Minhaz Merchant
Interpret the former liberally and protect the latter uncompromisingly.
Every now and again, the question pops up: is nationalism a bad thing?
It was asked during the Award Wapsi campaign, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) agitation, and now after the imbroglio over director Karan Johar's film.
The same question came up during a panel debate at an awards ceremony celebrating excellence in journalism. “Can nationalism have different meanings,” I was asked by the moderator.
Yes, it can, I replied. You can interpret nationalism in different ways. For example, criticising the government doesn't compromise your nationalism. Being left wing doesn't. Being right wing doesn't. Not standing up in a cinema hall when the national anthem is being played doesn't. (It makes you an insensitive cretin but that's still not enough to make you anti-national.)
The real issue isn't nationalism or patriotism which have (and should have) liberal, flexible definitions for different people. In a democracy such differences are not only acceptable but desirable. Plurality of opinion defines a civilised, evolved society.
While nationalism has many perfectly acceptable interpretative definitions, national interest does not. You can still be a patriot and a nationalist when questioning or even condemning the government.
National interest, however, is an entirely different matter. It differs from nationalism in one critical way. National interest is absolute. It has a singular interpretation unlike the plurality afforded by nationalism.
Right to dissent
Dissent is the placebo of democracy. Without it, democracy dies. But when you convert dissent into subversion, national interest can be compromised.
For example, Kanhaiya Kumar, the former JNU president, crossed the line from dissent to subversion. We see that line being crossed in Jammu & Kashmir as well where civilians and soldiers are killed because separatists instigated by Pakistan have subverted the state.
This endangers national security, causes death and destruction, and must obviously be dealt with by the law.
As I've written before, however, even subversion must not be conflated with sedition. So the government was wrong to charge Kanhaiya Kumar under the colonial-era Section 124A (which though modified after Independence is still often misused) but right to suspend him. Let the punishment fit the crime or you create a victim out of a culprit.
National interest is intimately tied up with national security and must be protected. Unlike nationalism, it does not have interpretative flexibility.
Left-leaning liberals (whose hectoring is often illiberal) confuse nationalism with national interest. Their narrative thus gets distorted. They deliberately conflate national interest with jingoism. Such ultra-nationalism has nothing to do with national interest.
Because India has had a troubled colonial history, national interest occupies a more central role than it does in other countries. It's important therefore in India to separate the practical imperative of national interest from the ideological component of nationalism.
Those like Santosh Desai who in The Times of India (October 24) called the recent surgical strike in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) a manifestation of “an angry nationalism” miss the point. The strike in PoK, after years of timorous strategic restraint that cost innumerable Indian lives, was a manifestation not of nationalism, angry or otherwise, but an act in preventive counter-terrorism.
It is such woolly-headed logic that allows countries like Pakistan and China to divide the nation's voice by giving credence to a false equivalence between nationalism and national interest.
In countries like the United States and Britain, the two often get merged because of their particular histories. British Prime Minister Theresa May has signalled that post-Brexit Britain will follow a hard right-wing anti-immigration policy. Governments across Europe, deluged by Middle East refugees, are turning Right on security issues. To them nationalism is a prerequisite to protect national interest.
Nowhere is this more sharply evident than in the US. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has based his entire campaign on an anti-immigration plank.
Nationalism in America and Europe, long reviled as an ideology associated with Nazi fascism after World War II, has become respectable again because it is so clearly in these societies' interest to combat Islamist terrorism.
In India nationalism, embraced during the freedom movement, has in sharp contrast come to acquire negative connotations. It is associated with right-wing majoritarianism. The RSS has fallen into this ideological trap by placing religion at the centre of its discourse. That gives religious bigots of all stripes an opportunity to dissemble.
The RSS must stop its anti-English language drive, admit women to the main organisation (not just the mahila wing) and recognise that Vedic science, whatever its accomplishments (and it is right to acknowledge these) cannot replace modern science.
National interest in the end can only be protected by a modern, forward-looking society in which neither jingoism nor appeasement has a place.
The best way to safeguard and advance national interest is by building a strong economy, rapidly improving the military's capability with modern weaponry neglected for decades, and harmonising social tensions. Peace comes from strength. India has for too long been a weak state which Pakistan and China have fully exploited. That must end.
The importance of advancing the national interest is lost in the counterfeit argument over nationalism.
The criticism recently levelled by the “liberalati” is that Pakistani actors, writers and artistes are soft targets. But so are Indian women and children targeted daily by Pakistani mortar shelling on border villages.
The same liberalati doesn't say a word when Indian films like Phantom are banned in Pakistan. This of course still doesn't make them anti-national – nationalism is a broad tent which accommodates all views, however quasi-liberal, as long as national interest is not compromised.
A country's security and unity is best protected by allowing widely different interpretations of nationalism within the purview of the law. Plurality of opinion is the best antidote to the real anti-nationals. They seek to subvert the national interest by raising the bogey of nationalism-as-jingoism.
To defeat these anti-nationals, who often hide behind a liberal-secular veil, call their bluff. Draw a distinction between nationalism and national interest. Interpret the former liberally and protect the latter uncompromisingly.
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