People are being identified as nationalist or anti-national depending upon their attitude towards the State and its politics, says historian S Irfan Habib who has edited an anthology that traces the growth and development of nationalism in India.
"Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings" brings together some crucial views on the subject by important thinkers and leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, C Rajajgopalachari, Bhagat Singh, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sarojini Naidu, B R Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Maulana Azad, Jayaprakash Narayan and others.
The book traces the growth and development of nationalism in India from the late 19th century through its various stages: liberal, religion-centric, revolutionary, cosmopolitan, syncretic, eclectic, right liberal.
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"We live in times of hyper-nationalism, amid the shrieks of cultural homogenisation. The frenzy of the self-proclaimed nationalists and mono-culturists is threatening to tear apart our social fabric. A binary has trapped us you are a nationalist or an anti-national, depending upon your attitude towards the State and its politics," Habib says.
"This xenophobic nationalism is alien to us as Indians, as over the years we have cultivated at pluralistic, inclusive and relaxed nationalism, which evolved around a consensus during the freedom struggle, based on certain fundamental democratic values," he writes in the book, published by Aleph.
However, Habib says this rigid nationalism is not new.
"It did exist, but on the margins, among an aggrieved group of people, who envisioned themselves as victims of history and who had an unreal, skewed and glorified view of our past. They had identified their enemies as Muslims, communists and foreigners (mostly from the West)," he argues.
Today, he says, secular liberals have been added to this list.
According to Habib, this hyper-nationalist stance is a global trend "from Trump to Brexit to several extreme right-wing groups in Europe that are growing on the hatred for the 'other'."
Until the 1980s, he says nationalism was relaxed, it was neither aggressive nor adversarial.
He says it is clear from the collection of writings that nationalism is not universal and one-dimensional.
"Our freedom struggle and its illustrious participants prove that so convincingly. Gandhian nationalism disagreed vehemently with that of Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose's, and Nehruvian nationalism was quite different from these streams," he writes.
"There was no homogeneity except for the common goal. There was a critical engagement and debate but they didn't accuse the other of being anti-national. Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Patel, Azad and others clearly delineated the Indian idea of nationhood, with democracy, pluralism, secularism and social justice as its four pillars," he says.
All four pillars have weakened over the years and now they are almost on the verge of collapsing, he adds.
"For three or four decades after independence, our nationalism remained an extension of the inclusive and composite ethos of the freedom struggle," he says, adding the current usage of the concepts of nationalism and culture in India has acquired some ugly manifestations.
"It is no more a serious concern about nation or culture, but a rather crude jingoism fed by a populist majoritarian exclusivism. An empowered section, which had remained on the margins of the process of nation building all these years, finds itself catapulted into the mainstream," he argues.
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