The hazards of nation-building through poisoned wells

Acute Angle

In this heady age of ‘nation-building’, it’s worth asking the question: What makes a nation? Is it people brought together to applaud the pomp and circumstance of a military parade? Or glorying in some achievement conjured up by the University of WhatsApp, perhaps a ‘Unesco award’ for the best national anthem? Or, going further back, feeling joy in grain self-sufficiency or pride in a modern temple of India, a Bhakra Nangal Dam? Or in the high of winning a cricket World Cup?

In such times, at such events, every Indian wants to hug the Indian next to themselves and make common cause with perfect strangers. A sense of nationhood is strengthened, if ephemerally, and if sometimes built on dubious foundations.

What is it in the longer term? The monuments will stand, but they are, at the end of the day, so much stone and mortar. The cricket wins will be replayed in glorious technicolour, but even the fondest memory fades. The seemingly strong glue of social media fakery soon gives way. And some achievements appear much smaller in the rear-view mirror anyway.

What makes a nation, durably, is the stories we tell our children, the values we imbue them with. What makes a nation is the prayers they chant at school assembly. And the friendships they make, with people of every stripe.

Over the last seven years, and notably in the last few weeks, it has become clear that this most meaningful nation-building is being wilfully undermined. The consequences will take their time to show, but show they will; if we are not careful, they will hollow out one of the most remarkable experiments in nationhood anywhere in the world.

Among the many videos that emerged in Karnataka last week was one that showed young Hindu girls suddenly sporting saffron stoles and shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. One observer on Twitter perceptively noted: “We have poisoned the well.”

What sort of stories were those kids told? Where did that sudden fervour come from, the conviction that saffron stoles were a perfect riposte to the hijabs worn by ‘them’? In that moment, the idea of ‘us versus them’ decisively displaced the Idea of India, derided often when it comes from Congress lips, but an idea worth cherishing nevertheless. This new conviction, implanted early, threatens to blight whole lifetimes. The genesis of this latest bonfire is less important, as is the purpose for which it was started: What matters is that long after this incident is forgotten, perhaps after a key election or two, the damage will remain.

I think back more than three decades ago to school assembly, where all kids -- Hindu, Muslim and Christian alike -- together chanted verses from the Rig Veda, the Koran and the Bible. This was all somewhat mechanical, and in the Delhi cold, one longed to get it over with quickly, but now it feels like a prescient inoculation against a deadly virus, a sort of antidote taken in advance of future poisoning. It’s a testament to the toxicity that abounds now that Doordarshan’s 1970s animated film on diversity Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiya evokes a longing for simpler, nicer times, rather than a snigger at its tackiness.

Modern India’s founding fathers, perhaps due to their souls being burnished by the rigours of the freedom struggle, often tended to take the hard way out. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to let one group dominate every other, like a Hindu Pakistan, or become cruelly, backwardly monochrome, a Hindu Saudi Arabia.

But no, they were determined, backed by a remarkable Constitution, to do the right thing. It meant missteps, messiness, the occasional firestorm, but it fit like a glove with the ethos of an ancient land. And it was not just altruism by our statesmen. Somewhere, our early leaders lived by the modern management maxim of diversity in thought and style yielding the best results; what better way of watering the roots of a young nation?

Often, our leaders’ determination to protect minorities could come across as “appeasement”; as the years wore on, regrettably, some of it became cynical vote-bank politics. But at its heady best, India was a dream come true, a sort of ideal for the world, despite the grinding poverty and corruption.

We’re now in different times. A whole generation of young Indians -- on every side of a deliberately deepened religious divide -- is going to grow up with brutish ideas that are easier to assimilate, drunk innocently from poisoned wells across the country. For those on the ‘right’ side of the divide, life will be simpler, less challenging. Perhaps they will just go with the flow.

And perhaps it’s no coincidence that in the run-up to the days of awfulness in Karnataka, the BJP government purged the Beating Retreat ceremony of a Christian hymn that was a favourite of the ultimate unifier, Mahatma Gandhi. This belated kick at the departed British would have amused the Mahatma, who forged a united nation to deliver the actual, and rancourless, coup de grace 75 years ago.

(The Editor of DH lives for the space between the headline and the story @shankarsview)