European nationalism, khaki shorts
The RSS that wants to be regarded as indigenous and
reviles secular democracy as “western”, has itself borrowed its whole
construction of the nation from a narrow western exclusionary nationalism
BY PRABIR PURKAYASTHA
The advance of
the neo-liberal agenda and its demand for free flow of capital and commodities
is seen to be generally unrelated to the fault lines of ethnic and religious
violence that are opening up in various countries. If they are related they are
seen more in terms of an assault by forces of backwardness on a “civilised
West”. Even those who are victims of this assault do not challenge what
constitutes western civilisation but only invert its categories. To others, the
nation state is passé and is an anachronism that will be overcome in an
increasingly globalised world.
In economic
language, things are not quite what they seem: often, terms are constructed to
mean their opposite. Globalisation, competition and free trade are some of these
terms. People may think that these are all positive ideas: globalisation should
mean the free flow of people and ideas, allowing advances taking place anywhere
to be shared by others; competition should translate as more choices for the
consumer. And free trade should make it easy for producers to get a better deal.
Unfortunately,
the reality is quite different. Globalisation has meant a free flow of
commodities and capital, that also primarily of speculative capital. Free flow
of ideas has come up against a much harsher Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
regime. Competition in practice has meant mergers and acquisitions on a global
scale and creation of mega monopolies. The other element missing from this
picture is that globalisation of the current variety is only for finance capital
and commodities: people are excluded from the globalisation scheme. They are up
against a far harsher immigration regime today. While a global corporate elite —
rich, mobile, and integrated — is emerging, the overwhelming majority in most
countries are becoming marginal to this global economy. They are increasingly
pauperised as their nations implode or fracture.
Some
supporters of globalisation argue that it is better to submit to an American
Imperium with its “western” values, as this would automatically secularise
countries such as India. With increased globalisation, the world will become
infused with common global values, presumably much better than the national and
local ones currently in vogue. Unfortunately for this view, globalisation has
been accompanied by far more violent “religious” and ethnic conflicts: somewhere
this equation between a “civilising” global order and realities on the ground is
breaking down.
If we locate
the problem correctly, the reasons are not difficult to seek. In the period of
struggles against colonial regimes, the nationalist forces all over the world
had differing views of the nation, much in the same way that they did in India.
It is not surprising that in most national movements, civic nationalism with its
core of economic nationalism became the dominant force as economic exploitation
of people and countries was at the centre of colonialism. If we give up the
economic space of the nation, the basis of civic nationalism then collapses.
Once the leadership, in country after country, decided to give up their economic
space under the assault of neo-liberal globalisation, they had two choices:
either give up the concept of the nation itself or define the nation in terms of
either a cultural, linguistic or an ethnic identity. As giving up the nation
would mean accepting virtual re-colonisation, therefore the need arose for
falling back on narrow nationalism with its attendant ethnic or religious fault
lines.
The global
neo-liberal agenda is to dismantle the nation state except for its police
functions. As Wayne Ellwood notes: “True believers in the neo-liberal agenda
would prefer a pliant nation state, one which supports them when it is necessary
and stands aside the rest of the time (Redesigning the Global Economy, New
Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2000). If the nation states are to be dismantled
except for their police function, they cannot have legitimacy without
re-defining themselves.
A state that only oppresses its people to further
global corporate rule must find some other identity. It is here that the ethnic
and religious agenda are playing themselves out. By redefining the nation in
religious or ethnic terms, they turn the focus away from the process of
re-colonisation. Similarly, it is difficult for the new imperial order to claim
legitimacy for forcing a global corporate rule on the world including their
people. Therefore, they need the legitimising myth of a rational and civilised
“West” being confronted by forces of darkness rising out of the “non-West”.
The
West as an Ideology
After September 11, there is the recurring motif in
the media of clash of civilisations. The West and Islam — in conflict from the
time of the Crusades — are pictured in perpetual conflict except for a small
interregnum in which the West clashed with the ‘Evil Empire’ of Communism. We
had expert after expert and political leaders — dim-witted or otherwise —
echoing that the attack on the World Trade towers is an attack on western values
and civilisation. The underlying message is clear; the killing of thousands of
innocent people is non-western and could be the handiwork of only those who find
themselves incompatible with the West.
It is not only
the “injured” west that is replaying endlessly the theme of clash of
civilisations. The Indian (Hindutva) variant has also projected an alliance of
civilisations — Hindu-Christian and Zionist — against the new Evil Empire of a
resurgent ‘Jihadi’ Islam and portrayed itself as a victim of past Islamic
dominance needing redress.
The current
national and international backdrop is allegedly this clash of religions. In the
west, it is cloaked as the Huntington thesis, a clash of civilisations.
Strangely enough, a Talibanised Islam also echoes this view of clash of
civilisations. And at home, we have the Hindutva lobby who seek to project in
the past a conflict between religions — a homogenised monolithic Hinduism
against an equally monolithic Islam.
The underlying
subtext of such worldviews is that current society is built on a foundation of
hate and conflict, with the “we” and “they” being interchanged. In this
worldview, periodic sectarian clashes — Palestine, Bosnia, World Trade towers,
Afghanistan and closer to home, Gujarat — are a reaffirmation of this framework
of clash of “religions”.
In all
conflicts, we hear about the superiority of the values of “us” against “their”
inferior ones. A Bush talks about the “western civilisation values” forgetting
the genocide of the Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers, 350 years of slavery of
Africans and King Leopold’s horror filled colonial regime in Congo that killed
10 million in his lust for collecting and selling rubber. Similarly, Vajpayee
talks about 10,000 of years of Hindu tolerance, unmindful of the savage
repression of Dalits throughout this “tolerant” period. This amnesia over
history is very much a part of this civilisational discourse.
The problem with this kind of partial view of the West
or Hinduism is that it seeks to present a mythical and airbrushed past. The
mythical “past” is for projecting a particular future in which “Western” or
“Hindu” values would be hegemonic. The hegemony of “western” values boils down
to the dominance of “western” multinational corporations and their global
corporate empire. The “Hindu” is a euphemism for the upper caste Brahmanical
order, which would acquire a dominant position under the hegemonic ideology of
Hindutva.
Myth-making
and falsifying history is a part of this future project. The history chosen is
crafted out of the past and quite often even manufactured. In this version of
the West for example, Greece — the classical civilisation — is the progenitor of
all western values. And this Greece arose from a primordial Aryan Greece with
hardly any influence of the proximate older civilisation of African Egypt or
Semitic Phoenicia. This deeply racist view of history, in which the “West” and
“western values” have borrowed nothing from elsewhere, provides the underpinning
of the popular view of this manufactured West. All other groups then are
denizens of a space, which is informed by inferior values, largely irrational
and generally primitive.
The bloody
wars between nations in Europe including two world wars, the brutal repression
of its religious minorities, gas chambers, are all forgotten and are somehow
extrinsic to the innate “West” that germinated in Greece, lay dormant in the
Dark Ages and has now put up its green shoots all over the physical west —
Europe and Americas. That the indigenous people of Americas were “ethnically
cleansed” just as Moors from Spain were after being there for more than 800
years, does not find a place in this narrative.
If building
myths did not involve building a particular future, we could perhaps ignore it
as common prejudice that would slowly disappear with a better appreciation of
the past. Just as colonialism sought legitimacy defining itself in terms of its
civilising role, current imperialism couches its mission as one of spreading
reason. This idea of western history as reason and civilisation is a myth that
needs to be exposed in the fight against the neo-imperial order.
Hindutva as an Ideology
The Hindutva view which posits itself as an “opponent”
of the west has absorbed the entire format of the west in its construction of a
mythical Hindu past. Denying its Dravidian antecedents, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa
are Aryanised. The inequity of the caste system, the clashes with Buddhism, the
conflicts within Hinduism — Shaivites versus Vaishnavites — are all airbrushed
out. All intolerance is attributed to Islam while Hinduism — in this view —
remains innately tolerant.
The problem is that while the past is the terrain in
which this battle is being fought, the project is one of creating a future
exclusionary India in which minorities know their “place”. The fight against
this manufactured past is necessary to create a society that does not exclude
any community, not merely out of love for tolerance, but as the only basis of a
nation.
Quite often
the RSS agenda is thought of as a much larger fundamentalist wave in the world.
Whether it is the Christian Right, the Ayatollahs in Iran or the VHP here, there
is no question that fundamentalism has gained ground. It is true that
fundamentalists do share certain common features with those who want to use
religion for a “nationalist” project. The fundamentalists — Islamic, Christian
or Hindu — want the people to recover a past where peoples’ lives were governed
by sanction of the scriptures. Therefore, both religious nationalists and
fundamentalists seek to glorify the past.
The RSS
project, however, is not one of merely returning to this past. Its core project
is one of building a “modern” nation in which minorities have no place: they can
either be “assimilated” or live in complete subjugation. The RSS agenda is one
of building a homogeneous nation, a bleak landscape where there is no diversity
or plurality.
The RSS
concept of a homogeneous nation is not an original one. It was borrowed, lock
stock and Khaki knickers from Europe. The premise of much of European
nationalism was this exclusionary homogenous nation, which led to 300 years of
continuous bloodletting, ending with two world wars last century. The RSS
project has also little of traditional Hindu values, which it quite often
derides as weak and effeminate. Tolerance, love and peace, in this scheme of
things, are what led to India’s enslavement and therefore the RSS espousal of
the newfound “virtues” of intolerance and “militant” Hinduism. Much of the RSS
criticism of Gandhi is a criticism of this kind of “soft” Hinduism, which in
their view led India to be repeatedly invaded and conquered. Gandhi’s religious
idiom was therefore dangerous to the RSS, as was his secular politics.
European
nationalism soaked Europe in blood; massacres and brutal persecution of all
minorities — ethnic, linguistic and religious was its hallmark. Not that this
form of nationalism was not contested. The French Revolution produced the other
view of nationalism — civic nationalism — where all citizens were equal in the
nation irrespective of any other characteristic. The blood and race variety of
nationalism is built on the straitjacket of homogeneity and exclusions; the
second (civic) allows diversity and plurality. However, civic nationalism, the
dominant form today in Europe, had ceded ground to the blood and race variety of
nationalism before being de-legitimised by Hitler in his gas chambers.
The West has a
high degree of collective amnesia; it forgets its bloody past. Thus when Bush
talks about “our western civilisation and its value”, he does not mean genocide,
slavery, colonial plunder and bloody wars that was also the characteristic of
its past. In the West, the recent emergence of a more tolerant civic nationalism
must be seen against the backdrop of its extended barbaric, past exclusionary,
ethnic nationalism. The amnesia encourages the belief that the West had
civilised nationalism while the others have only the brutal variant. However,
even today there are uncomfortable echoes from its past: immigrant Turks in
Germany cannot get citizenship even after three generations. And Enoch Powell in
England earlier, and Le Pen in France now, stand for this exclusionary variety
of nationalism, where ethnicity or “white nationalism” is the basis of the
nation. That the RSS
nationalism is a derivative of this exclusionary ethnic European nationalism is
clear in the way Golwalkar defines the nation, “ … Nation — satisfying all the
five essential requirements of the scientific nation concept of the modern
world.” (italics added). Further, “Thus applying the modern understanding of
‘Nation’ to our present conditions, the conclusion is unquestionably forced upon
us that in this country, Hindusthan, the Hindu Race with its Hindu Religion,
Hindu Culture and Hindu Language, (the natural family of Sanskrit and her
offsprings) complete the Nation concept...” (Ref: We or Our Nationhood Defined).
Both Golwalkar and Savarkar, the other ideologue of Hindutva, were looking at
how to build a “modern” nation using religion as an important element. This
involved — as a natural corollary to this trajectory of nationalism — the
glorification of a Hindu past.
Nations as we
know them today did not lie hidden in some remote past and have not merely
unfolded in modern times. They have been historically constructed out of
language, culture and race; quite often this construction of the nation has led
to bloody conflicts. Even language, the cement in many of the nation states
today, grew and was standardised in the last 300 years: the nation and its
language grew together. The process was not a simple, linear one. The complexity
of nation building thus involved dissolving multiple identities that people had
into simple, monolingual, mono-religious and mono-cultural ones.
Historically,
the homogenising process that accompanied European nation building produced
relatively sterile monocultures, banishing its minorities to either the Americas
or to its prisons. Ironically, many of the ethnically cleansed minorities of
Europe replicated the same pattern even more violently on the indigenous
population of the Americas.
Present day
Europe is striking in its homogeneity. Countries largely speak only one
language, are largely Protestant (Germany, England, Sweden) or Catholic (France,
Spain, Italy) and if they have linguistic or religious minorities such as the
Basques in Spain, or the Catholics in Northern Ireland, they are still in
conflict. The nationalist wars in Europe altered fundamentally the landscape of
European nations, the result of continuous wars that they fought. Added to this
dangerous mix of culture, language and religion, was the new found enthusiasm
for scientific racism: that black and brown populations were “biologically”
inferior, leading to the killing of six million Jews and half a million gypsies
of Indian origin.
Golwalkar
traces his lineage from this definition of narrow European nationalism. His
nationhood is defined in terms of five “unities”: geography, race, religion,
culture and language. Plurality has no place in such a nation. This is the
vision that was the basis of the RSS slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.”
Golwalkar
tried to remove the problem of language by claiming Sanskrit as the mother
language and therefore declaring that all Indian languages are either derived
from Sanskrit or they are not Indian. Urdu, even though it is totally indigenous
to the country, became in the eyes of the RSS, foreign and Dravidian languages
had to be claimed as derived from Sanskrit. The language riots of the 60s forced
the RSS to give up, at least publicly, that Hindi should be the only national
language; the fascination for Sanskrit still remains. The Hindu-Hindustan plank
obviously still remains intact.
The striking
feature of Golwalkar’s variety of nationalism is not only what it claims as its
basis but also what it does not. It nowhere talks about the economic basis of
nationalism: the right of a people to control its economy, market and its
resources. It is not surprising therefore that the RSS did not fight the
British: their main focus was against the enemy of the “Hindu” nation: the
“secularists” and the Muslims. It is not an accident that the BJP government is
quite happy to surrender India’s economy to the US, IMF and World Bank while
still claiming to be nationalists. Advani riding the Toyota Rath is not a
coincidence in his bloody march to the Babri Masjid. It symbolises their “Hindu”
nationalism in which the national economy has no space.
Once the
nation is defined in these narrow terms, the crucial question is what to do with
the excluded minorities. Golwalkar’s solution was simple: either accept his
homogenous framework of the nation (Murli Joshi’s Ahmediya Hindus, Christiya
Hindus) or remain outside, forever subordinated and in peril of extinction.
Why do the RSS
ideologues so viscerally hate the secularists? It might be thought that as
Hindutva proponents, their target would be other religious groups. In physical
terms, that is quite true as a Gujarat brings out, but in ideological terms,
they share a kinship with the Taliban or similar fundamentalist groups. An
Islamic Pakistan (or Afghanistan) sits quite comfortably with the concept of a
Hindu Indian nation even if it means continuous wars. What the RSS cannot
tolerate is the idea of a nation that is inclusive and allows plurality. The
secular definition of the nation, by which the nation state is neutral between
religions and does not allow religion any place in governance, goes against the
very basis of the monolithic nation built on identities of certain kinds. It is
this definition of the nation that is at the core of the dispute. And in this
dispute, the fundamentalists and the communal fascists are on the same side.
While the RSS
wants to be regarded as indigenous and reviles secular democracy as “western”,
the RSS has itself borrowed its whole construction of the nation from a narrow
western exclusionary nationalism. It is blind to the truly original contribution
that India has made to the discourse on nation and nationalism. The concept of a
plural nation, with many languages, religions and cultures, is a unique one and
it is this unique experiment that is in danger of derailing now. And derailing
for a putrid form of European nationalism that even Europe has discarded.
It is not an accident that an
Islamic Pakistan and a Hindutva-led India are at the brink of war: this is the
history of this variety of nationalism. Unfortunately for all of us, this war,
unlike the European wars of the past, may be fought with nuclear weapons. This
is why European nationalism wrapped in Khaki shorts is so dangerous.
(Prabir
Purkayastha is a well-known academic and anti-nuclear activist).
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