Kanhaiya's challenge to State and problems of defining India

Terrorism is a confession that the terrorist is failing, for all terrorists know their inevitable end: a certain death only a few weeks away, without a victory.Yet, the romance of terror so captures the imagination of manyintellectuals in India that they become blind to the bloodshed that accompanies terrorism. All that they can notice is the symbolic challenge to the state expressed by the terrorist.

Something of this could be seen in the the public lectures at JNU in February/March 2016, subsequent to the arrest of the JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar. Most speakers got so beguiled that they were willing to define India out of existence in their desire to revile the Indian state. Could it be that these revilers of the Indian state were actually falling back on the age-old traditions of India in which state authority was something valueless?

Let us look at it like this: identity is made up not just of self-perception but also of how others perceive us. The very use of the words "India", "Hindu" and "Hindustan" is indicative. Arabs still use the word Hindu for all Indians irrespective of their religion.

To trade with India, in 1600, the English floated the East India Company and not some "South Asia Company". Two thousand years before that Alexander of Macedonia too came on a military adventure to India and not to some other land as did Mahmud Ghaznavi in 1000 and Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1748.

Presuming India to be a cultural entity without a political or legal basis would be a serious case of category mistake. A person from a village when going to a neighbouring town identifies with being a person from the village but when going to the big town in the region, the identifier ceases to be the village; it becomes the town near which the village was settled.

When the same person goes to a completely different region of India, there the identity is neither that of the village or the small district from which the person hails but that of the region.

It is only when a person emigrates to a completely different part of the world that he identifies himself as an Indian. These layers of identity do not mean that this person is confused about who they are; rather it suggests a sensitivity to the fact that different identities work at different levels and in different ways.

The one identity that was of little value for the people at large through Indian history, was the identity of belonging to a state.

For centuries, Indians have had an indifference, amounting to incomprehension, of state authority and its importance in shaping society and state systems. Kings and their kingly authority was discardable in India.

In 1757, when Mehtab Rai Jagat Seth actively colluded with the East India Company to unseat Siraj-uddaulah from the Nawabi of Bengal, it never even occurred to him that what he was doing would seriously compromise his ability to do business.

Mehtab Rai's successors once again colluded against the new Nawab, Mir Jafar; they were in the end executed by Mir Qasim. Finally, the East India Company conquered India with the help of its Brahmin soldiers who hailed mostly from Awadh, Bihar and Bengal.

To condemn any of these people as being traitors to the nation would presume the need to be loyal to a state.

But, loyalty to any state is not something which was ever important for anyone in India.

Indifference to the utility of loyalty to state power and to the value of state organization cost Indians heavily.

Until such time as Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean, trading in India had largely been a peaceful affair. Europeans, whatever their level of prosperity, always understood and used war and state power as an instrument to conduct trade.

Indian rulers never did. And their subjects repaid their indifference amply.

But the fact that modern state identities were unimportant did not mean that India did not exist. Rather, India existed without a state to back it up.

In the contemporary world it is politics and state authority that is central to one's identity. To denigrate the idea of state power may be an atavistic fallback to Indians' traditional hostility to the state. It also ignores the one lesson we should have learnt, but obviously have not, in two hundred years of living as colonial slaves.

One does wonder whether Indian intellectuals, in their ignorance, are merely being politically correct or whether they are foolish enough not to know that as you sow, so shall you reap.