A former Vice-President told an international forum that cultural nationalism was taking over civic nationalism. Now, how true is that?
India is being taken over by a “new and imaginary practice of cultural nationalism” as against the “well-established principle of civic nationalism, which seeks to present electoral majority in the guise of a religious majority, and monopolise political power”. Thus spoke former Vice-President Hamid Ansari while addressing a conference on protecting the Constitution. The fact that the former Vice-President chose to make these comments while speaking at an international forum, the Indian American Muslim Council, sharing space with foreign elements, some of whom are known to be hostile to our country and its interests, is also not lost on many Indians.
However, the thrust of Ansari’s speech must now bear closer scrutiny. His allegation is that a civic life laid down by the Constitution is sufficient in a pluralistic country. This is far from a welcome assertion. The culture and the history of one community might be distasteful to another. Those not proud of the post-Independence history of theirs because they have stayed back in a Dar-ul-Harb (place of conflict) instead of migrating to their new homeland now prefer their origin to be the Constitution of 1950. This is a conflict between culture and civic existence. In the views of a significant segment, the culture of the rest of the country is something that harks back to jahalia or darkness.
The former Vice-President’s outburst must also, therefore, provoke another very serious question, one which the country has so far chosen to put off, but with rather unhealthy outcomes for its body politic. What is so permanent about a country’s civic life? The Constitution can be amended; it can be replaced by another document. Our own Constitution has been amended more than 100 times already since 1950, whereas the history of Indian culture would go back to at least the Vedic Age. What probably the former Vice-President referred to was this conflict when he talked of the phenomenon of cultural nationalism seizing power from those who established the principle of civic nationalism, possibly operative since 1006 AD and Qutubuddin Aibak, or perhaps 1526 AD when Babur won the first Battle of Panipat, or any other date.
Those citizens who are desirous of civic nationalism would have to abandon their imaginary preferences and identify with the pristine culture of the country. This, ie, the Partition of the nation, was effected in 1947 as Messrs Jinnah, Mohd Iqbal and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed in and wanted it at any cost. It was a settlement made for all time to come, as it appears now. An undoing of that Partition means a 60/40 population ratio between the ‘cultural nationalists’ and the potential ‘civic nation’ advocates.
Three prominent personalities had envisioned this clash of nationalism; namely MA Jinnah, BR Ambedkar and Dr Rajendra Prasad, our first President. All of them proposed what the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, had done with respect to Greece and Turkey in 1923. Going back into history, the Turks had conquered Anatolia and its neighbourhood in the decades preceding 1453. This was the Islamic takeover of legendary Greece. Istanbul was Constantinople until then; the headquarters of the Eastern Christian Church are still situated in this historic city. Through the centuries, there used to be clashes between the Turks and the Greeks; in fact, they were rather like what we nowadays call communal riots.
The League of Nations, after the end of World War I — when the Turks were amenable to listening after their defeat and collapse of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire — proposed an exchange of Greeks who were to migrate to their original country while all the Turks were to immigrate to Turkey. A detailed procedure of what was to be done, who would do what and by when was documented. The exchange was conducted smoothly and methodically; there has not been a single riot since.
Returning to what former Vice-President Ansari has chosen to articulate, many questions spring to the minds of many concerned countrymen. Why did a former Vice-President choose an international forum to make remarks against one’s own country, whose second-highest office he held for, say, 10 years? Is there even an iota of merit in Ansari’s claim that India is being “torn apart by a new cultural nationalism?” It is also very difficult to ignore the record in public life of the country’s former Vice-President. Also, the fact that Ansari chose the platform of the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), a sectarian lobbying group with a long history of anti-India activities, certainly is a poor advocacy for any civic nationalism. Cultural nationalism is nothing but the nation waking up to its fundamental ethos.
The historical track record of this supposed civic nationalism in promoting tolerance, togetherness, peace and any sense of national security can at best be called a disappointing one. The substance of the former Vice-President’s remarks, if one were to ignore his diatribe, is also lacking in any specific content as to the exact nature of the threat he has talked about. The country, despite no dearth of serious challenges since Independence, has steadfastly stood by democracy and the very freedom that allowed Hamid Ansari to become the country’s Vice-President.
(The writer is a well-known columnist, an author and a former member of the Rajya Sabha. The views expressed are personal.)
