Indian Nationalism: The Memories Of History – Part I to IV

https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/indian-nationalism-the-memories-of-history-part-i

Manish Maheswari
 - Nov 08, 2017

Snapshot

Why has nationalism become such an important topic in the Indian political theatre? Why does it arouse so much passion? Is it just a political slogan whose shelf life is limited to the next election? How is Indian nationalism related to the ‘idea of India’? Is patriotism the same as nationalism? Is Indian nationalism the same as Hindu nationalism? Why does the concept of ‘Bharat Mata’ continue to capture the national imagination? Why is nationalism an anathema to some of our intellectuals? In fact, what is nationalism?
Answering these questions is not merely an academic exercise but lies at the core of the Indian identity. These answers hold the clue to what India was and what India wants to be. They define India’s relationship with the world and with its citizens. They define what it means to be an Indian citizen and describe the relationship of an Indian citizen with the Indian state and the Indian civilisation.

Definitions
Before we proceed, let us define a few terms that have caused a lot of confusion. There is a difference between a state and a nation. A state (‘state’ and ‘country’ are synonyms) is defined as a territorial unit with a system of government and administration. The state has an exclusive right to use of violence to protect its territorial sovereignty and maintain peace within its boundaries. The symbols of the state are its flag, emblem, currency notes, parliament, police, courts and many others. The state is sovereign because it is not subject to another power, and has the supreme authority to administer the area under its control. Loyalty to the state is called patriotism, and a person loyal to the state is called a patriot.

However, a nation is not easy to define. It is an abstract concept; its essence is intangible. Scholars have defined a nation as a “group of people possessing in common a rich legacy of remembrances…to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again”, “a community of sentiment”, “a psychological bond that joins people”, “a shared solidarity”, “an imagined community” and so on. The manifestation of a nation is subtle. It works in the realm of values, customs, traditions, behaviour and belief systems of the people. There is an inherent conservatism in a nation because it relies on the past and on the wisdom and achievement of its ancestors. Loyalty to the nation is called nationalism, and the person loyal to a nation is called a nationalist.

A nation may have different states – Britain and New Zealand – joined together with the same values and traditions but yet separated. The state may also have a different nation – China and Tibet – with two sets of people living under the same state but having entirely different cultures and histories. Some countries like these are called a nation-state, like Japan, where people are united by a common history or rather a common interpretation of history, and living together under the Japanese state.

Appropriation of Memories

The definition of a nation requires a certain interpretation of the terms “rich legacy of remembrance” or “community of sentiments”. The terms “remembrance” or “solidarity” are associated with memory, meaning recalling something from the past. The stuff of this memory is created from the playground of history. The history is the past; what can be recalled are the memories of history. Once the memories of history can be appropriated to a certain ideological framework, then everything from nation, nationalism, state and civilisation can be appropriated to that same ideology. Accordingly, the past can be remade, and the future built. This is the arena where the titanic struggle is being played out in India.

Now there are two sides arrayed in this ideological struggle – the nationalists on the one hand and Nehruvians and Marxists (we will explain in Part II why they have been clubbed together) on the other. The Indian nationalist claims that there is a certain common memory of India derived from the deepest sources of Indian traditions, culture, literature and philosophies which supersede any regional or community-based memories of the people. Even the regional or tribal memory is intimately connected with the common memory. This common memory makes India a nation.

The Nehruvians and Marxists assert that there is no such common memory, and that every community and region have different memories. Even if there is a common memory, it has to do with Hinduism and, therefore, not worthy of being called ‘common’. The Marxist calls this common memory communal and reactionary.

So here is the difference at a basic level – when a nationalist says he is Indian, he is not only identifying with the Indian people and their present culture but with the Indian people and their activities throughout history. However, when Nehruvians and Marxists say they are Indians, they identify with the citizen of the Indian state that came into existence in 1947. According to Marxists, people hopelessly divided by caste and class could not possibly have a collective historical identity.

Marxists and Nehruvians claim that India was never a nation. Instead, it is a union of different nationalities, brought together by an accident of history – the conquest of India by the British. They claim that rather than our common civilisational heritage, it is our common problems that unite us – the problems of economic inequality, caste and communalism.

The Nehruvian wants the Indian citizen’s allegiance to the Indian state, not to the Indian nation. The very idea of Indian nationalism is moot. Since India is a union of different nationalities, then Indian nationalism, by definition, would take the forms of religious, regional, linguistic and sectarian categories, popularly called Hindu nationalism, Muslim nationalism, Tamil nationalism, cultural nationalism and so on. What the Nehruvian state wants from us is patriotism to the state – follow the laws of the state, pay your taxes, perform the civic duties as a citizen of the state. Any talk of nationalism is reactionary.
Indian nationalism is an ideological challenge to Nehruvians and Marxists. The workers of the world form one nation; therefore, the solidarity of the Indian working class should be with the working class of other nations rather than the bourgeoisie of his country. The idea of India based on a certain unified civilisation is an anathema to Marxists because their conceptual apparatus is not trained to think in terms of civilisational terms. Nationalism has been variously described by Marxist thinkers as a “metaphysical cliché”, “false consciousness”, “invented tradition” and so on. “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s greatest historical failure”, declared Tim Nairn, one of the leading Marxist scholars on nationalism.

One of the biggest turning points in modern Indian history was the close ideological alignment of the Nehruvians and the Marxists. Former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was concerned about what form the Indian state would take post-independence. For the Indian state to have longevity and legitimacy, it had to be closely aligned with the historical ideals of the Indian nation. Therefore, not only the knowledge but also the understanding of Indian history was essential. Nehru did find his understanding of Indian history in the theory of Marxism, and he wrote about it in a breathless tone.

The theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me. The Marxist interpretation (of history) threw a flood of light on it, and it became an unfolding drama with some order and purpose, however unconscious, behind it….The great world crisis and slump seemed to justify the Marxist analysis. While other systems and theories were groping in the dark, Marxism alone explained it more or less satisfactorily and offered a real solution. As this conviction grew upon me, I was filled with new excitement…Was not the world marching towards the desired consummation?

- Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography

What is the Marxist interpretation of history and the desired consummation that Nehru got so excited about? He himself provides a part of the answer. “If there is one thing that history shows it is this: that economic interests shape the political views of groups and classes. Neither reason nor moral considerations override those interests.”

Nehru is basically rephrasing the doctrine of dialectical materialism of Marx, which states that “all history was the history of class struggles...the history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms…these warring classes of society are always the products of the conditions of production and exchange, in a word, of the economic condition of the time.” The desired consummation is the collapse of the capitalist society, the revolution of the proletariat, the counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie and the final end in the establishment of the perfectly equal and classless society. Nehru subscribed to the Marxist ideology, but not to its violent political methods.

Notice that this theory is exclusively based on perpetual conflict, hostility, and hatred between the classes. It reduces the entire working of history to just the economic cause. In this worldview, religion, philosophy and ethics have no place in the evolution of society – everything is basically an effect of an economic cause.

The contours of the new Indian state were becoming clear to Nehru. If the history of India was an arena of class wars, then the central aim of the state was social justice. To provide social justice, the state must appropriate the means of production, reorganise the system of economic production, and redistribute the wealth. Therefore, the central aim of the Indian state is socialism. The final of the triumvirate is secularism, which the state, though religion-neutral, would take special measures to provide specific safeguards to ‘minorities’.

In this socialist scheme of things, Nehru was against making the “right to property” a fundamental right of the Indian citizen. It meant that the state would have unlimited power to appropriate the private property of citizens without fair compensation. Nehru acquiesced only when John Mathai, the then finance minister, threatened to resign if this fundamental pact was not added to the Constitution.

To give legitimacy to this materialistic conception of India’s past, the Nehruvians appropriated three personages from Indian history – Buddha, Ashoka, and Akbar. In probably the greatest intellectual chicanery of modern times, Buddha was made some sort of class warrior and a champion of the social justice cause. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in his life as chronicled in the Pali Canon from which we can draw the conclusion that Buddha was a social reformer in the modern sense of the term. He upheld the Varna system with the slight modification that now Kshatriyas were at the top of the Varna hierarchy.

Ashoka was the symbol of socialism in ancient India. The Lion Capital of Ashoka is the official emblem of India. As the Arthashastra tells us, the Mauryan empire ran a highly centralised state that controlled the people, production and economic resources under its domain, something aligned to the economic policies of the Nehruvian state. Moreover, Nehru wanted to establish a nation based on ahimsa in his famous phrase, “Scrap the army, police is enough.” Who better than an Indian king eschewing violence and adopting Buddhism. It was a match made in heaven!

Akbar was the great torchbearer of Indian secularism. He was an antidote to the destructive legacy of the Turkish, Afghan and Mongol invasions of India. Akbar was used by the Indian state to whitewash the toxic legacy of hundreds of years of “jizya” tax, the institutionalisation of slavery, the wanton destruction of temples and ancient universities. This was a way for the Nehruvians to buttress that religious tolerance was not only the legacy of Indic faiths, but even of Islamic rulers.

Marxism and Nehruvianism in action

With the ideological underpinnings of the new state ready, Nehru unleashed the full might of the Indian state to achieve the objective of socialism, social justice, and secularism. Nehru was “eager and anxious to change her (India) outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity.” Hinduism with its Varna system, elaborate rituals and its philosophical speculation on the nature of reality, was the biggest hindrance to this objective. The idea of building the modern state based on Indian civilisational heritage and from the wisdom of her ancestors was dismissed as the fancy of upper-class Hindus. The scholars described such phenomenon as “product of intellectuals from backward societies…retreating into history to claim descent from a once great civilization.”

Therefore, to create this radically new society, built on the corpse of a four-thousand-year-old civilisation, a new generation of Indians had to be trained to imbibe this ‘materialistic spirit’ of the age, often called the ‘scientific spirit’. One of the remarkable features of a modern state is not only the monopoly over violence but also monopoly over education. The Marxists, with the help of Nehruvians, would control and dominate every social science and cultural institute of importance, and indoctrinate the next generation of Indians to this materialistic conception of India’s past. It was no coincidence that a card-carrying Islamist, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, and a card-carrying Marxist, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, were made the education minister during the reign of Nehru and Indra Gandhi respectively.

In this remaking of India, the political and legislative work would be done by the Nehruvians, while the ideological work was outsourced to the Marxists. The idea was to create citizens who are cut off from their civilisational roots, a cultural automaton who could be retrained in the ‘scientific spirit’ of the age. This sense of rootlessness, often called anomic cosmopolitanism, a condition in which society cannot provide moral guidance to the individual, was a fertile ground on which the seeds of Marxist thought could be planted.

The greatest attack Marxists and Nehruvians made was on the Sanskrit language. Any Marxist articles on Sanskrit would not be complete without the use of the word ‘oppressive’, ‘Dalit’, ‘caste’ and ‘subjugation’. Some Western Marxist scholars even associated Sanskrit with fascism and Nazism! A language is neutral and passive, so why this intense hatred for Sanskrit? Because Sanskrit reminds us daily of the civilisational continuity of the Indian nation. Sanskrit is the link to our past, a window to our cultural heritage and a basis for our unity. When millions of Indians chant the shanti mantra and pray for world peace, it connects them to their ancestors, who also chanted the shanti mantra. When millions of Indians chant the Gayatri mantra, it connects them to their ancestors, who also chanted the Gayatri mantra.

Steadily, the pillars of Indian civilisation were being knocked out and this is what happens when Marxist theory is applied to the Indian context – the whole history of India becomes an arena of class and caste struggle. Buddha appeared in Indian social life to preach equality of different classes, the entire devotional outpouring of Bhakti movement in vernacular literature was a revolt of lower classes against the Sanskritised upper class. The elaborate rituals of Hinduism are a Brahminical ploy to dominate the lower classes. The Islamic invasion of India led to the ‘liberation’ of lower classes from caste hierarchy. In fact, the entire tradition of Hinduism is nothing but difference of caste.

The nationalist fight back that never happened

What was the nationalist reaction to this reductionist conception of India? Why did they let Nehru get away with the cultural effacement of Indian society? Historically, the Congress party had a very strong nationalist faction led by Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, Purushottam Das Tandon, and K M Munshi. They kept a check on both Nehru’s political power and his intellectual flights. But after the death of Patel in 1949, Nehru eventually cut all of them to size. Such was the bitterness of Nehru towards the nationalist faction of congress that he even barred Congress ministers and secretaries from attending Patel’s funeral.

He was vehemently against Rajendra Prasad becoming the president of India, and when Prasad did become the president, due to an overwhelming majority of Congressmen voting in his favour, Nehru did everything to stomp his authority. From appointing an army general without his consent to disregarding any presidential advice on important matters such as Hindu Civil Code, the Tibet issue, the Zamindari Act. Prasad wanted to write a book on his presidential years called “The Years of Agony”. The only reason he allowed Nehru to have his way was, in his words, “I do not want to create a crisis in the early years of the Republic.”

Syama Prasad Mukherjee’s ideological differences with Nehru were too vast for them to work together. He resigned from the Congress party in 1950 and founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. In 1953, he died under mysterious circumstances in a custodial jail in Kashmir. Purushottam Das Tandon was elected as the president of the Congress party, but had to resign due to vehement opposition by Nehru. Nehru replaced him as the president of Congress in 1951, further cementing his hold over the party organisation. Meanwhile, K M Munshi was sidelined from the Congress. He, along with Rajagopalachari, eventually founded the Swatantra Party – a nationalist, pro-free-market political party. This was his assessment of Nehru:

Jawaharlal Nehru was a dictator by temperament but had an intellectual aversion to dictators….He swore by the constitution but was ever ready to defy or ignore it. Entrenched as he was in unlimited power, he could never realize the harm that he was doing to the country by twisting constitution to his liking…Other leaders had to submit to his wishes because sweeping electoral victories could not be won by his support. Built up as an heir to Gandhiji, and spoiled by interested international adulation, he was intolerant of criticism and impatient of opposition.

- Indian Constitutional Documents, Pilgrimage To Freedom

So, after a few years of independence, the whole nationalist faction of the Congress party was neutralised. Nehru became the sole ‘bhagya vidhata’ of the country. In the annals of modern Indian state, this was the most ruthless display of political power, topped only by his daughter.

P S: In this historical evaluation of Nehru, we have relied on Nehru’s actions rather than his grossly verbose books. In his writings, we neither find the moral conviction of Gandhi, the erudition of Ambedkar or the logic of Bankim Chandra. While reading Nehru’s work, one common theme is the inherent contradiction in his positions. For example, he wrote about the “unity of India”, “five thousand years of civilisation”, Sanskrit as India’s “finest heritage”, but then talked about a radically modern India based on socialism. Therefore, rather than judging the man by his written word, we have judged him by his actions.

It is an India that does not depend on Marxist historiography and the a priori prejudices of Western academia. It is an India that cannot be perceived from the sectarian lenses of religion, region, or language.

It is an India that fired the imagination of Bankim Chandra, Bipin Pal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, and continues to inspire the present generation of nationalists. It is the India that was conceived and made manifest by the very inhabitants of this ancient land who saw it as a unified geography. The idea of India as a unified geography is as old as history, the glimpses of which we first find in the writings of Greek travellers to India.

In preparation for the conquest of India, Alexander wanted to determine the length and breadth of the land that he was about to conquer, so that his army could prepare accordingly. Alexander wanted the “whole country described by men well acquainted with it”. And here is the measurement that these “well acquainted” men gave to Alexander: “the whole country from Indus to the mouth of Ganga was reckoned at 1838 miles, from Cape Comorin to the mouth of the Indus was reckoned at 2183 miles and the eastern coast from the mouth of the Ganges to Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari) was reckoned at 1838 miles.”

A few decades later, Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the Mauryan court, stated the distance of India from the Southern Sea to the Hindu Kush as 2,298 miles. He talks about the pillars and roads set up across the land for travellers. Based on these measurements, the early Greek geographers described India as “rhomboid, or unequal quadrilateral, in shape, with the Indus on the west, the mountains on the north, and the sea on the east and south.” Alexander Cunningham, the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, remarked,

Ancient Indians had a very accurate knowledge of the true shape and size of their country……The close agreement of these dimensions, given by Alexander’s informants, with the actual size of the country is very remarkable, and shows that the Indians, even at that early date in their history, had a very accurate knowledge of the form and extent of their native land.

- Alexander Cunningham, The Ancient Geography Of India

How astonishing it is that even 2,300 years ago the “well acquainted” men of India described the country as a single land! That even in those times, Indians travelled the length and breadth of the country on “roads” and were intimately familiar with its geography and dimensions. There was no political unity then; there was no nation-state then; there was no pan-India empire then, but the concept of India as a geographical unity existed. Given the sheer number of different sources Greek geographers quote, this conception of a unified Indian geography must have been common knowledge among the Indian populace. That is why, from very ancient times, the people of this land gave a single name to this unified geography, “Bharata”.

The Mahabharata describes the contours of Bharata, “The land north of the seas and south of the Himalayas is called Bharata where the descendants of King Bharata live.” This conception of a unified land is given not only in the Mahabharata but in Vishnu Purana, Vayu Purana, Brahma Purana and Agni Purana. The Vishnu Purana gives the definition of Bharata,

The country that lie north to the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bharata, for there dwelt the descendants of Bharata. It is nine thousand leagues in extent, and is the land of Karma, in consequence of which men go to heaven.

The puranic writers were intimately aware of the extent of Bharata’s geography. They wrote that to the west of Bharata was the kingdom of Yavanas (Greek) and to the east was the tribe of Kirata (barbarians) and between the east and the west is the land of Brahmins, Shudra, Vaishya and Kshatriya of Bharata.

The sixth-century Chinese traveller to India, Hiuen Tsang, described the large number of pilgrimage centres (tirtha-sthan) spread across India. The “descendants of Bharata” have from time immemorial made this pilgrimage, reaffirming their bond with this ancient land.

Philosophical core of India

This consciousness of geographical unity could not have been based on consanguineous kinship. It could not have been based on language, not on beliefs and not on the physical appearance of the people. This conception must have been based on certain common ideas and values that were cherished by the people inhabiting this unified geography – let’s call it the philosophical core of India. In search of this philosophical core, let’s go back to the life of Gautama Buddha 2,500 years ago.

The king of Magadha, Ajatashatru, on an “auspicious moonlit night” wanted to visit some philosophers “to bring peace to our heart”. His minister gave him a choice of seven philosophers, all of them very famous and founders of sects with a large following. They were introduced as Purana Kassapa, an amoralist, Makkhali Gosala, a determinist, Ajita Kesakambali, a materialist, Pakudha Kaccayana, a categorialist, the Nigantha-Niitaputta (Mahavira Jain), a relativist, Salijaya Belatthaputta, a sceptic or positivist and lastly Gautama Buddha. The king chose to meet Buddha. He detailed the philosophy of other sects to Buddha. After hearing Ajatashatru’s description, Buddha held a discourse on his philosophy.

Note that this list is just the philosophers who were famous and were present at that time to meet Ajatashatru. The Buddhist sources quote that there were 62 different philosophical schools that were prevalent in India during the time of Buddha! The Jain texts refers to still more doctrines.

Let’s see another incident from the life of Buddha. One of Buddha’s disciples, Subhadda, asked him a question, “Venerable Gotama, all those ascetics and Brahmins who have orders and followings, who are teachers, well-known and famous as founders of schools, and popularly regarded as saints, like Purana Kassapa, Makkhali Gosala, Ajita Kesakambali, Pakudha Kaccayana, Salijaya Belatthaputta and the Nignatha Nataputta – have they all realised the truth as they all make out, or have none of them realised it, or have some realised it and some not?” Buddha, slightly irritated by the question, replied, “Enough, Subhadda, never mind whether all, or none, or some of them have realised the truth. I will teach you Dhamma.”

Notice that the disciple of Buddha accepted that even a materialist and an amoralist, “popularly regarded as saints”, through their paths can also realise the same truth as Buddha realised through his path. And here is the philosophical core of India:

Innumerable philosophers and ascetics have led a fearless search for the Truth in this ancient land. The very meaning of Bharata is the “search for light (knowledge)”. Everyone preached their own philosophies, passionately argued that their path to the Truth is the best path. Even the materialist and amoralist have showed the Indian society their paths to the Truth. But no one, absolutely no one ever claimed that theirs is the only path! The Truth provided the unity, the paths to the Truth provided the diversity.

Now imagine if Buddha on that “auspicious moonlit night” would have told Ajatashatru that his path is the only true path and the rest of the preachers with their followers will burn in hell for eternity. The zealous Buddha follower, King Ajatashatru, might have himself despatched those philosophers to the fires of hell. But in the great Indic tradition, no Socrates was made to drink the hemlock, no Hypatia was murdered at the stake and no Al Hallaj was beheaded because their paths to the truth were different.

Diversity is possible when no competing ideology has any exclusive claim to the truth. Once the Indian philosophical core is accepted, then the understanding happens, then the process of give and take begins, then the synthesis of ideas happens and, in the process, some ideas are elevated while some are rejected. However, the ideas that were rejected were also aspiring for the same truth as the other.

The search for this truth is a common theme that runs through the couplet of Thiruvallavur, the kavya of Kalidasa, the doha of Kabir, the gurbani of Nanak, the poetry of Tagore and the musings of Gandhi. It is the instinctive belief that there is some spiritual unity of all mankind – in fact, of all living beings. That we are connected by a common thread that runs through all living organisms. The materialist is trying to find this unity in the interplay of matter, the scientist in his experiment, the worker in his work, the yogi in his meditation, the devotee in his devotion and the modern state in its ancient nation.

Notice that this idea of the Indian nation, based on a unified geography and the Indian philosophical core, is independent of any religion, belief, or dogma. It makes up the highest humanist ideals of our ancestors and the supreme achievement of the Indian nation. And as we have defined earlier, Indian nationalism is nothing but loyalty to this Indian nation. Rabindranath Tagore called it “the basis of Indian unity which is not political”.

The pictorial representation of this nationalism is the Bharat Mata. The picture of Bharat Mata has a territorial map of India, superimposed on which is a goddess. The map represents the Indian state while the goddess represents the Indian nation. We have millennia-old traditions of representing abstract concepts in concrete human form. That is why Goddess Lakshmi represents wealth, Goddess Saraswati represents knowledge, Goddess Durga represents shakti. Similarly, Bharat Mata is the personification and the concretisation of Indian nationalism.

Ratneshwar Mahadev temple (left) and surrounding temples on the bank of the Ganges at what is now the Scindia Ghat in Benares (Varanasi), Uttar Pradesh, India, circa 1865. (Samuel Bourne/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Once the idea of an Indian nation is established, the contours of the Indian state become available. The Nehruvian and the Marxist saw Indian history as an arena of class warfare, and moulded the modern Indian state accordingly. The nationalist instead dug into the deepest sources of Indian history to establish the idea of an Indian nation. In his search, the nationalist found glimpses of the geographical unity and philosophical core of India, which made possible the immense flowering of thought in art, literature, philosophy, sciences, mathematics and metaphysics, collectively called the Indian civilisation.

However, the nationalist also found that whenever certain ideas contradicted this philosophical core, it led to the utter destruction of the Indian civilisation. He found that wherever the authority of the Indian state or Indic empires declined, it led to the complete annihilation of the Indian civilisation. His historical memory goes back to Afghanistan. This land was the seat of the Buddhist civilisation; it was the melting pot of Greek, Parthian, Turk and Indic cultures. The sublime Buddhas of the Gandhara School of Art, the majestic Buddhas of the Bamyan are the supreme gift of the Afghan people to the world. Now see what happens when the Indic empires collapsed and an alien philosophy took root. Not even one Buddhist remains in Afghanistan, and not even one Buddha statue remains unmolested.

Pakistan was part of the unified geography of India. It was the land where Panini wrote his Ashtadhyayi and Nanak preached his nirguna bhakti. They should have been Pakistan’s heroes, but see who their heroes are – the biggest mass murderers in Indian history, Mohammad Ghauri and Mohammad Ghazni. The state of Pakistan names its roads, releases postage stamps, builds monuments, and considers them to be the ancient founders of their nation. Does anything remain in Pakistan of Indic civilisation? Again, when an idea (Islamism) that contradicted the Indian philosophical core took hold in the minds of the people, the Indian civilisation was obliterated.

Tibet, the place of Mount Kailash and the source of Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, was part of the sacred geography. India and Tibet shared a civilisational bond of 2,500 years. Look what happened when China conquered Tibet – a complete annihilation of their cultural heritage, what the Dalai Lama described as the “cultural genocide” of Tibetans. Again, when an idea (Marxism) that contradicted the Indian philosophical core was imposed on the people of Tibet, the Indian civilisation collapsed.

Similarly, the limited authority of the Indian state over Kashmir led to the gradual decimation of the Indic civilisation. Indonesia, a part of the Indian civilisational matrix, has enshrined in its Constitution the worship of one and only one god! Atheism or teaching new religious philosophies is a punishable offence in Indonesia. The gradual destruction of Indic cultural heritage is happening right now in Bangladesh, and this process will continue to repeat even in the modern Indian state, unless the Indian state knows what it stands for.

An Indian State aware of its heritage is the only guarantor of the continuity of Indian civilization. Therefore, the raison d’etre of Indian State is to defend and protect the Indian civilization.

To a nationalist, this is a moment of immense conceptual clarity. An Indian nationalist is a patriot because he believes that the Indian state stands for the same values that his ancestors stood for. He intuitively understands that another “tukde tukde” of the Indian state will be another nail in the coffin of the Indian civilisation. To a nationalist, India is not just a state whose territorial boundaries can be changed based on the ideological mooring of a select group of people or the latest political theories in Western academia. If India is just a piece of territory, then why fight and die for it?

The nationalist is wary of the theories from the West because it has done tremendous harm to the unity of India. He is aware that the various race theories in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century gave rise to Periyarism and Dravidianism, whose manifestation is seen in Tamil separatism and its rejection of the Indian civilisation. Similarly, the Marxist theory of revolutionary war of the proletariat to overthrow the ‘oppressive’ bourgeoisie has infected the very heart of India. It has given rise to the violent Naxal movement which aims to overthrow the democratically established government to establish a classless utopia.

The nationalist is anguished that the Indian state under the sway of Marxist and Nehruvian ideology has not played its civilisational role. The nationalist calls India a weak state because it does not know what it stands for. Otherwise, a state aware of its civilisational role would not have allowed the conquest of Tibet by China; a civilisational state would not have allowed the destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban; a civilisational state would not have aligned itself so closely with the theocratic Arab cause against Israel.

In domestic affairs, a state aware of its civilisational role would not have allowed English to become the only language of social and economic advancement of India; a civilisational state would not have allowed its ancient temples, Buddhist pilgrimage sites, historical towns to go derelict through sheer official neglect; a civilisational state would not have allowed the Naxals to wreak havoc in rural India for half a century; a civilisational state would not have allowed the takeover of its cultural institutions and universities by doctrinaire Marxist ideologues; a civilisational state would not have allowed hereditary caste as the basis of state patronage; a civilisational state would not have laws that bans books, artists and even academic criticism of religious doctrines.