standards that nobody would expect from the private capitalist sector (the corruption discourse in India is directed mainly at the state and parastatals, less against private business/merchants per se). The agents being held responsible for the loss of the nation are in India: the secularists, socialists and the minorities themselves, especially the Muslims, while in the USA they would be: liberals, state bureaucrats, the irreligious, popular media and liberal university establishments.

To accuse such re-nationalisers as communalists or racists is to set oneself up for a ferocious counter-refutation. For the ardent re-nationliser is not a communalist (as the nationalist does in the sense that some religious communities are inferior to others) or racist (in the sense that some races are congenitally inferior to others). This definition does not quite fit as for the Hindutva activist religious minorities are deemed compatible to the Hindu Rashtra as long as they accept the predominantly Hindu nature of society in India and the state as a Hindu state and not a secular one (even Veer Sarvarkar in his early tract “Who is a Hindu” did not want to repatriate or exterminate Muslims in India, only for them to accept the predominance of Hindu values in society and abide by them in public life and this goes with the BJP notion of the good or acceptable Muslim in the guise of Abdul Kalam or Sikhander Bakht) while in the USA such ardent nationalists would assert that individuals and families from any racial background can be assimilated into the American nation if they work hard enough and assert the right identifications actively enough. Accusations of racism or communalism against re-nationalisers, then opens up the door to counteraccusations against the critics themselves. After all didn’t the BJP put themselves forward as the true secularists in wanting a Uniform Civil Code with the Congress as the pseudo-secularists and more recently NGOs and Charities active in post-Godhra Gujarat who have criticised the state government in complicity and planning the riots have themselves been accused of fomenting communalism (a peculiar variant of blaming the victim syndrome, whereby those who speak on behalf of persecuted of discriminated groups are they themselves accused of perverting universalist notions citizenship and identity). A better response would be to point out the difficulty in accommodating t every divergent grouping into such an imagined nation.

A good example given by Dipankar Gupta is the approach to religion in American politics. The “American people” do not support one faith within Christianity, but this authoritative abstraction does not undermine or weaken the separation of church and state as that principle has been interpreted within the Tocquevillian/American tradition. Rather it sets faith in a less sectarian, monotheistic, moral God as the consummate sign of moral virtue and defining condition of legitimate participation in the politics of the nation. To the question ‘Do you pray’ a simple Yes or No answer will suffice (of course this analysis extends only towards Christian denominations, non-Christian religions are outside the pale all together). In this subtle way a certain moral undermining of those who don’t pray such as the atheist, agnostic, secularist, Unitarian etc. is accomplished without committing the American people to public enforcement of a particular version of Christianity or Judaism (needless to say any such attempt to dissolve the consensus). Similarly, BJP leaders in India such as LK Advani during the Rath Yatra campaign were at pains to clarify that they were not “temple Hindus” but “political Hindus” aware no doubt that many “temple Hindus” would be unimpressed by the politicisation of religion that has undertaken by the BJP. Even the RSS has chosen to express its political support through the organ that they deem to best exemplify their notions of Hinduism rather than consistently support the BJP, during the 1984 elections after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, many RSS cadres were so enthused by Rajiv Gandhi’s majoritarian rhetoric and campaigning and alienated by the then BJP leadership’s turn toward Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism, that on the ground they campaigned passionately for Congress candidates in the general election even against BJP candidates – the result reduced the BJP to single digits in the Lok Sabha. This shows not only how recent the upsurge of Hindutva has been as a political phenomenon but also how the expression of majoritarian nationalist sentiments can be expressed through different political parties/groupings at different time hiding a continuity under supposed regime changes (e.g. politics in Uttar Pradesh have always been vitiated by questions of caste and communalism under Congress, Janata and BJP governments alike).

Hindutva and Capitalism

Nearly 100 farmers ransacking the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in the southern Indian city of Bangalore on Tuesday Jan.30, 1996 after breaking through a police cordon. Farmers demanded that the multinational fast-food chain leave India, accusing the restaurant of serving food that was un-Indian and unhealthy, and threatened to throw the chain out of India. Nationalists opposed to entry of multinationals in India, have targeted KFC before. ( AP Photo)

As the BJP has grown and come to power the RSS does not provide the primary reference point for its ideology. A large number of recent activists and legislators have only superficial attachments to the “spirit of the Sangha” as old-RSS men prefer to call their specific ideology. These ‘newcomers’ to the party belong to the more pragmatic wing and are more interested in winning political power, patronage and the considerable financial benefits that flow from holding office; an attitude that is an anathema to the “purist” advocates of discipline and swadeshi. This is indicative of a deeper conflict between two visions of politics and modernity: one a pragmatic, pro-capitalist outlook committed to an often philistine middle-class vision of a ‘clean society’, to the consumer good life; the other is an austere vision, ideologically pure, more socially conscientious in outlook, uncomfortable with what it sees as the brutality, fragmentation and hedonism of the modern world. These two tendencies were for a while united by a joint commitment to communalism and a desire to assert a common Hindu consciousness; however, as the symbolic issues of religion and nation becomes less prominent on the national agenda, these more ‘profane’ issues have come to the fore exposing the social divisions within the Hindutva movement.

When the RSS Sarsangchalak Rajendra Singh travelled abroad to the West in 1995 (the first Sarsangchalak to do so) he returned disillusioned with the stagnation in India and the rampant corruption “Beggars that is what we have been reduced to, because we are going with begging bowls before the affluent nations and multinationals” (from the Telegraph, 4th May 1995). The contradictory stand on foreign investments has produced some odd incidents since liberalisation. The BJP government in Delhi decided to close down a KFC outlet in Delhi on the (really flimsy) grounds that flies had been recovered in the kitchen premises of the restaurant. This is a rather selective enforcement of hygiene regulations as any visitor to Delhi will know and the other major action was to close down Muslim abattoirs on the same grounds – the same notions of the impurity and uncleaniless of “foreign” and Muslim food habits here persists. Resistance to allowing foreign food companies to supply food to the Indian market is fuelled by a certain forced construction of the ‘foreign’ as a substance that is not pure and should be kept out of the kitchen (read hearth) the heart of the Hindu family (read upper/middle caste and middle-class). The angry comments of Jay Dubashi, one of the BJP’s prominent thinkers on economic affairs (there are not many of these, and none who are competent):

“I eat in my house, I don’t want a foreigner to come and prepare food in my house – it is as simple as that….see, there is in this country a general prejudice against foreign companies, and against foreigners as such because of the way we have been ruled by foreigners for 1,000 years. Anytime you try to tap this sentiment you find there is a tremendous response….Jesse Helms once said ‘I hate foreigners’ – and I don’t mind saying the same. Why should we give reasons-it is our house…Is America great because of Coke, potato chips or Pepsi? No! The country is great because of the cars, computers and machines they produce. We should do the same.”

These examples can be multiplied ad nauseam, a particularly interesting one is the Enron-Dabhol issue and the politics this had in Maharashtra, but Vikash would know more about this than me. What does remain specific to this discourse and other statements such as S. Gurumurthy’s statement that “India will not allow itself to be raped and that the West needs India” in the aftermath of the nuclear tests, is the combination of tough self-assertion and self-deprecation about the lack of work culture, endemic corruption which accompanies it. This is a discourse, which addresses itself to the urban middle-classes, and the upwardly mobile social groups who are anxious not lose self-respect in the maelstroms of modern urban culture while they at the same time are painfully aware of their own peripherality in the global economic arena.

By way of wrapping up these preliminary thoughts, the areas for concern I would note is the emerging character of capitalism and globalisation effects and their synergies with the re-nationalisation tendencies in India. I am inclined to the view of Richard Fox and William Connolly who both argue that such effects will increase the urges and the desire for a re-nationalisation of the nation and how the hyper-disenchantment brought about by late modernity will lead to a blowback effect where movements and ideologies that seek to re-enchant the public sphere and politics will gain in strength. The class and distributional effects of this for India cause me some discomfort: after all the privileged middle-class elite which prospered under the Nehruvian regime, is the same one now that (with some important exceptions) embraces capitalism and globalisation so enthusiastically – I agree with Vikash that Mimicry is superior to and different from imitation, but the relation may be curvilinear and a composite mix. Popular Indian culture had many elements of mimicry in the 1950’s and 1960’s but the kind that we are seeing now is a more insecure and uncertain form of mimicry and one that panders to consumerist tendencies blindly rather than trying to create its own sensibilities. A good example is the numerous remakes of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic novel Devdas.

Indian actors Sharukh Khan, left, Aishwarya Rai, center, and Indian director Leela Bhansali arrive at the Festival Palace to attend the screening of their film "Devdas" which is out of competition at the 55th International Film Festival in Cannes, southeastern France, Thursday, May 23, 2002. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

The 1930’s version by Promothesh Chandra Barua, was a low-value production, strong on simplicity and deep acting wit clever use of rural scenery, black and white lighting techniques and reverse shots, full of the anxieties of a world lost in the twilight of colonialism and before the onset of modernity. Most aficionados of classic cinema deem this to be the definitive version; the 1950’s remake by Bimal Roy with Dilip Kumar in the lead role is also seen as classic though one full more of the post-Independence euphoria and Nehruvian optimism that infused the nationalist elites in the period and the current version directed by Bhansali is far removed from this. Screened at the Cannes film festival and billed as the most expensive Bollywood film to date, with the big names in Hindi cinema: Aishwariya Ray, Madhumati Dixit and Shah Rukh Khan in the lead roles, it boasts sumptuous, gilded costumes, magnificent sets of epic proportions and over-top gaudy musical numbers. A critic in Britain called it “the film Moulin Rouge wanted to be”, this is not the place to go into an in-depth examination of the film or the theme, though artistic circles and devotees of the original howl in disgust and anger at the devaluation of a classic (I am sure they will howl a lot louder when they actually see the film), the style and atmosphere of the film reveals the more distasteful side of what we could call contemporary Indian mimicry – a blatant celebration of material wealth, style over content, abundant over ripeness over elegance and energy over matter. In any case what we should be aiming at and celebrating is syncretism not mimicry, a equal blending and valuation of cultural/national styles which produces a wholly new and original result which cannot simply be reduced to the sum of its parts as merely part East and part West.

The newly emergent urban middle-classes and the upwardly mobile lower classes that are profiting from globalisation and liberalisation, who form a large part of the immigrant Indian community abroad do not fill me with ease. Many of these groups tend to some come from backgrounds which are socially conservative or rapidly become so, some such as the NRI community in the USA are key financers of the Hindutva, others such as the trading community in the Middle-east is heavily implicated in money laundering and other illicit dealings. The desire to see a militarily strong and nuclear India, was received most rapturously by the middle classes both at home and abroad – after all they don’t have to face the fallout of communal rioting or see the ugly discrimination by saffronised administrations; the disenfranchised groups and the labouring poor are in the main too caught up with the pressures of daily survival to pay much attention to such posturings while the super-elite have already opted out of the political process preferring to reach private accommodations with whichever government is elected to power – effectively buying protection from any attack on the underlying structure of property relations and insulating themselves from the rest of society by retreating into isolated urban enclaves; where as long as the amenities of a modern lifestyle are supplied (consumer goods, regular electricity, water, good healthcare, police protection and cleaned spacious housing) and their income streams are undisturbed they are willing to tolerate any government in power. The space for change in such an emerging scenario seems very limited indeed and this is one of the most acute problems facing India today.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:33 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Daniel Pearl Case:

The Sindh High Court has sentenced the British-born Omar Saeed Sheikh to death for the brutal slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The main evidence in the closed door trial was a retracted confession by Mr. Sheikh and testimony by a taxi driver who saw the victim and the accused together. Three other men were given life sentences. Apparently the Pakistani government has been under a lot of pressure from the US to deliver results in this case. Whitehouse Spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, has welcomed the decision by the Pakistani court system.

I find one aspect of this case troubling. If the Pakistani courts had found differently would the US respect the decision? If not, then what does it mean for the US to accept this verdict when it falls the way they want?

:: Vikash Yadav 6:34 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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