#IAmAnAntiNational: Lessons for BJP and JNU

I do not know what lessons everyone involved is learning from the trouble in JNU, but one group has started to trend the presumably ironic hashtag "I am an anti-national" today.

So there is presumably much still for everyone to learn.

I don't think we ever start to learn till that moment we realise that we don't know something. Knowledge is about pleasure, and in moving from that moment when we did not know, or thought we knew it all, to that moment when the world becomes larger than our thoughts about it suddenly. I feel that way often in Sanskrit classes; a little nuance, a word or sound, a grammatical tweak perhaps.

But in the real world, especially the world of politics and openly political fields of study where stakes are high, humility and pleasure in learning are perhaps both easily forgotten by habit and hatred. That is what has been happening from the day that someone shouted for the destruction of India in JNU.

It began with a moment of hatred, clear and simple. Let us not use our urgent international petitions and discourses on dissent and tolerance as evasions from that moment of sheer, open hatred. And that hatred, ultimately, was a symptom of ignorance.

It should have been examined, diagnosed, and treated by those who understand the nature of academia and campus activism accurately. We might have then seen it for what it was, an overreaction, a terrible, dangerous, misguided overreaction to real or perceived ills in India by a few students or their friends. We would not have overreacted.

But there was no spirit of learning at all in how the government responded. It was all predetermined. That’s how JNU is, "anti-national."

And so the students' union leader Kanhaiya Kumar (who apparently was not the person who ever chanted for the destruction of India) gets arrested, brought to court, and then another sorry spectacle breaks out.

There is something that members of the government and ruling party do need to learn about India too. It is not a simple split between nationalists and anti-nationals. It should respect the fact that students, especially in the humanities, spend their lives talking about parts of the nation and its life in ways that might seem radical and offensive to the mainstream, but at its core are not always about destroying it, or even hating it.

They become activists, journalists, and work for people whose lives signify less to the state and elite society than big roads and shopping malls. Their diagnoses, and their ways of blaming India, Hindus, and both the historical and the present Smriti might be wrong, hot-headed, and sometimes even ridiculous. It’s a symptom of their lack of learning, and it must be treated as such, with education and debate.

But it's not a symptom of their moral character or inferiority to those of us who still weep or feel sentimental about Bharat Maata. This is what I hope government, party and critics of JNU will learn. For over one year, we have found the phrase "anti national" being used again and again, whatever the cause or reason (and there was cause or reason, certainly, given the largely baseless, skewed and vicious climate of media hate-mongering that took place against India and Hindus in the name of reasoned criticism of the Modi government).

When the media went berserk about intolerance, beef, or any other issue, there were several precise, factual responses that could have been made; yet, all we heard was the same old thing: you’re anti-national.

There are some basic realities that a proudly nationalist party seems to be unaware of and I hope will make the effort to learn. The age of absolute, near-religious belief in nationalism is over. A very large part of India is young, urban, and globalised in some profound ways.

They are a part of what researchers call the millennial generation, and for them any kind of tribalism or identity fetishism is passé. They live, work and communicate in transnational cultural spaces, and more of them marry outside of their traditional communities too.

India, or some part of it, is changing and becoming more cosmopolitan and transnational. For most of them, the nation may not be an object of hate (and for a few of them, sadly it is), but it is certainly a matter of some cool indifference. They will not respond favorably to any kind of coercion about patriotism.

But they will, in my view, respond whole-heartedly when a case is made for respecting India reasonably and intelligently, for they are Indians too.

As for what I hope those who have started to call themselves "anti-nationals" now will learn…

There is a vast difference between contesting normative nationalism and participating in discourses and even movements aimed, even if slowly, at the genocidal destruction of a billion people. If India is sounding ever more patriotic and "intolerant" of you, it is not simply because several hundred million people know less than you.

India is not a country with an imperial past. Hindus are not some racist supremacist colonisers who got left behind in 1947 to keep oppressing you or your friends. This is our home. We can accept fair criticism and change, but not the relentless and insane campaign against us you have waged in academia and media year after year.

If you call for the destruction of India because you think it’s somehow existentially hegemonic or evil, a billion people here differ with you and will indeed criticise you for it. And your comparisons about Berkeley in the 1960s do not fly in the face of reality for one simple reason. The students in American campuses were protesting to stop their government from fighting a war against a foreign country they had no moral right to be involved in; and they paid heavily for it, they were tear-gassed, and they were even shot.

Where is India's Vietnam? Is there anything even close that gives you the right to equate postcolonial Indian survival with neocolonial Western megalomania?

You have your right to dissent, but not to delude yourself into thinking you are stopping some pugnacious neo-imperial India from causing some great and catastrophic evil simply because it disagrees with your post-national paradigms of thought.

You can be a conscience as you hope, only if what you feel for and fight for is real, and your fight is proportional to the cause. Right now, all it looks like is that you are trampling on the little guy your theories profess to care so much about; the auto driver and fruit sellers, the people deeply entwined with the culture and life of India.

And if you listen, you will find that they are not on your side but are calling you a desh drohi, because they belong deeply to this desh you think is an imagined hegemonic oppressive fantasy that must be overcome.

The poor and barely educated people of India may not get the nuances and self-reflexive posturing in your ironic declarations about being "anti-national". But they do know that India is real, and their lives could be a thousand times worse if their country is conquered yet again.

And they do know that when hundreds of men hold a hostile piece of ice for you because if they don’t your life could one day be in danger, you owe them a bit of gratitude at least.

Please stop thinking about your revolution, and think about Hanumanthappa and his family instead. That too is an education, and if you can feel for him what nature demands you ought to, that too will be a revolution.