India's tortured debate on nationalism and free speech

It was the French intellectual and writer, Albert
Camus, who once wrote, "I love my country too
much to be a nationalist".
Those words seem to have particular relevance to
India's contemporary political milieu.
What most activists and intellectuals across India
seem to have forgotten is that those who forged
India's constitution were ardent liberal democrats.
They would have a tough time recognising the
tortured debate about nationalism and free
expression in India taking place today.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government
seems to have convinced itself that it has a
monopoly in defining what constitutes nationalism.
To that end, it has chosen to hound intellectuals,
students and activists who hold a vision of India
that differs from that of their own.
Self indulgent
The latest episode, of course, that has galvanised
both the government and the opposition, involves
the harassment of some student leaders at India's
premier Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
The students have been accused of organising an
event commemorating the hanging of 2001
parliament attacks convict Afzal Guru, where "anti-
India slogans" were allegedly raised.
Admittedly, much of the sloganeering, which
precipitated the harsh actions of the government,
was naive and self-indulgent.
Guru, a Kashmiri militant, was executed in 2013
after all his legal challenges were exhausted, and a
presidential clemency plea denied.
The decision to dismiss his pleas, it needs to be
underscored, had in any case, taken place under a
different political dispensation. Commemorating his
death anniversary hardly constituted an act of
sagacious judgment.
The government could have simply condemned the
callousness of the event and let matters rest.
Opposing reactions
The rants of the students may well have been
reprehensible. However, the government hardly
covered itself in glory in resorting to the colonial era
sedition law to try and cow these dissidents.
Worse still, it showed scant regard for the rights of
the accused when it created permissive conditions for
a group of lawyers to physically harass the student
on his way to court.
These appalling actions have elicited two strikingly
opposing reactions.
On the one hand, a segment of the country's
intelligentsia has uncritically lionised the students.
JNU, which for decades was a bastion of left-wing
sentiment, has suddenly been hailed as an arena of
spirited intellectual freedom and debate.
The stridency of these assertions notwithstanding,
they are, quite frankly, disingenuous.
From the time of former prime minister Indira
Gandhi, JNU has given scant space to the
consideration of any viewpoints that smacked of
ideological conservatism. Those of that persuasion
were ostracised.
The other reaction, however, is more disturbing.
The students may well have been difficult to control
and were hardly models of common sense. That
said, their speeches still fell firmly within the ambit
of free speech.
Suggesting that such naive proclamations either
challenge the foundations of the Indian republic or
constitute a threat to Indian nationalism is
nonsense.
Sadly, such a parochial vision of nationalism is the
stock in trade of the ruling party.
Its concept of nationalism challenges the liberal
democratic vision embodied in the Indian
constitution.
Instead, what it is peddling is a parochial,
primordial conception of nationalism that privileges
the majority religious community, brooks no dissent
and seeks to marginalise, or worse still, muzzle the
views of those it finds distasteful.
Of course, it would be dishonest to suggest that this
government alone has been hostile towards views
that it finds disagreeable.
Fearful of the wrath of orthodox Muslim groups,
they too have displayed pitiable fortitude in
defending artistic expression that some found
objectionable.
These failures had already eroded India's liberal
democratic ethos.
Indeed India towards the end of the last decade of
the 20th Century had already become a far cry from
the land that its founders and constitution framers
had envisaged.
What the country is currently witnessing is simply a
more naked and blatant version of some deeply
illiberal, hyper-nationalistic trends.
Virtually every political party, regardless of
ideological stripe, has to varying degrees been
complicit in the closing of minds in India.
Even the organised political Left, which is so
vociferously crying foul over the government's high-
handed actions in the name of nationalism,
maintained a curious and deafening silence when
unpopular views and ideas were under attack earlier.
The tragedy that now stalks the land is that many
of those decrying the chest-thumping nationalism of
the BJP were themselves complicit in constricting the
arena of free speech.
Consequently, their strident denunciations of the
BJP's ham-fisted tactics tend to ring a bit hollow.
And the BJP, which has never had much use for the
pluralist, secular tenets embedded in India's
constitution, now feels at liberty to intimidate and
bully those who dare question its ideological writ.
It is a pity indeed that few, if any, Indian
intellectuals, let alone its political class, would
make common cause today with Camus' brilliant
formulation - a sentiment that many of India's
constitutional framers might actually have
embraced.
Sumit Ganguly holds the Rabindranath Tagore
Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at
Indiana University, Bloomington.