Is Modi right? Are we finally proud to be Indians?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may just be right when he said Indians have been ashamed of themselves. In the last 67 years, India has suffered from lack of nationalistic pride among its citizens. An entire generation simply hated India. They did not pay taxes. They sent their children abroad if they could or aspired to get them employed in a multinational corporation. For a generation at least, it was national pastime to bash India, treating India as an unkind stepmother. May be it was survival instinct, an awareness that our nation could not deliver even modest comforts any time soon. Instinctively, a generation of Indians hoped to thrive by distancing themselves from our postcolonial ravaged reality, regarding it as an aberration from their personal narrative.

In this narrative of shame and distance, there are essentially two types of Indians. The Macaulay’s elites, the service class who talked in English, pumped their children either back into the services and family businesses or shipped them abroad, and the poor natives who were struggling to speak correct English and hoped that if not them, but perhaps their children will join these elite classes. Thus, in India either you are actually poor or you are the type that is psychologically distant to poverty, filth and neglect regarding it as an incidental curiosity unrelated to your family life. The result is that majority of Indians simply do not believe we have played any part in nation’s current problems. We preserve our personal pride by experiencing India’s problems as alien bric-a-brac when it is portrayed in naked realism by the western media.

Our personal pride is of course a mirage. We share blame for problems that plague our nation. It is us who fail children who die before five and women who die during childbirth. We are at fault when we turn a blind eye to child abuse happening in our homes, roads, construction sites, and schools. We are culpable when we do not volunteer to give our maids and drivers health insurance, adequate pay, and reasonable working hours. We are to blame when we try to find an acquaintance that can push our file ahead of others. We are to blame when we break the line at offices citing an uncle who may or may not have called the officer-in-charge. We are to blame when a family member kills a girl in the womb for a son and we bide our time in silenceuntil they have a son to celebrate. If it was not the majority that supported these practices, there is absolutely no way they would thrive the way they do in contemporary India.

So are we or are we not ashamed to be Indians? Put it another way, are we ashamed of being ourselves? I would vote yes, if we aren’t then we should be ashamed. But unfortunately, Modi government has not done anything so far to alleviate this shame. If at all, it has made it worse. Consider for example, our struggles with nationalism that current BJP government has skewed so perniciously that soon nationalism will be a dirty word. Nationalism in India will mean a narrow provincial Hinduism to which as a liberal Hindu I cannot relate to. Worse still, I will be ashamed to call myself a Hindu because their version of Hinduism is nowhere near my core values of liberalism, tolerance, and love for all humanity. My biggest fear is their Hinduism, which is simply fundamentalism common to all religions, will give rise to the same struggles as current liberal Muslims are facing. It will engulf the true values of what is called “a way of life” and be blighted by a vacuous militant notion of religion. Their ostensible promotion of classics will in all likelihood alienate open-minded readers from the Indian epics. Their penchant for banning dissension also interferes with India’s ancient openness to various, often contradictory, strands of thoughts. And needless to say, it does nothing to correct other problems our nation faces at the moment for which one needs all civic and social elements to come together towards a better future.

Edward Said, in his landmark book Orientalism, wrote “Can one divide human reality and survive the consequences humanly?” If our children need to be proud of their nation, what kind of nation India needs to be? If nationalism is needed, what kind will it be? There are 1.2 billion people in India. Is the idea of nationalism equal to the one proposed by approximately five million RSS activists?

The remaining millions of Indians of various races, colour, and religions have to ask ourselves: what is the way forward to capture India’s past glory (and if indeed that is what we seek)? Is the monstrous artificial uniformity being imposed both within Hinduism and on our other cultures our truth? Or is it an artifice constructed to benefit a specific ideology? Will Modi government really make us proud to be called Indians?

In India the terrible and the terrific coexist. Terrible are the sights of lepers and emaciated puppies and half naked kids. Terrible is our road rage that takes innocent life. Terrible is the murder of unborn girls. But terrific is the humanity of the craftsmen, traders, coolies, labourers. Terrific is the smell of champa and mogra during summer evenings. Terrific is our street food born out of our composite culture. Terrific are our mausoleums, our temples, our churches that have survived the test of time. Terrific is the peepal tree that has stood for hundreds of years where Buddha achieved enlightenment. Terrific are our caves, our mountains, our rivers, and our sea. We have our strengths and we have our weaknesses. Now the question is which side do we nurse to make ourselves and our children proud to be called Indians.