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RIGHT
ANGLE
Flip
Side of Nationalism
Minority
rights must blend with a cohesive national identity
By
Swapan Dasgupta
 What
is best described as the "identity debate" is an occupational
hazard in all plural societies. Last week, rss chief K.S. Sudarshan ruffled
many feathers by calling for the Indianisation of Christian churches,
a theme reminiscent of Henry VIII's bid to subsume papal authority under
national sovereignty some 500 years ago. But he wasn't the only scud missile.
In Britain, the Lord Bhikhu Parekh report on the future of multi-ethnic
Britain raised a storm by calling for a new Britishness. The prevailing
nationhood, it said, was too "white", too English and by definition
excluded Black and Asian Britons.
Though prompted by vastly divergent concerns, both debates are symptomatic
of the growing concern over the relation of minorities, be they religious
or ethnic, to what is loosely defined as the mainstream. If Sudarshan
has been attacked for seeking to impose a doctrinaire uniformity, the
Parekh report has been criticised for reducing Britain to a disparate
"community of citizens and communities". Just as many bjp leaders
have squirmed at Sudarshan's loyalty test, British Home Secretary Jack
Straw has distanced himself from the Parekh report's very denial of patriotism.
Sudarshan
and Parekh represent two extreme responses to the growing menace of multiculturalism.
According to this intellectual fad, nurtured in academic sanctuaries in
the West and Australia, national culture limits citizenship to the dominant
community-in India to sanskritised Hindus and in Britain to the white
English. Consequently, until the cultural ethos surrounding nationhood
is redefined, the minorities remain alienated from the nation and the
flag. To effect this redefinition, there must be affirmative action, a
reassessment of history and a state-sponsored cultural engineering. In
India, a historian has advocated the appointment of a Reconciliation Commission-along
the lines of South Africa-and one of those associated with the Parekh
report has said Prince Charles should have married a black to prove his
commitment to multicultural Britain. Still others have openly advocated
the breakup of both Britain and India.
They are
invitations for a xenophobic backlash. Every nation has a set of ordinary
decencies that defines its nationhood. In India, respect for divergent
forms of worship, support for the cricket team, commitment to family values
are at the heart of nationality. Defining Britain, on the other hand,
is a respect for authority, a fetish for privacy and a fanatical commitment
to courtesies. However nebulous, there is something called a national
character that verges on the mystical. Roger Scruton's recently published
England: An Elegy is a captivating exposition of Englishness as an idea,
a theme that echoes traditional Indian beliefs in the sacredness of Bharat.
There is an imagined nation that exists above both the law and popular
icons.
Britishness
cannot be reduced to the great love for curry just as Indianness is more
than the sum of the articles of the Constitution, important as these may
be as window dressings of cosmopolitan nationhood.
What matters
is the minority's desire to seek emotional compatibility with the imagined
nation and the majority's readiness to be inclusive. A nation isn't frozen
in history but its existence can't be prefaced on the avant garde. Sudarshan's
desire to minimise sectarian conflict is understandable but his remedy
is sledge-hammer and his tone too righteous. Where the problem is vitamin
deficiency, both he and Parekh have prescribed surgery.
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar