How Indian Are You? Shashi Tharoor Breaks It Down

Brut India

Nationalism or Patriotism? Hindutva or Hinduism? Tharoor talks to Brut about the ideas of Indianness and Indian nationhood.

Transcript

00:00I mean, I find Hindutva essentially non-Hindu or anti-Hindu in its refusal to celebrate

00:08acceptance and its refusal to celebrate the diversity of truth and its refusal to accept

00:14the fact that there are many paths to reach the same realization.

00:18Do all of us in India belong to the Indian nation equally?

00:21Or do Hindus belong in a special primordial way that others don't qualify for?

00:26You're Indian, you have the same rights as anyone else who's Indian.

00:30You can be a good Muslim, a good Bengali and a good Indian all at once.

00:33Saying that, a patriot is prepared to die for his country.

00:38A nationalist is prepared to kill for his state.

00:57Basically, there are lots of different types, but you can boil them down really to two.

01:02One is those bits of nationalism, those kinds of nationalism that come from immutable factors

01:08you get stuck with from birth.

01:10Your race, your religion, your ethnicity, your language, your region.

01:13Those things are one kind of nationalism.

01:16And the other kind of nationalism is what's called civic nationalism, which is not anchored

01:21in identity, but rather in constitutions and institutions.

01:25And at the end of the day, the liberal democratic culture infused into civic nationalism

01:33gives you a very different kind of nationalism from one that says that because I am born

01:39in this country of this color and worship in this way, I belong to that country.

01:45So in India, for example, civic nationalism says it doesn't matter what your religion is,

01:50what language you speak at home, what the color of your skin is, which region you come from,

01:55what your race is as far as you're concerned.

01:57All of those things don't matter.

01:59If you're Indian, you have the same rights as anyone else who's Indian.

02:03And that idea is what civic nationalism actually celebrates.

02:07You can be a good Muslim, a good Bengali, and a good Indian all at once.

02:15Savarkar, who came up with the concept of Hindutva.

02:17Golwalkar, who was the longest serving head of the RSS from 1940 to 1973.

02:23And then Dindayal Upadhyay of the RSS sent to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, who headed it.

02:28The Bharatiya Jan Sangh was the precursor of today's BJP party.

02:32They all rejected that constitution and they said this is not right.

02:36They said the constitution seems to say that the Indian nation is a territory called India

02:43and the constitution is written for all the people on it.

02:47Wrong, they say.

02:48A territory is not a nation.

02:51A nation is a people and the people of the Indian nation are only the Hindu people.

02:56And all those who are not Hindus are here only as guests or as interlopers.

03:02They're welcome guests like the Parsees and the Jews who are model minorities

03:06and far too insignificant numerically to threaten anybody.

03:10Or they're like the Muslims and the Christians whom these people consider to be interlopers or bandits

03:15who can either live here on sufferance as, in effect, second-class citizens

03:20rather than have the same rights as Hindus in a Hindu Rajasthan.

03:24Now, this is a fundamentally different idea of nationalism from the civic nationalism that I talk about.

03:30This is the battle of belonging.

03:31Who belongs?

03:32Do all of us in India belong to the Indian nation equally?

03:36Or do Hindus belong in a special primordial way that others don't qualify for?

03:41And this battle has to be fought out for.

03:43I think everyone knows which side of the battle I'm on.

03:46I believe passionately in an inclusive nationalism.

03:49So the answer to your question isn't a simple one.

03:51It depends on what you understand Indian nationhood to be.

03:59Well, it's very simple because the truth is that patriotism is nothing more than love for your country

04:04the way you love your mother.

04:05You love your country because you belong to it and it belongs to you.

04:09It is not at all linked to the state or the passport.

04:13It's not about disliking anybody else.

04:16It's essentially love for your own.

04:19And it's often linked up in a country as vast and diverse as India.

04:23It's made up of many little local patriotisms.

04:26The patriotism that you feel about the place you were born in.

04:29The language your mother spoke to you when you were in her lap.

04:33The foods you eat.

04:34The music you've grown up singing and that drives you to tears.

04:38These things will vary in a big country like ours.

04:40Certainly, what you hear in Bengal may not be what I hear or eat or dress in Kerala.

04:45But all these little local patriotisms come together in the collective patriotism of Indianness.

04:51We all have our own private Indiannesses within us.

04:54That's patriotism. Nationalism, on the other hand, is much more linked to the state.

05:01Much more linked to the system. Much more linked to the government.

05:04The citizenship. Saying that a patriot is prepared to die for his country.

05:09A nationalist is prepared to kill for his state.

05:13And others have said things like the famous line of a marvellous writer who said that,

05:22I think it was Charles de Gaulle who said that,

05:25patriotism is about love of your country and nationalism is about hatred for other countries.

05:31It was partition of the soil to begin with, with the division of the country in 1947.

05:44And it didn't divide, as you know, on Marxist versus capitalist or any ideological grounds.

05:48It didn't divide on North versus South or East versus West or any geographical grounds.

05:53It divided on a simple principle. Is religion the determinant of your nationhood?

05:59And Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League said, yes, yes, we are Muslims and we belong to a Muslim nation.

06:06And people like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad, Dr. Ambedkar, they all said no.

06:14Our freedom struggle was for everybody. Our nation is a nation for everybody.

06:19And religion has nothing to do with it.

06:21What I argued with a couple of the decisions of this government,

06:25particularly when they introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act,

06:30and then they came up with a threat articulated by the Home Minister in the Parliament,

06:35that it would be followed by a nationwide NRC or National Register of Citizens.

06:40I said, now you've really achieved the victory of Mr. Jinnah.

06:44And I said, this would be a partition in the Indian soul, not just in the Indian soul.

06:50Collectively, if you look at all those who are comfortable in Hindi, we may indeed have a bit of a majority.

06:56But the problem with the Hindi speakers is they then assume that that majority entitles them

07:04to make Hindi the national language and to impose it on everybody else,

07:09which would be a disaster for India's unity.

07:12You can't have in a country of such diversity,

07:15one national language thrust on everyone's throats,

07:18which would be the language of government, of parliament, of administration, of public discourse.

07:22The problem with that would be what?

07:24That suddenly, Mr. Singh, Mr. Shukla, Mr. Sharma,

07:30would be able to do everything in the language they've heard from their mother's lap,

07:34at their mother's breast.

07:36Whereas Mr. Reddy, Mr. Subramaniam, and Mr. Chatterjee would suddenly find themselves

07:41Whereas Mr. Reddy, Mr. Subramaniam, and Mr. Chatterjee would suddenly find themselves at a disadvantage.

07:46Now, that would inevitably create divisive tendencies in the nation.

07:51And that's why English was retained as a linked language.

07:55Because, let's face it, after 200 years of colonialism and now a few decades of globalization,

08:01we've seen what a useful thing it is to have English.

08:03But that doesn't make us any less Indian or any less in love with our Indianness.

08:07It just means that our Indianness incorporates and embraces multiple languages.

08:16So, Hinduism is a religion.

08:18It's a way of connecting yourself to the divine or what you understand to be the divine.

08:23And the wonderful thing about Hinduism is that it's completely open-minded and eclectic about it.

08:28You can imagine the divine in about 333 million ways.

08:33So, if you want to imagine God as being completely formless, without qualities, without shape or form or gender, you can do that.

08:40If you want to imagine God as a ten-armed woman riding a tiger, the goddess Durga, that's fine.

08:46By the same logic, if you want to imagine God as a bleeding man suffering on a cross, the Hindu sages have no problem with that.

08:52They say that all ways of worship lead ultimately to the same divinity.

08:57You worship as you see fit. That's the Hindu idea.

09:00Swami Vivekananda taught us,

09:08That's the Hinduism.

09:14It's about identity and it's a political doctrine.

09:16It says that those who belong to the Hindu community, whether or not they worship Durga or Vishnu or Shiva or Rama or anybody else,

09:27those who call themselves Hindus belong to a political community and that that political community should take precedence over everyone else.

09:36What the Hindutva people say is much more like the non-Hindu faiths that say we are the only truth.

09:43The Hindutva people say if you want to survive in this country and flourish in this country, you accept our truth.

09:49I find Hindutva essentially non-Hindu or anti-Hindu in its refusal to celebrate acceptance, in its refusal to celebrate the diversity of truth,

09:59in its refusal to accept the fact that there are many paths to reach the same realization.

10:09I used to say when I was living in America and making speeches to American audiences about India, I would say,

10:14you guys think you're a melting pot, but we are not. What are we? We are a thali.

10:18We're a collection of different dishes in different bowls.

10:22Because we're in different bowls, we don't necessarily flow into each other.

10:25But we belong together on the same platter, the thali, and we combine together on your palate to give you a satisfying meal.

10:33So that's my idea of Indian nationhood. That's what I celebrate as unity in diversity.

10:38The diversity is visible, but we're all unified on that thali.

10:41And the RSS and the Hindutva Brigade say, no, no, no, we are actually a khichdi.

10:45We're all mixed together. We're all Hindus. There might be a piece of aloo here or a piece of gajar there,

10:50but ultimately we're mixed together and it's a saffron khichdi that we all have to belong to.

10:54So if you want to worship something else, you can call yourself a Christian Hindu or a Muslim Hindu.

10:59We won't mind, but you have to acknowledge you're basically a Hindu at the bottom.

11:02That's what they call diversity in unity rather than unity in diversity.

11:11For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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