The Battle of Belonging - Review

 

Four hundred plus pages of dense prose, a provocative subject like nationalism and a best-selling author in the likes of   Shashi Tharoor–that is a startling combination. ‘The Battle of Belonging–On Nationalism, Patriotism and What it Means to be Indian ’ - the latest book by Aleph–is said to be Tharoor’s magnum opus that deals with theory, evolution and practice of nationalism across the globe, but more expressly in India.

An extension of his earlier book ‘Why I Am a Hindu’, it provides the historical context to the ideas of nationalism, patriotism, humanism, democracy and their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries. The basic proposition or inquisitorial of the book is: there are over a billion Indians alive today. But are some Indians more Indian than others?

From ‘Midnight to Millennium’ to ‘The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India’, Tharoor has been writing expansively and, every so often, contraryly. Detectably, contemporary ideas of nationalism and citizenship that have occurred in the last few months have come into the scanner in the book.

Tharoor reconnoiters hotly contested ideas of citizenship and belonging. He springs a percipient view of the forces working to undermine the ‘idea of India’ (a phrase coined by Rabindranath Tagore) that has evolved through history and which, in its modern form, was enshrined in India’s Constitution by its founding fathers.

Divided into six sections and running into forty chapters, the book starts off by exploring historical and contemporary ideas of nationalism, patriotism, free-thinking, egalitarianism, and humanism, many of which emerged in the West in the eighteenth-and nineteenth centuries, and quickly spread throughout the world.

He then encapsulates India’s liberal constitutionalism, surveys the enlightened values that towering leaders and thinkers like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Ambedkar, Patel, Azad, and others invested the nation with. These are juxtaposed with the narrow-minded, divisive, sectarian, ‘us vs. them’ alternatives planned by Hindutva ideologues, and circulated by their supporters who are now serving.

As the blurb says, ‘Today, the battle is between these two opposing ideas of India, or what might be described as ethno-religious nationalism vs. civic nationalism. The struggle for India’s soul has heightened, deepened, and broadened, and threatens to hollow out and destroy the remarkable concepts of pluralism, secularism, and inclusive nationhood that were bestowed upon the nation at independence. The Constitution is under siege, institutions are being undermined, mythical pasts propagated, universities assailed, minorities demonized, and worse.’

 ‘Every passing month sees new attacks on the ideals that India has long been admired for, as authoritarian leaders and their bigoted supporters push the country towards a state of illiberalism and intolerance. If they succeed, millions will be stripped of their identity, and bogus theories of Indianness will take root in the soil of the subcontinent. However, all is not yet lost, and this erudite and lucid book shows us what will need to be done to win the battle of belonging and strengthen everything that is unique and valuable about India.’ 

Tharoor’s barney is that the Hindutva movement is a mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947. His fear is that the victory of the Hindutva movement will mark the end of Indian idea. He clarifies that “Hindutva is not Hinduism; it is a political doctrine, not a religious one”. Dealing with the political ideology which has become quite contentious in the last few years, he tries to illuminate what nationalism is and what it can be to give a clearer view of factors in play that give birth to the ‘Idea of India’.

Fiercely argued, ‘The Battle of Belonging’ unequivocally establishes what true Indianness is and what it means to be a nationalistic Indian in the twenty-first century. His standpoint is to spick-and-span on the predominant political ideology of Hindutva, which focuses on a religious-based nation-state.

Tharoor feels the nationalism being promoted in India today is a tantalizing vision that excludes citizens and those who do not subscribe to it, based on identity or immutable markers like ethnicity, religion, language and. He declares that we vary the basis of Indian nationhood and it isn’t tied to any language, or geography, or faith. Mark these lines:

“... Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of what I have dubbed an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy under the rule of law. As I never tire of pointing out, the fundamental DNA of India, then, is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may incorporate differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, conviction, consonant, costume, and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy under the rule of law, you don’t really need to agree all the time—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.”

Tharoor’s deduction is that despite the ‘myriad problems,’ that India has, it is the democracy that has given Indian citizens of various caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their age-old subsistence-level existence: “There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but democracy offers the victims a means of escape, and often—thanks to the determination with which the poor and oppressed exercise their franchise—of triumph. The various schemes established by successive governments from Independence onward

for the betterment of the rural poor result from this connection between India’s citizens and the state.”

“And yet, in the more than seven decades since we became free, democracy has failed to unify us as a people or create an undivided political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, and ethnicity. The political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a ‘backward caste’, a ‘tribal’, or a religious chauvinist, than to be an Indian; and to some it is more important to be a ‘proud’ Hindu than to be an Indian,” writes Tharoor.

Tharoor goes on: 

“As I have often argued, we are all minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off a train, say, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), might cherish the illusion that he represents the ‘majority community’, to use an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he, literally, does not. As a Hindi-speaking Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 80 percent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority there is not even male. 

‘Even more tellingly, our archetypal UP Hindi-speaking Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, multihued crowds thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majority-hood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, a ‘backward class’, 85 percent of Indians are not, and so on.’ 

The book has a rich potential to trigger a serious debate on many issues concerning the present day India. What Tharoor says is that we must ‘develop a comprehensive and globally shared view’ of how the current rigidity and prejudices create a division in society and how to tackle them.

A deeply researched work which delves into contemporary social, political, and cultural issues confronting India, ‘The Battle of Belonging’ hunts for a healthy and secular environment in the country.