It's nonsense to believe there is one nationalism for India

If what we are being told in the news is true, Indian nationalism is in deep crisis, and it is being whittled away by radical students on the campuses of Jawaharlal Nehru University and other universities, who, in between endless cups of tea and subsidised samosas, have done everything in their power to dismember Mother India, in words at least, if not in deed.

But who are these fearful students, who in turn now respond by accusing their accusers of themselves being anti-national? We might, at this point, note that in these violent times, nationalism is being used as misdirection: after all, as has been noted elsewhere, nationalism has to be both universal (everybody allegedly has them, and in recognisable form) and particular (they must be different from one another's) - in this sense, nationalisms are rather like genitalia.

Why, then, should one state contain one nationalism, and not, instead, contending visions of society, state and nation? Why should a nationalism be restricted to the territory of existing states? After all, a "nation" is the legitimation for states and, and for states' monopoly of violence; it doesn't actually exist in any real sense. And surely the right to be anti-national is part of the right to dissent? Since when did "anti-national" become the perfect justification for the suspending of the rights, even the humanity, of the said "anti-national"? This is intellectual fraudulence.

I am pleased that the press and politicians are finally using the term "fascist" to describe the criminals in and around the present government. Some of us have been using the term "fascist" to describe them for several years now, and it doesn't actually feel all that good to have been right. We'd have preferred to be wrong.

But it doesn't take an Antonio Gramsci to point out that the use of brutal, excessive force is a sign that the government has lost its legitimacy. A hegemonic movement does not need to resort to coercion - that threat of coercion can remain implicit. You cannot suppress opinions by force, even if you label them "anti-national" beforehand.

JNU, the current target of state violence, or of paramilitary extra-legal violence of the present government's student wing, often followed by that of its private Hitler Youth, now has a certain responsibility: it has found itself with widespread international support by virtue of its prominence, its international reputation. It must now speak not only on behalf of itself.

The outrage that an elite institution has been attacked should not be based on the fact that the privileged have faced the kind of violence that many others face every day. As Dr Binayak Sen, long imprisoned for sedition in Chhattisgarh, said when he got out of jail: his was a relatively happy ending, he was prominent and he got out; many others were left behind bars, unnoticed.

The "sedition" Pandora 's Box was opened by the Congress and other parties, and it is strange that this vile colonial law is still with us, ready for use by a government whose respect for the rule of law involves tearing down buildings, assorted incitements to hatred, murder, and condoning murder.

Principles and laws are feeble tools against a marauding mob masquerading as a government; where even lawyers form lynch mobs, beat up people in a court, and talk of shooting them. But a principle must serve at least as a warning of the illegitimacy of that government.

And they are not a majority, even in electoral terms, this Sangh Parivar who turn the idea of family into something reprehensibly right-wing. The BJP got 31 per cent of the votes cast. As a quick comparator, in 1932 Hitler got 33.1 per cent of the vote; in March 1933, with the Nazi Party in power and its thugs intimidating people everywhere, he could increase this percentage only by 10 per cent.

Two young men have come into prominence through the wave of aggression and violence directed by the Sangh Parivar against places of learning: the late Rohith Vemula, unfairly debarred from continuing his studies at the Central University, Hyderabad, targeted by the ABVP and maligned by the minister of human resources herself; and now Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNU Students' Union president.

Both did no more than state the obvious: that caste discrimination, fascist intimidation, and a subversion of constitutionally-guaranteed rights is a feature of everyday life in India. One of them, at least, is still alive; Rohith Vemula paid a terrible price, even if he partly took it upon himself to feel called upon to pay it, for the audacity of his dissent.

The country (we ought to say "the nation", if we are to follow the cliché) was then treated to an attempted posthumous character assassination, as aspersions were cast on Vemula's Dalitness. These assassins, we are now given to understand, are the true "nationalists".

And while most nasty, oppressive states use undercover policemen as agents provocateurs, India is privileged to have prominent television journalists play this role for free, or at least apparently for free. Meanwhile, the flying of the national flag over central universities is to be made compulsory, even as police accuse its inmates of beef-eating and demon-worship: could the language of witchcraft have had a better afterlife?