ARUN Jaitley, the finance minister, has claimed that the BJP has “won the first round in the nationalism debate. The people who were raising anti-India slogans are now forced to say Jai Hind, or Bharat Mata ki Jai”.  This understanding underscores the Sangh Parivar’s jingoistic and purile notion of the ‘nation’. The Sangh Parivar, and indeed Jaitley would do well to remember that Jai Hind and indeed Bharat Mata ki Jai (where Bharat Mata is in chains with a tricolour not on a lion with a saffron flag) are slogans of the freedom struggle which the RSS was never a part of. So the Sangh and its followers cannot lay their claim on these slogans and make superficial claims. In fact underlying these superficial claims is an Imperialist notion of the ‘nation’ and nationalism. This is seen in a recent article ‘One nation, one culture’ (Indian Express March 24, 2016), by VG Vaidya, a senior RSS ideologue and the former editor of Tarun Bharat, who uses western political theorists like Ernest Barker and Renan to argue that “to become a nation you don’t need one language or one religion, but a shared value system”. He asks the readers “is this a dangerous notion”? Since this is the first attempt by a Sangh intellectual to theorise their own conception of the ‘nation’ in the contemporary political debate, it is worth showing how the contents of the article represent a dangerous trend at the manipulation of history and political theory. In the process of arguing his case, Vaidya in fact proves beyond doubt that the Sangh espouses an imperialist notion of nationhood, one that is rightwing, upper caste and anti-constitutional in character.

THE ORIGINS OF

‘BHARAT’, THAT IS INDIA

The first proposition made by Vaidya in his article is that unlike the USSR, which was a State including many ‘nations’, “our Bharat, that is Hindustan, that is India, was one nation from time immemorial but contained many states”. The examples given by Vaidya are that of the Nanda Empire (4th BCE), Harshvardhan’s empire (7th BCE) and the birth of Buddha who he says was born in a ‘republic’ within ‘Bharat’. Naturally the examples used by Vaidya are those of upper caste ruling classes who largely belonged to the so-called ‘cow belt’. Significantly this excludes all non-Hindi speaking areas and the regions of the Indus valley which were included in the older Hindutva conception of akhand bharat. The narrowing down of the scope of ‘ancient Bharat’ in this way is obviously constructed to build up a upper caste view of ‘Bharat’ which is embedded in cow belt Kshatriya nationalism.

The creation of the ‘antiquity’ of the nation is a project that has been espoused by several ruling classes with imperialist ambitions. In contrast the idea of the ‘nation’ developed and espoused during the freedom struggle (from which the RSS’s presence was absent) was part of the negotiation between different classes and social groups. The constitution, which was borne out of this process, was largely a liberal modern document with no antecedents in the antiquity.  This union of states is born out of the links forged through several struggles against imperialism and does not denote an ancient, but a modern history of anti-imperialism. Given this fact the constitution is a political and social contract to maintain cultural pluralism and basic rights, a document that contradicts the logic of empire building on which Vaidya basis his argument. Hence the concept of India is based on the people-to-people unity achieved during the multiple struggles for freedom against the British and its federalism denotes the diversity of these struggles and their multiple ideologies and trajectories. Therein lies the origins of anti-imperialist ideas of the modern Indian nation.

THE BASIS OF

NATIONHOOD

Proceeding from his argument about origins, Vaidya then goes on to define a ‘nation’. He says “the people are the nation”. He defines three main conditions for the people to constitute a nation. The first is the quest for a ‘historical homeland’; the second is ‘a common history’ and the third ‘adherence to certain value system, that is culture’. Explaining the first Vaidya uses the example of Israel where he, incorrectly and in a manipulation of historical facts, claims that the “jews were driven out of their motherland and for 1800 years they lived in other countries. But they never forgot that Palestine is their country”. Of course this interpretation repeats the Israeli version of ‘history’ and conveniently ignores the imperialist origins of Israel itself. The creation of Israel as a way of quelling the rebellion by the Palestinians against British imperialism is something that Sangh Parivar does not want to recount. As the noted scholar Albert Hourani explained in his magna opus The History of the Arab Peoples, the cultural pluralism and co-existence of different social and religious groups in the region of ‘Arabia’ was disrupted by the active intervention of the British through its recognition of the Wasabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the one hand, and an extremely reactionary Israel state on the other hand.  Given the imperialist and fascistic leanings of the philosophy of the Sangh Parivar, it is not surprising that its senior ideologue resorts to Israel as an ideal example of nationhood in terms of the yearning for a ‘historical homeland’ whose ancient existence is only proven through revisionist rightwing history writing.

In explaining the second and the third conditions of nationhood, Vaidya resorts to the familiar ‘Indian is equal to Hindu’ argument. He quotes Radhakrishnan saying that ‘Hinduism is a commonwealth of many religions’, and uses the constitution as a refuge to state that Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs should be construed as ‘Hindus’. This anomaly in the constitution is a costly one because it gives political Hinduism a license to claim that ‘Hinduism’ is a culturally inclusive religion. But it is worth recalling that it is so-called ‘upper caste Hindu empires’ (who Vaidya terms as being the ancient predecessors of Hindustan)  where Buddhists were persecuted by Brahminical rulers in post-Mauryan period. That modern Hinduism is even intolerant of its own dissenting traditions is seen in the violent protests by Sangh Parivar when an exhibition described Ram and Sita as coming from same lineage in a tribal version of the Ramayana. The controversy over Ramanujam’s essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ and its exclusion from the syllabus under ABVP pressure shows that the pluralism that Vaidya so proudly talks about under the ‘Hindu Dharma’ does not exist either in theory or reality. Hence Vaidya’s argument that  ‘Hinduism’ has the capacity to provide a value system that provides the basis of nationhood is nothing but a hogwash to legitimate the ‘nationalism’ of a pro-imperialist ruling class.

Following from the point made above, it would be correct to state that Vaidya’s attempt to justify Hinduism as a basis for the ‘value system’ is against the constitution of India as a secular, culturally and religion wise pluralistic nation in its spirit and content. The shared values that Renan speaks about are enshrined in a negotiated document called the constitution. Its commitment to democratic culture, freedom of religion and speech are not the values that Vaidya’s theory either espouses or propagates. Hence the ‘spirit and the values’ propounded by him stand in stark contrast to the ideas of nationhood that the freedom struggle envisaged for a composite culture based self-reliant and egalitarian republic. The repeated attempts of the Sangh Parivar to polarise public opinion on the basis of their own retrogressive ideas of ‘nation’ is not only dangerous but also potentially ‘seditious’ as it incites violence by lumpen opinion makers against a liberal democratic constitution. The ideological war against a rightwing imperialist idea of the ‘nation’ is on, and the progressive and democratic forces should cooperate with each to win this war.