Don't let the love for your country make you sound like a fool
It is easy to shout patriotic slogans. It is even easier to force others to do so, if you can flex the gigantic muscles of the state.
But it is a challenging and daunting thing to live patriotism, and to translate love for the motherland into principled and meaningful actions.
I chanced upon an interview on one of the channels the other day. A fiery nationalist-patriot was being interviewed. He insisted that those who do not shout "Vande Mataram" were not patriotic. They were anti-national.
Unfortunately for him the reporter had a little presence of mind. When the nationalist-patriot was asked if he was familiar with the poem, Vande Mataram, by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Could he recite it? He was caught. His voice fell. His tone became tentative. He admitted he didn’t know the poem. But, in the very next nano second, he resumed his fiery fulminations against unpatriotic people who would not scream "Vande Mataram". You have to be a special brand of patriot to be able to do that.
So, there you have it. Patriotism and nationalism are no more than slogans and shouts.
Wonder who will save India from such patriots? Two simple truths stand out from this scenario.
First, patriotism and nationalism do not need any positive contents. Adding to our stock of knowledge, thoughts, insights, treasures of art, and so on, is not patriotic.
I will not be considered a patriot for having served the country faithfully and zealously over a lifetime. To qualify as one, in the present climate of opinion, I have to shout. The louder I shout, the better I am as a patriot. You will not qualify as a patriot for having resisted all temptations to line your pocket with ill-gotten wealth, when you could easily have been a thriving Vijay Mallya or a Lalit Modi, living smartly in London with the blood of the tax payers on your conscience. Oh, no. That won’t do. You have to shout.
One wonders how many of these fire-breathing patriots are honest tax payers. As per Narendra Modi’s own statements, only a tiny fraction of our citizens pay tax. They comprise almost entirely those in salaried brackets who have no option but to pay. the BJP claims a membership of 100 million. Would the patriots find out how many of them evade tax? Now we are told that due to GST another six lakh citizens have fallen into the tax net. Six lakhs out of 1.32 billion?
One wonders how many of our loud and belligerent patriots keep their own door steps clean. With so many enthusiasts on whose lips patriotism sits so strident and athletic, Bharat Mata should have been sparkling clean.
Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. Such things do not figure in our menu of patriotism. Some half-a-century ago, when we were in schools, we were made to clean our school premises as a run-up to Independence Day celebrations. Now we are into happier times; it has become a lot easier. All you have to do is to shout.
And, of course, make videos of your shouting, catching yourself at the widest expansion of your oral aperture, if you are in Yogi-land or other pockets of nascent, high-decibel patriotism.
This can happen only when patriotism is drained of all positive contents. The current version of patriotism is all about hating and settling scores. It is about inflicting one’s will on those who are perceived to be different and not of one’s own camp.
One wonders how this version of patriotism squares up with the spiritual genius of India. "Zero", we are told was our greatest contribution to the world of mathematics. It was indeed a brilliant shaft of mathematical light. But far more significant was our spiritual contribution to the world. We were the pioneers of spiritual globalisation, or the idea that the whole of the world is one family, or Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.
This vision is an enlightened protest against all man-made walls, labels and barriers. All LoCs are man-made; they are spiritual aberrations. They represent the limitations of our understanding, sympathy and freedom. Colonialism could happen because the white man did not have such a vision.
Today patriotism forces us to make a choice: between our core spiritual vision and our profession of shallow loyalty to the country as shouting snatches and slogans. Rather than provide the spiritual light that would unite the global village, following the paths blazed by our seers and spiritual luminaries, we would mouth divisive labels that will fragment our own country. We will do so under the pretext of patriotism. You cannot endorse "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" and the current version of patriotism at the same time. You can choose the latter only at the expense of the former.
Now to the second issue. Convictions do not matter; only shouting does. How does producing some noise matter, or become a virtue, if the heart is not in it?
To our vigilantes of coercive patriotism, this is a non-issue. The heart does not matter; only the mouth does. Patriotism doesn’t have to be in the heart; it suffices that it fills the mouth for a fleeting, booming second. We are required to believe that this is a great shot in the arm for the country.
Even a school kid knows that shouting a slogan, if it is to have any value at all, must issue sincerely from genuine, deeply felt feelings. When Archimedes made a discovery, while in a bath-tub, he leapt out shouting "Eureka", or "I found it". He ran around, naked, shouting "Eureka". It made sense. Imagine Archimedes being made to run naked shouting "Eureka", under pain of being branded anti-national without anything to back up the noise of that word. He would have merely qualified for a place in a lunatic asylum.
It is an insult to the very idea of patriotism to equate it with sound sans sense. Shouting, let’s say, is part of speaking. Human speech cannot be divorced from sense. That is the main difference between what is sounded by the upper and the lower orifices of a human being. Surely, even our merchants of patriotic sloganeering will agree that there is an irreconcilable difference between speaking and farting. The former is distinguished for its sense; the latter, for its the total absence of sense or sensibility.
One of the prayers I used to read out at the morning assemblies in St Stephen’s College was Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the mind is without fear”, composed originally in Bengali in 1900. I used to do so, because it implies a laudable definition of patriotism. Patriotism, according to Tagore, is inconceivable without the right to live free from fear.
Today it is equated with coercing, even terrorising, citizens burdened with labels of otherness into mindless conformity.
Patriotism, to Tagore, is about liberating knowledge so that it can set all people free. Project freedom will remain incomplete till knowledge is unfettered vis-à-vis all sections of the society.
To Tagore, knowledge is the bridge between freedom and patriotism. By this standard, one wonders how patriotic our governments have been since Independence. Our practice of education, Tagore would say, is blatantly unpatriotic.
Patriotism is about being rational. To love our country is to uphold reason above the tyranny of "dead habits". Freedom from prejudice is the proof that one is rational. Patriotism should involve, besides, "tireless striving towards perfection", our minds expanding continually into "ever-widening thought and action". Today patriotism is at peril of becoming synonymous with "narrow domestic walls", and that, at a time when our country is making an unprecedented, and long over-due, pitch for a place of respect in the global arena.
If faced with a choice to shout "Vande Mataram" and my life, I will surely shout. But that will snuff out the light of patriotism in me forever; because slaves cannot be patriots. Freedom is a precondition for patriotism; freedom not just for a section of the society, but for all. Freedom is nothing, without freedom of choice and freedom of conscience.
By forcing people to shout what are considered patriotic slogans, our misguided enthusiasts undermine the very foundation of patriotism.
One has to be woefully uneducated on loving one’s country to venture into inflicting patriotism as shouting slogans on those who are presumed to be unwilling customers.
They may derive some ideological euphoria out of this. But all they’ll achieve is dishonouring the soul of India.
Also read: Questioning another's patriotism on social media doesn't qualify you as a nationalist