The Principal of the school, Rashmi Hegde explained that the azaan had been played as an initiative to make students aware about prayers of different religions. “This is a misrepresentation of our attempt,” she said, according to The Indian Express.

As if suspension of the teacher was not enough, the issue has been criminalised. Deputy Commissioner of Police Ajay Kumar Bansal said that a complaint has been filed in the matter and an inquiry is being done, ANI reported.

The protest by the parents was led by Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Yogesh Sagar. The police complaint about hurting religious sentiments was filed by local Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Sawant, according to The Indian Express.

Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra

Members of BJP and Shiv Sena, along with some parents, created ruckus at a school over a teacher playing Azaan (Islamic call to prayers) during morning assembly.

According to the school principal, it was an initiative to inform the students about… pic.twitter.com/1IWDSxZAHG

— HindutvaWatch (@HindutvaWatchIn) June 17, 2023

“A teacher belonging to the minority community deciding to play the Azaan from her phone into the loudspeaker during the morning assembly of Friday is not just a mistake,” Sagar told reporters.

Meanwhile, the principal — who herself had explained the act as a means of spreading diversity later is reported to have told parents that the school management was also conducting an inquiry into the matter. “This is a Hindu school and our prayers include Gayatri Mantra and Saraswati Vandana,” the principal said. “We assure that such an instance will not be repeated in the future.”

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Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan has said that people in authority have to tolerate criticism and that any move to suppress it “is a sure fire recipe for policy mistakes”.“What makes India strong is its diversity, debate and tolerance. What makes it weak is narrow-mindedness, obscurantism and divisiveness,” Rajan said in a long LinkedIn post on Monday, two days ahead of the 150th birth anniversary of the Father of the Nation. Rajan has been known to publicly make comments on the state of India’s economy and polity ever since he quit his post.

He also said that governments that suppress public criticism do themselves a gross disservice.

 “If every critic gets a phone call from a government functionary asking them to back off, or gets targeted by the ruling party’s troll army, many will tone down their criticism. The government will then live in a pleasant make-believe environment, until the harsh truth can no longer be denied,” he said.

“Undoubtedly, some of the criticism, including in the press, is ill-informed, motivated, and descends into ad-hominem personal attacks. I have certainly had my share of those in past jobs. However, suppressing criticism is a sure fire recipe for policy mistakes,” he added.

Last week, the Narendra Modi government had removed Rathin Roy and Shamika Ravi from the economic advisory council to the Prime Minister. Both had criticised some of the government’s policies. Roy had questioned the government’s decision to borrow funds from overseas markets through the sale of sovereign bonds. Rajan, too, had earlier cautioned the government about the consequences of raising funds through overseas sovereign bonds.

In his latest post, Rajan reposes great faith in the ability of India’s vibrant democracy to foster debate and make mid-course corrections.

“We have our weaknesses and our excesses, but our democracy is self-correcting, and even while some institutions weaken, others come to the fore,” Rajan wrote.

At one point, Rajan said: “…an attempt to impose a uniform majoritarian culture on everyone can kill minority community characteristics that can be very advantageous to growth and development. Cultural diversity can promote intellectual diversity and intellectual ferment, something every economy at the frontier needs.”

Rajan’s remarks have come at a time the government, which has seen economic growth tumble to a six-year low of 5 per cent in the first quarter ended June 30, has been hashing out a number of measures to kick-start the engines of growth.

But while putting into place a slew of post-budget measures, the government has not tried to foster a wider debate on some of its questionable policy prescriptions like the recent move to force banks to start a credit carnival to boost consumption, raising another spectre of bad loans just when financial service entities had started to clean up their books.

Rajan, who had significantly been a vocal critic of the idea of demonetisation when it was sprung on the country, had also recently argued that the Modi government’s move to consider the flotation of sovereign debt on overseas markets could prove to be disastrous, condemning India to the prospect of a perpetual cycle of debt. He had said the idea needed to be debated vigorously before any decision was taken.

“Constant criticism allows periodic course corrections to policy — indeed public criticism gives government bureaucrats the room to speak truth to their political masters. After all, they are not screaming the loudest in the room,” Rajan said in his latest post.

He said he was worried about three emerging developments in India. The first was a “tendency to look back into our past to find evidence of our greatness”.

“Using history to thump our own chest reflects great insecurity and can even be counterproductive,” he added.

His second concern was a tendency to regard foreign ideas and foreigners with suspicion.

“It seems a number of cultural and political organisations are trying to oppose anything foreign, not because they have examined it carefully and found it to be bad, but because of its origin,” he added.

“We cannot be so insecure that we believe allowing foreign competition will demolish our culture, our ideas, and our firms. Indeed, it is by erecting protective walls that we have always fallen behind, making us susceptible to total colonisation,” said Rajan, currently a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

His third concern was the disquieting tendency to muzzle all debate. “A quick resort to bans will chill all debate as everyone will be anguished by ideas they dislike. It is far better to improve the environment for ideas through tolerance and mutual respect,” he said.

If India wanted to compete at the frontiers of production, he said it would have to stimulate debate rather than choke it off completely.

“It would be retrograde, indeed against our national interest, to give up this vibrant democratic society that tolerates and respects its diverse people and viewpoints for a more authoritarian, monocultural, majoritarian imposition,” he said.

Listing what one needs to do to keep the “idea factory” open, Rajan wrote: “The first essential is to foster competition (emphasis added by Rajan) in the marketplace for ideas. This means encouraging challenge to all authority and tradition, even while acknowledging that the only way of dismissing any view is through empirical tests.

“What this rules out is anyone imposing a particular view or ideology because of their power. Instead, all ideas should be scrutinised critically, no matter whether they originate domestically or abroad, whether they have matured over thousands of years or a few minutes, whether they come from an untutored student or a world-famous professor.”
 
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Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Abha Dev Habib

Bhima Koregaon is a tribute to the strength of the Mahar community in their fight against the Peshwas and the memorial has been standing there for long. It is here that Baba Saheb Ambedkar used to come every 1st January. The Ambedkarites from Maharashtra and other parts of India visit this place every year and celebrate it. There are a few areasin which none can match the Ambedkarites. On the Dusshara day or on October 14^th, when Baba Saheb Ambedkar, with millions of his followers, embraced Buddhism, people gather in Nagpur to commemorate the event, which is one of the biggest congregations. Again, on December 6^th, which is Ambedkar’s death anniversary, people gather at Chaitya Bhumi in Mumbai where Baba Saheb was cremated. Also, on April 14th, crores of Bahujan Samaj people celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti.

The question is – who was responsible for Bhima Koregaon violence, when it is a well-known fact that it is an annual function or celebration which is spontaneous in nature and where a majority of Ambedkarites visit.

Police has the right to investigate things but it cannot harass people, raiding their homes and taking away their intellectual wealth. It is sad that despite the arrest of a number of people, there is no formal chargesheet.

In today’s world, when you have huge digital data, you can get mails from a diverse group, you may be a member of various discussion groups, sometimes you don’t follow, you may receive phone calls from different people, many of whom you may not even know, but based on these things, if the police and the agencies create an environment of intimidation and harassment, then it must be stopped.

We know that this government has decided to call people terrorists before they could prove it. The onus lies on the individuals to prove the contrary. This is such a mental trauma, which only the individual facing it and his or her family know about. It is time for the Supreme Court to prove its mettle and provide strong guidelines in relation to such searches by a state police in another state. There was a time when it was difficult for a state police to enter and do the searches in other state, but it seems that now, it has become a norm.

It is sad because this is nothing more than an attempt to stop ideas from flourishing. Courts have clarified many times that a difference of ideas from the state does not amount to being anti-national. If an idea does not promote animosity among communities or waging a war against the state, it is no crime. Definitely, we all know that the unity and integrity of India is paramount, but equally important are the rights of the people. It is because of the choice of the Indian people to live together as a nation that we are a strong nation. It is not the state or power which keeps us together, it is our commitment to certain common values which bind us together. Interestingly, those who are openly calling for mob lynching, elimination of minorities and their deportation are roaming free and police does not find any evidence against them even when they are caught red handed.

Discrimination and biases among our fellow citizens will not make this country great. It will flourish only when diverse ideas are allowed to roam and we critique them. It is not necessary for us to agree on everything. India grew because our founding fathers realised the immense power of its people and strength in its diversity. Attempt to homogenise thought processes, ideologies, eating habits or culture of this great country, will only be detrimental to the integrity of the nation. Hope those in power realise that diversity of ideas and culture is our strength, and not our weakness. Academic institutions and academics must allow questioning and freedom of thought, so that we have children who can question wrongs and have the power to speak the truth to those in power. But, it seems, those in power are frightened of the independence of thoughts and ideas. Still, we have no option but to keep uniting and joining our hands in our common struggle to protect our secular, liberal constitution and the unity and integrity of the country from those who want to destroy it by trying to homogenise it.
 
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Source: Dennis Jarvis | Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
 

A little after the inaugural meeting of the Indian National Congress on 28 December 1885, the Bombay Gazette carried a report on the event, expressing genuine wonder at the proceedings. To begin with, it was noted, the very fact that Indians ‘representing the various races and communities, castes and sub-divisions of castes, religions and sub-divisions of religions, met together in one place to form themselves, if possible, into one political whole,’ was ‘most unique and interesting’.

Then there was fascination born from the sheer visual extravaganza that the meeting appeared to be: ‘There were men from Madras,’ announced the Gazette (throwing political correctness to the wind) ‘the blackness of whose complexion seemed to be made blacker by spotless white turbans’. Standing beside them was the cream of colonial Bengal society, many of whom ‘appeared in entirely European costume’. There were ‘bearded, bulky and large-limbed’ Pathans, just as there were ‘Banyas from Gujarat’ and ‘Sindhees from Kurrachee’. The Marathi delegates came flaunting ‘cart-wheel’ turbans while the fire-worshipping Parsis displayed, in the Gazette’s opinion, a ‘not very elegant head-dress’. To add to this, there were many delegates from the South who appeared bare-chested, just as there were some who saw no reason to use footwear. ‘All these men assembled in the same hall,’ concluded the report, ‘presented such a variety of costumes and complexions, that a similar scene can scarcely be witnessed anywhere’ – except perhaps, it offered, ‘at a fancy (dress) ball’. 

To Indians today there is nothing particularly unusual about the multiplicity of languages and cultures our countrymen and women uphold and celebrate – in a single urban classroom, for example, there may be children who speak English during their lessons, Malayalam or Meiteilon at home when with their parents, and Hindi to friends while playing gully cricket, added to which might well be extra lessons in Sanskrit or German. But a little over a century ago, the sight of so many diverse groups represented in one single room was nothing short of extraordinary. The proposition that these men – with their different colours, costumes, cuisines and castes – desired to assert a common political identity was even more revolutionary. After all, an almost chaotic sense of division seemed to be the guiding principle of life in India. There was language to begin with, so utterly complex that a dialect spoken in one district could be replete with peculiar inflections unfamiliar to fellow speakers of the same tongue in the next district. 

Beyond geography, there were the divisions of caste: while Brahmins existed everywhere, there were 107 different types of them in Varanasi alone, each variety claiming superiority, and each asserting the distinctness of its identity. Costume, again, revealed a great deal: where Tamil Brahmins grew their tuft of hair at the back of the head, the Malayali Brahmin wore it in the front; where Iyengar women saw white as the colour of widowhood, the Namboodiri bride, just across the Western Ghats, wore nothing but white to her bridal chamber. And while the Rajput lady moved around with a veil, wearing even a blouse was considered indecent in Malabar. Only the most tenuous of links seemed to run through these groups while the more solid ingredients essential to the birth of modern nationalism seemed, even to most Indians, worryingly absent. 
 

To some thinkers, India was enriched and made strong by the breathtaking heterogeneity that had long been its hallmark; others argued that homogeneity was what made sturdy nation-states.

What, then, united these people and slowly brought them together on a common platform? To begin with, it helped that they were standing up to British inequity, an unpleasant experience they all suffered in common. As was once remarked, ‘It is not so much sympathy with one’s fellows as much as hostility towards the outsider that makes for nationalism.’ It certainly did seem the case that while finding sturdy bonds between Indians was not an easy task, it was definitely possible to identify a common, oppressive enemy, in whose expulsion lay everybody’s combined salvation. 

The irony that this nascent sense of national feeling was, in some respects, a by-product of British rule was not lost on India’s early freedom fighters. It was after all the English language – a colonial import, if ever there was one—that permitted India’s nationalists to engage with one another. It was in English that Jyotirao Phule, one of India’s most remarkable crusaders against caste, read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and it was also this very language, among others, that delivered to the Maratha rajah Serfoji lessons in science in early 19th century Thanjavur.
Indeed, when that first meeting of the Indian National Congress was convened in 1885, the circular inviting participants insisted that while delegates ‘from all parts’ of India were welcome, they would need to be ‘well acquainted with the English language’ in order to be able to communicate with one another. In other words, to birth a mood of nationalism, what was needed was not only a shared love for India, but also one of the most potent instruments of imperial rule: the coloniser’s grammar book.

As late as 1947, the lack of a common language troubled the minds of India’s leaders, for language could potentially unite or divide. The report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission, appointed in 1948 by the Constituent Assembly, is telling of the formidable challenges in welding together such a patchwork of cultures as existed in India. ‘The work of 60 years of the Indian National Congress’ with its vision of a united land, the Commission noted, confronted ‘face to face’ the ‘centuries-old India of narrow loyalties, petty jealousies and ignorant prejudices engaged in a mortal conflict’. They were, furthermore, ‘simply horrified to see how thin was the ice upon which we were skating’.

After all, why should Naga tribes in the north-east feel any affinity with former subjects of the maharajah of Baroda in western India? What was to be done about the fact that though they were now people of one country, a Malayali’s traditional links with Arabia were stronger than any that existed with Delhi, just as Delhi’s bonds with Kabul were richer than its relationship with Tamil country? So, too, the Islam of the Mappila in Kozhikode had little to do with the faith as practiced in Bhopal, just as the daily worship of the Punjabi Hindu was vastly different from that of his co-religionists in Orissa. 

Ethnic nationalism would not work here because the subcontinent was bursting with ethnic diversity, and forcing any kind of rigid, overpowering uniformity over its peoples would break the nation before it was even born.

It was no wonder, then, that while the Congress had, before 1947, established regional units on linguistic lines, there was profound (though ultimately unsuccessful) resistance to permitting Indian states to be established on the basis of language. As the Linguistic Provinces Commission warned, ‘Some of the ablest men in the country came before us and confidently and emphatically stated that language in this country stood for and represented culture, race, history, individuality, and finally a sub-nation.’ If such sub-nations were given political expression, would that not jeopardise the larger vision of unity? Was this not a recipe for the future disintegration of the India for which our freedom fighters had suffered and fought?

These questions had exercised India’s best minds from the very start, with the result that more than one vision of nationalism was articulated across the political spectrum, from the poet Rabindranath Tagore to the proponent of Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar. As the scholar Sunil Khilnani notes, from the late 19th century the challenge, both philosophical and political, was always about ‘How to discover or devise some coherent, shared norms – values and commitments—that could connect Indians together under modern conditions.’ And whether or not India’s diversity was an asset or a dangerous weakness depended on which of these visions was allowed to prevail and gain moral influence over the majority of India’s people. 

To some thinkers, India was enriched and made strong by the breathtaking heterogeneity that had long been its hallmark; others argued that homogeneity was what made sturdy nation-states, and as far as possible, diversity ought to make way for a master culture, woven around a majoritarian religious principle. To some, as Shashi Tharoor puts it, India resembled a thali or a platter with ‘a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.’ This vision of nationalism focused on transcending difference by looking to a shared, modern future – whatever India’s fragmented yesterdays may have been, everybody could now be an equal partner in shaping its tomorrow. On the other hand, to proponents of what would become Hindutva, this was, to quote Ashutosh Varshney, the ‘opposite of nation-building’ for a ‘salad bowl does not produce cohesion; a melting pot does’. And if India had to become a melting pot, as opposed to a thali or a salad bowl, its regional cultures and local identities would have to make sacrifices for a greater cause. Hindutva was the pot, and it was the smaller cultures that would have to endure the melting.

Given that the freedom fighters had to rally Indians behind them and stand up to imperial might, it is understandable that the first of these visions were more popular – to take everyone along in a working consensus was wiser than to succumb to quarrels about which culture would become national, and whose identities would be renounced. Instead of one kind of uniform appearance, a joint cooperative effort was what they envisioned. 

As the Mahatma wrote, ‘Hindustan belongs to all those who are born and bred here and who have no other country to look to. Therefore, it belongs to Parsis, Beni Israels, to Indian Christians, Muslims and other non-Hindus as much as to Hindus.’

As early as 1884, the poet and champion of the modern Hindi language, Harischandra, explained this vision of Indian nationalism. Referring to all residents of Hindustan as Hindus, he declared: ‘Brother Hindus! You, too, should not insist any more on all details of religious faith and practice. Increase mutual love and chant this “mahamantra”. Who lives in Hindustan, whatever his colour and whatever his caste, he is a Hindu. Help the Hindus. Bengalis, Marathis, Panjabis, Madrasis, Vaidiks, Jains, Brahmos, Mussalmans, all should join hands.’ 

The following year, the prominent Muslim reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan added his weight to this conception of Indian nationalism: ‘Remember,’ he pointed out, that ‘the words “Hindu” and “Muhammadan” are only meant for religious distinction, otherwise all persons whether Hindu, Muhammadan, or Christian, who reside in this country belong to one and the same nation.’ By 1909, Madan Mohan Malaviya too reaffirmed this position. ‘How ennobling it is,’ he pronounced, ‘to even think of that high ideal of patriotism where Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees and Christians stand shoulder to shoulder as brothers and work for the common good of all… we cannot build up in separation a national life such as would be worth living; we must rise and fall together.’ 

Perhaps the greatest support for this vision of modern Indian nationalism came from Mahatma Gandhi and our future prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Though they disagreed on many things, the Father of the Nation and his protégé were more or less in agreement on the broad idea of what made the Indian people one. Ethnic nationalism would not work here because the subcontinent was bursting with ethnic diversity, and forcing any kind of rigid, overpowering uniformity over its peoples would break the nation before it was even born. 

Religion, as far as Gandhi saw it, could mobilise people but could not serve as a sufficient or enduring basis for nationalism. It had value, admittedly, and there was civilisational unity among the people despite numerous differences – why else would men and women from across the subcontinent crisscross the land on pilgrim routes that encompassed Rameswaram and Benares, Jagannath and Haridwar? But this did not make India a land of Hindus alone – everyone who had adopted India as their home had a place in the nation. 

If a nation was, as Marcel Mauss noted … a society ‘where there is a relative moral, mental, and cultural unity between the inhabitants’, in India that unity was exemplified in the mature understanding among its peoples to preserve and cherish diversity.

As the Mahatma wrote, ‘Hindustan belongs to all those who are born and bred here and who have no other country to look to. Therefore, it belongs to Parsis, Beni Israels, to Indian Christians, Muslims and other non-Hindus as much as to Hindus. Free India will not be a Hindu raj; it will be an Indian raj based not on the majority of any religious sect or community, but on the representatives of the whole people without distinction of religion…’  ‘Religion,’ he believed, ‘is a personal matter which should have no place in politics.” Naturally, the idea of nationalism as a commodity designed only for Hindus was as abhorrent to him as the notion that Muslims constituted a separate nation and could seek, for that reason, partition. 
Nehru, too, articulated nationalism in similar terms where diversity was not an impediment to love for one’s country, and inclusiveness and tolerance were, in fact, an ancestral principle once again elevated to the forefront as modern India reclaimed its destiny. He too pointed to a certain civilisational bond. ‘Some kind of a dream of unity,’ he argued, ‘has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilisation. That unity,’ however, ‘was not conceived as something imposed from outside’, as the British had done. ‘It was something deeper, and within its fold the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced, and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.’ 
Various races, religions and ethnicities had co-existed in India, and difference was accommodated within a larger tradition rather than subjugated or rejected. There was, in other words, room for everyone in India in the past, and the India of the future would reinforce such inclusive national ideals in order to make its way in the 20th century and beyond.
If a nation was, as Marcel Mauss noted in L’Anee Sociologique, a society ‘where there is a relative moral, mental, and cultural unity between the inhabitants’, in India that unity was exemplified in the mature understanding among its peoples to preserve and cherish diversity. 
This vision of nationalism was not without its challengers. V.D. Savarkar articulated in what is now a founding text of Hindutva an ideology where ‘Hinduness’ rather than a celebration of unity in diversity becomes the cornerstone of the nation. This was not a religious argument, offering instead several political criteria. After all, Hindus themselves were hardly a united force. The 1911 Census of India found, for example, that ‘a quarter of the persons classed as Hindus deny the supremacy of Brahmans, a quarter do not worship the great Hindu gods… a half do not regard cremation as obligatory, and two-fifths eat beef.’ There was, in other words, no perfect way to define who was a Hindu and who was not on account of the sheer divergence of custom and practice within Hindu communities – i.e. Hindus, too, could only be understood in the plural rather than the singular. 

[N]ationalism, according to Golwalkar, was not ‘a mere bundle of political and economic rights’, it was a cultural idea in which some were included and some had necessarily to be left out.

Savarkar offered an explanation for this state of affairs. The Hindus, soon after the Aryans arrived, had formed themselves into a nation. Over time, however, this was ‘first overshadowed and then almost forgotten’ as culture became fragmented. Lord Rama, who is treated by Savarkar as a historical figure, rejuvenated the nation, only for its unity to be crushed by the advent of Muslim invaders. Leaving aside the lack of historicity to this argument, the point ultimately made was that what bound together the Hindu nation was the ‘blood of the mighty race’ of the Aryans, so that ‘no people in the world can more justly claim to get recognized as a racial unit than the Hindus and perhaps the Jews’ That is why, he claimed, ‘the Nayars of Malabar weep over the sufferings of the Brahmins of Kashmir’ (when in fact the Nairs had little knowledge of where precisely Kashmir was or what its Brahmins were doing). Meanwhile, though Muslims and Christians in India were converts from Hindus of yore, they were, nonetheless, disqualified from membership of the nation. 

Why was this so? Hindus, according to Savarkar, were members of a single nation because no matter the countless diversities they counted within their ranks, no matter how fragmented they were, they saw India not only as their motherland (mathrubhumi) and fatherland (pitrubhumi, the land of their ancestors), but also as their holy land (punyabhumi). Muslim and Christian converts might fulfil the first two criteria but they did not envision the subcontinent, defined since antiquity as the land between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, as sacred – it was in Mecca and Rome that their sacred sites were located. The Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and others whose religions were born in India were all eligible to be members of the Hindu nation, but Christians and Muslims, whose faiths emerged in lands beyond India’s historical limits, were at best second-class citizens. 
 

While the inclusive nationalism of Gandhi, Nehru and assorted political leaders came from direct experience of fighting for freedom, Hindutva was constructed by thinkers who were not active participants in the struggle against imperialism.

Savarkar’s heir, M.S. Golwalkar, built on this and rejected the notion of territorial nationalism, as promoted by Gandhi, Nehru and the freedom fighters. ‘In this land,’ he declared, ‘Hindus have been the owners, Parsis and Jews the guests, and Muslims and Christian the dacoits.’ Religious resentment was pronounced in Golwalkar, who was suspicious of minorities. ‘They are born in this land, no doubt,’ he wrote. ‘But are they true to its salt? Are they grateful…? Do they feel that they are the children of this land… Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation.’

In essence, then, the Hindutva vision was perched on the twin notions of Hindu pride as well as an antagonism towards the disloyal ‘other’ – nationalism, according to Golwalkar, was not ‘a mere bundle of political and economic rights’, it was a cultural idea in which some were included and some had necessarily to be left out.

But this predictably controversial Hindutva vision existed largely on the fringes of society. While the inclusive nationalism of Gandhi, Nehru and assorted political leaders came from direct experience of fighting for freedom, Hindutva was constructed by thinkers who were not active participants in the struggle against imperialism and therefore could fabricate theories divorced from the lived experience of the masses. In actual fact, most Hindus hardly saw themselves as a fixed, united group who could transform that identity into a rock-solid sense of nationalism. 
Even the question of who exactly a Hindu was, in practical terms, remained frustratingly unresolved. In 1871, for example, a ‘committee of native gentlemen’ defined as Hindu all those who believed in caste. But caste appeared among Muslims and Christians also. In the 1891 census, then, the Hindu was defined by exclusion, as ‘the large residuum that is not Sikh, or Jain, or Buddhist, or professedly Animistic, or included in one of the foreign religions, such as Islam, Mazdaism, Christianity, or Hebraism’. 

Sir Monier Monier-Williams felt that the notion of a pan-Indian Hindu identity was ‘wholly arbitrary and confessedly unsatisfactory’ for the simple reason that in practice, Hinduism was amorphous. Some, such as a Brahmin census commissioner in princely Travancore, argued that Hindus were those who accepted the faith of the Brahmins, which, however, ran into trouble when one considers the words of J.W. Massie, who as early as 1840 pointed out that to consider the Brahmin as representative of all Hindus was as bewildering a statement as saying that the Italians represented all Europeans—there was too much diversity for simplistic statements to be true.  

[T]o repeat a cliché, one can be simultaneously a proud Santhal or Kashmiri, a devout Muslim or Parsi, a determined atheist or rationalist, a straight majority or a gay minority, and yet love one’s country.

The issue of diversity and nationalism and whether they complement or oppose each other, then, boils down to which vision of the nation is embraced. The Constitution India adopted in 1950 enshrines the former idea, creating a space for Indians to love the country without having to surrender any other equally legitimate identity – to repeat a cliché, one can be simultaneously a proud Santhal or Kashmiri, a devout Muslim or Parsi, a determined atheist or rationalist, a straight majority or a gay minority, and yet love one’s country. One can assert proudly a patriotism that rises over and above other feelings, without clashing with individual and group identities. 

In this vision of the nation, nationalism is not a zero-sum game; it can coexist with a variety of other valid sentiments. It draws wisdom from the past, but is oriented towards a progressive future. As Nehru saw it, it was predicated on a national philosophy featuring the seven goals of unity, parliamentary democracy, scientific temper, non-alignment, socialism, industrialisation and secularism. 

Some of these values may change with time, as we evolve as a people, but the Indian nation is not threatened if a state voices sharp concerns, or if raucous debate and disagreement take place routinely, so long as they occur within established institutions and in keeping with certain ground rules by which everybody agrees to play. Indeed, it creates checks and balances that prevents any one group from dominating the rest; any one region from engulfing others; and one version of a religion from enforcing its principles on even the last rationalist, or those who believe in a different definition of the same religion. The principle was that we could all continue to embrace our differences while staying wedded to a national consensus. 

The other vision of nationalism, meanwhile, has mutated into a one-size-fits-all variant, which is at odds with history, and denies consensus as the guiding principle of the nation. ‘Such identity,’ the historian Romila Thapar notes, ‘tends to iron out diversity and insists on conformity’ – in other words, pluralism is weakness. 

Leaving aside the treatment it proposes for religious minorities, this means radical changes even for Hindus themselves, as a tradition that has been described as a fascinating ‘mosaic of distinct cults, deities, sects and ideas’ (including contradictory ideas) is regimented to address various anxieties. This is a nationalism that follows one definition, one form, one loyalty, and one narrow ideology. 

[D]ecades and generations of officially promoting diversity means that attempting to reverse the flow and manufacture a narrow nationalism will provoke challenges, if not long-term disaster.

Naturally, this calls for a new structure and a new vocabulary of Hindu identity, featuring certain sacred books but not others; fewer gods, at the cost of others; and a standardisation of practice that sometimes goes against India’s own manifest heritage in its quest to service an overarching, synthetic cultural identity. So, for instance, all Hindus must avoid eating beef (though several castes happily did in the past) and should avoid meat in general (though a number of Brahmin communities too were not vegetarian). Nationalism must have a fixed language—Sanskrit is ideal but in the interim, Hindi will do – a language that to large numbers of Indians is hardly less alien than English, with which the country has made its peace. And then dress codes, social behaviour and much else must also fall in line, creating more a sharp machine to nurse insecurities than an organic people who live, breathe, prosper and preserve their diverse traditions and personalities. 

One-size-fits-all rules, however, have a tendency to backfire in India. And decades and generations of officially promoting diversity means that attempting to reverse the flow and manufacture a narrow nationalism will provoke challenges, if not long-term disaster. When, for instance, Hindi nationalism was force-fed from Delhi, the powers in Karnataka responded in 2018 with a Kannada-oriented sub-nationalism that even flew its own flag. If the idea is to create an ‘us or them’ with the ‘majority’ on one side, and the minority as the enemy within, the architects of this scheme will discover too many ‘thems’ sown into the fabric of the majority itself.

The historical lesson is clear – there was a reason why in 1947 India prevented nationalism from distorting into a rigid beast and envisioned it as a more malleable reflection of our multiple realities. To re-engineer this mature, long-standing policy in black and white today will only prove calamitous, showing that far from making India great again, what we will end up doing is breaking India.

Manu S Pillai is the author of three books of history, most recently The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin.

First published on https://www.theindiaforum.in/
 

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You might think that the culture war over race and immigration primarily transpires in dramatic events, like the woman who climbed the Statue of Liberty to protest Trump’s child detention policy or the events in Charlottesville last summer.
 

The culture war isn’t just playing out on the streets. It’s also a struggle over the dominant understanding of certain words. AP Photo/John Minchillo

But it also exists in the banal and everyday ways that we communicate.

It involves battles over the dominant meaning of words, and how we use those words to describe our values and construct our policies. For example, on July 19, House Speaker Paul Ryan urged conservatives to engage in a rhetorical battle over what he called the “hijacking” of traditional conservative terms like “Western civilization” by the alt-right.

Ryan asked conservatives to notice that a key term that they take for granted as universally understood had recently become contested. In a 2009 speech Ryan explained that “Western civilization” was “rooted in reason and faith”; it was a tradition that “affirms the high dignity, rights, and obligations of the individual human person.” Now Ryan fears that it is being construed to mean “white identity politics,” which is more like “racism” and “nationalism.”

Because we’re so immersed in our own culture and social networks, these rhetorical battles can be easy to miss; you have to look at them from the outside, which is a tricky thing to do.

One way to take a peek inside a culture’s discourse is to examine what rhetorical scholars like me call a culture’s “enthymemes,” which we can think of as the ways that words, phrases and ideas are understood in a particular community.

Enthymemes serve as common ground

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle coined the term “enthymeme” to explain how different words and arguments resonate in one community but not in others. Technically, an enthymeme is a “rhetorical syllogism” – an argument made with a premise that’s assumed or taken for granted, and so goes unsaid.

For example, when you hear someone say, “the states,” you know they’re referring to the United States of America. They don’t need to actually say it. More confusing is when people say “the city” because depending on where you are, “the city” could be San Francisco or Chicago. The difference between how we understand “the states” and “the city” is the difference between a commonly shared enthymeme and one that’s specific to a region.

If you want to persuade a group of people, then you need to understand what they understand, see the world the way that they do and use the words that they use to describe objects and ideas. Otherwise, you’ll just talk past them.

As Aristotle pointed out, what was persuasive in Athens might not be persuasive in Sparta. He thought that we could be most persuasive when we argue using commonly understood enthymemes and examples.
 

Decoding one American enthymeme: diversity

It can be difficult to see how enthymemes operate in a culture when you’re on the inside. It can help to look at how your culture is perceived by an outsider.

As part of my research for a book that I’m completing about the 2016 election, I’ve spent the past few months reading the message boards and websites of white nationalists, a group that exists on the fringes of American culture. It’s been fascinating to learn the white nationalists’ enthymemes and to see how they understand discourse about race.

I perused the now-banned white nationalist website Daily Stormer and read content like neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s article “A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”

I learned that white nationalists believe that racism is normal and that everyone else is a racist too. They are avowedly pro-white and believe that “diversity” is the dominant American culture’s code for a systematic program of promoting what they call “white genocide.” According to white nationalists, a conspiracy exists to exterminate white people “via mass immigration into white countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of white self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda.”

With that basic understanding in mind, let’s turn to a seemingly innocuous July 4th tweet from former President Bill Clinton celebrating the nation’s diversity.

Many of the responses to Clinton’s tweet understood his comment as a celebration of fundamental American values. Americans might disagree about how much diversity is best, but it has been generally understood that America is a “melting pot” and that diversity has made the nation stronger.

But not everyone accepted Clinton’s enthymemes.

If you believe that there is a conspiracy in the dominant culture to exterminate white people through immigration, you would read Clinton’s greeting claiming that the result of “diversity” is “deeper strength” as a call to unite all non-white people in the conspiracy of white genocide. You would read Clinton’s celebration of “we the people” as “us versus them.”

For example, one respondent decoded Clinton’s tweet from the white nationalist perspective, noting that “diversity” is “anti-White, anti-America, anti-While [sic] male.”

Another respondent rejected Clinton’s enthymeme, arguing that calls for diversity are calls for the eradication of white people:

Imagine attempting to have a productive conversation about issues of race or diversity with someone who holds completely different enthymemes from you.

When one side understands “diversity” as America’s strength and another side understands “diversity” as a conspiracy to exterminate white people, there is little common ground to discuss policies such as building a border wall, affirmative action, or whether to abolish ICE.

Without shared enthymemes, problem solving is almost impossible.
 

Beyond white nationalism

While white nationalist beliefs and rhetoric represent an extreme version of how different groups understand “diversity,” it’s possible to see how the meaning of the word is contested in attacks on university diversity initiatives. To one group, diversity initiatives mean allowing unqualified people to get an easy pass. To another, it fulfills an educational ideal of bringing people of different backgrounds and circumstances together. These different understandings make it that much harder to have a real debate.

What comes to mind when you hear a word like ‘diversity’? AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

One way to describe this cultural moment is that we’re in the middle of a battle to control the nation’s culturally dominant enthymemes – the ways that we communicate our understanding of our nation and its ideals.

It’s productive for cultures and subcultures to have open disagreements about facts, words and values – otherwise, dominant ways of thinking about the world may become calcified and suffocate progress. Think about where we’d be today if no one had ever questioned the once dominant enthymeme of “citizen” that denied women or African-Americans the ability to vote.

Yet nations need to share enthymemes to function. Without a mutually shared understanding of facts, words and values, a culture cannot endure.

It’s possible that at this moment in history there is little that we all understand in the same way, with the same emotional intensity.

We see more rhetorical battles over the meanings of key terms during moments of transition and upheaval. The instability in our understanding of the meaning of “diversity” reflects the nation’s actual instability.
 

Jennifer Mercieca, Associate Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Shutterstock.

Empirical investigations into how diversity affects communities are too few and far between to provide any definitive answer to the question. So, together with colleagues in Singapore and the US, we set out to examine this very question in a series of studies – the results of which were recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

There is indeed evidence that diversity creates mistrust in communities. But diverse communities also provide an opportunity for people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to come into contact with each other, and we thought that these experiences would create a positive effect on people’s identities: specifically, the extent to which they identify with humanity, as a whole.

A human connection

This is one of the biggest and broadest forms of identity, which a human being can comprehend. A number of spiritual and philosophical traditions have upheld that believing you share a fundamental connection with other human beings – regardless of race, religion, sexuality or gender – is the sign of a mature mind.

My colleagues and I thought that living in diverse neighbourhoods might create opportunities to come into contact with different people again and again, thereby expanding a person’s sense of identity. As a result, people living in diverse neighbourhoods should be more helpful towards others. We examined this possibility in five empirical studies.

Lending a hand. Wonderwoman0731/Flickr, CC BY

In the first study, we took to Twitter to analyse the sentiments of tweets across the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the US. This was a somewhat basic, exploratory test of our hypothesis, using a large sample of data. In this study, we found that the likelihood that a tweet mentions words which suggest positivity, friendliness, helpfulness, or social acceptance was higher in a more diverse city.
 

Opening up

Encouraged by our findings, we then sought to examine how diversity of a zip code where people lived might affect people’s likelihood to offer help in the aftermath of a disaster, such as a terrorist attack. We used data from a website that the Boston Globe set up, where people could offer help to those stranded after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

After accounting for factors such as distance from the bombings, political diversity, religious diversity and the mean household income of these zip codes, we found that people who lived in more racially diverse zip codes were more likely to offer help to those in need after the bombings.

To take our investigation even further, we examined whether people living in more diverse countries would report that they had helped someone in the recent past. We used data from the Gallup World Poll in 2012, which asked more than 155,000 individuals in 146 countries to report whether they had helped a stranger in the recent past. Again, we found that people in more diverse countries were more likely to report that they had helped a stranger in the past month.
 

Expanding identities

These three studies seemed to provide converging evidence for our ideas, but we needed to understand whether this was because diversity expands people’s identities. From a scientific standpoint, this presented a big challenge. It would almost be impossible to conduct a real experiment where we allocate people to live in different neighbourhoods and then check whether this had an effect on their level of helpfulness.

A friendly face. blue.bone/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

So instead we borrowed a technique routinely used by social psychologist, called priming. Priming is a psychological method, used to activate a state of mind for people in an experiment. We primed people to think about neighbourhoods that were either diverse, or not. We made this allocation randomly, then examined how this affected their willingness to help.

We also measured whether this simple procedure of priming also altered their identities. We used a survey measure developed by other psychologists, which measures how much someone identifies with all of humanity. In two studies, we found that imagining living in a diverse neighbourhood expanded people’s identities, which in turn made them more willing to help a stranger.

These results don’t prove definitively that diversity is always a good thing. But they do offer an encouraging view of some of the benefits which diversity might bring to communities, given the way that people’s identities shift when they often encounter those who are different to them.

Some governments are already putting policies in place to make the most of these potential benefits. For example, in Singapore, each public housing apartment block maintains the same ratio of Chinese, Malay and Indian residents as exists in the wider population. This has prevented segregation and created diversity in neighbourhoods, which has led to a better society for everyone.

In ancient Indian texts, sages exhort people to view the whole world as one family. Our studies show that this isn’t a pipe dream – it’s a real possibility.

Jayanth Narayanan, Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership, IMD Business School
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Meet one such person, Asif Khan Dehlvi, a resident of Delhi who took to storytelling as a means of bringing back the glorious past of peaceful living and the Hindu-Muslim co-existence in the country through his narratives in Urdu and Hindi. Indian history, its cultural heritage and the tradition of tolerance are the prime motifs that Dehlvi tries to bring out through his narratives. In course of storytelling, he pours his passion into  weaving threads of cordiality among brethren.

Dehlvi took to storytelling in 2011 when he left his corporate job after feeling discontent with his professional life and began ‘storytelling’ as a new venture for his career. Over the next two years, he focussed on honing his skills and in 2013 he founded ‘Delhi Karavan’. The first initiatives of re-telling the past of the country had a great impact on his career after the venture achieved success in Delhi he performed a number of times in Delhi over the next four years. In 2017, after the overwhelming success of ‘Delhi Karavan’, he founded ‘Jaypore Karavan’ and attended many programmes of re-telling the history, culture, and tradition of Rajasthan from various parts of the state like Jodhpur, Bikaner and Jaypore among others. In February 2018,, he founded ‘Calcutta karavan’ managed and curated by Suparna Deb with the same subject matter. The money is not great, he says, but nevertheless, he is not complaining.

Asif in his pray on the dunes of Bikaner, Rajasthan.

While speaking with TwoCircles.Net, Delhvi explained why he changed his career path. “The job I was doing was not actually for me. I felt I could do something better, something that encouraged a latent fascination of rejuvenating the past glory days of the country, its culture and religious tolerance towards other religions through my narratives.”

Talking about the various subjects he picks up for his storytelling, Dehlvi said he picked up specific portions of the history where he attends and shows people had lived peacefully together with the fellow Hindu-Muslims, absorbed each other’s culture, and sometimes even deities and religion. To him, re-telling the past is a way to entertain listeners, even though like bedtime stories usually heard from grandparents, they often contain lessons. The listeners, he says, are interested in seeing the history of the two hundred years before them through his words.

Asif Khan Dehlvi, narrating stories before the audiences

He stresses that his narratives have a great impact on the nation-building in a new way. Regarding this, he said, “since re-telling the past is all about life, people, religion, peaceful co-existence, culture, about communal harmony and staying together, people gain knowledge of the past on how Hindus and Muslims had lived together and celebrated festivals together. It enables them to differentiate the truth from whatever had been imposed in the name of history against each other and there is a new feeling for each other that will enable them to live peacefully”.

In the beginning, however, Dehlvi faced a series of difficulties. When he started this profession, he had to go through many harassments, humiliations and awkward and trivial questions from the audience. In his words, “ After the storytelling, I always try to keep a question-answer session. In the initial days, I faced uncomfortable situations with meaningless questions posed by right-wing-minded people in order to divert the topic and create a mess. But, now it is normal for me and I am habituated to handling these situations”.

In the course of his acts, Dehlvi has lived true to the name ‘Caravan’ and righteously performed the role of the caravan by ferrying ideas of retaining cultural heritage, reverence for one’s country’s historical treasure and taking pride in putting forth the essence of indigenousness.

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

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The President’s farewell. Image credit: News Nation

In his farewell address to the nation on July 24, President Pranab Mukherjee reminded fellow countrymen that “the soul of India resides in pluralism and tolerance” and that “the capacity for compassion and empathy is the true foundation of our civilization”.

“India is not just a geographical entity,” he said. “It carries a history of ideas, philosophy, intellect, industrial genius, craft, innovation and experience. Plurality of our society has come about through assimilation of ideas over centuries. The multiplicity in culture, faith and language is what makes India special. We derive our strength from tolerance. It has been part of our collective consciousness for centuries. There are divergent strands in public discourse. We may argue, we may agree or we may not agree. But we cannot deny the essential prevalence of multiplicity of opinion. Otherwise, a fundamental character of our thought process will wither away”.

Pointing out that “the capacity for compassion and empathy is the true foundation of our civilization”, the President bemoaned the fact that “every day, we see increased violence around us. At the heart of this violence is darkness, fear and mistrust”.

Calling upon the need to “free our public discourse from all forms of violence, physical as well as verbal”, Mukherjee said: “Only a non-violent society can ensure the participation of all sections of the people, especially the marginalized and the dispossessed in the democratic process. Power of non-violence has to be resurrected to build a compassionate and caring society”.

In his short address, the President also stressed the importance of environmental protection, education (“the alchemy that can take India to its next golden age”) and empowerment of the poor through financial inclusion policies.

Speaking in support of dissenting voices, Mukherjee said: “Our universities should not be a place for rote-memorizing but an assembly of inquisitive minds. Creative thinking, innovation and scientific temper have to be promoted in our institutions of higher learning. It calls for application of logic through discussion, argument and analysis. These qualities have to be cultivated and autonomy of mind has to be encouraged”.

Read the full address.

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Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Bachu C Marak is seen in this photo. (Photo: Facebook)

"I have decided to quit the party because I am a Christian and Garo first," Mr Marak said today. "The BJP is hurting sentiments here on the beef issue. Tribal society has its own laws. The BJP is trying to push Hindutva."

While Mr Marack was the only one to make such a promise, the other party leaders did not appear too enthusiastic about the new Central rule. Calling Mr Marak's opinion's his own, state BJP chief Shibun Lyndoh said they were not "against people having beef".

"Total beef ban is something that even people here do not support," he said, adding what was required in the state were regulations and hygienic slaughter houses.

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"Garo Hills BJP to organise bitchi-beef party to celebrate three years of Modi Government," Bachu Chambugong Marak, president of the BJP's North Garo Hills district, posted on his Facebook page. Bitchi is the Garo term for rice beer.

This BJP leader in Meghalaya also said on Monday said his party will not ban beef and legalise slaughterhouses if it comes to power, thus reducing the prices of various meat. The post brought to the fore the diversity of India and the challenge the Centre will face if it tries to enforce the new cattle rules across the country.

"In Meghalaya, most BJP leaders eat beef. The question of banning beef does not arise in a state like Meghalaya. BJP leaders in Meghalaya are well aware of the historical background and the Constitutional provisions over hill areas," BJP leader Bernard Marak said. The former militant-turned-politician said: "If BJP comes to power in 2018, BJP will not ban beef. Instead, it will regulate proper rates for meat and legalise slaughterhouses, reducing the prices of beef and other meat."

"Beef is an expensive meat which cannot be availed by all. The government has failed to regularise uniformity in rates of meats which is harassment to the public," he said.
Noting that Meghalaya does not have proper slaughterhouses to check the meat sold at market places, Marak said: "People are exposed to unhygienic edibles and sometimes chemical substances are induced in them which is consumed by the old and young."

He reportedly also said the BJP will do everything that the Congress government failed to by establishing slaughterhouses, checking meat quality and bringing down meat prices.
Several states, including Trinamul-ruled Bengal and Left-ruled Tripura, have said they would not implement the rules that ban the sale of cattle in markets for slaughter.

The issue of eating beef, selling it and sale and slaughter of animals has received much attention of the RSS-led government at the centre. The May 23 controversial Ban on Cattle Sale Rules invoked by the Union Environmental Ministry have also drawn criticism and mixed reactions. A student of IIT Chennai was thrashed for simply attending a discussion on the Beef Ban.

The Courts have also reacted differently to this ban. While the Madras High Court has stayed operation of the controversial ban on sale order, the Rajasthan government has in fact asked for the cow to be declared a national animal!

(Reports from Telegraph and IANS)

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