A tale of two Indias – a country’s search for national identity

by Anshula Chowdhury

There’s a lot of exoticism surrounding India—land of a thousand spices, a billion people, and two millennia of history. It is a place that begs for qualitative description, even with westerner’s who are used to having numbers tell the story. Anyways, how can we possibly understand the sheer magnitude of what the numbers do tell us? In Canada, the population density for a square kilometre is 3 people. In India, it is three hundred (and a million in Bombay). In Canada, the literacy level is 99%. In India it is 65% overall: 54% for women and 76% for men. And yet, India still has more literate women than Canada’s entire population.

And that’s the way it is with India: if you try and compare it to something you know understanding crumbles like a house of cards.

India’s whirl of contradictions has often been glorified by foreigners. In Shantaram, a book written by David Gregory Roberts, a former Bombay drug runner, wrote that India “was free—exhilaratingly free. I saw unconstrained spirit wherever I looked”. In Roberts’ India, “[t]he hapahazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of vegetables and silks”; it is a place where everything and anything exists.

And so the enormity of life that by turns shocks and fascinates foreigners and Indians alike is also a defining characteristic of the nation. However, there are two characteristics that not only define the nation, but are also diametrically opposed—and this opposition will eventually bring about a new India, remarkably different from the one we see today.

India is constitutionally a civil nation, not a cultural one. This means that anyone can claim Indian nationhood, and the country does not claim any one socio-cultural or ethnic identity as its defining feature. It is possibly the only country in the world that has ever elected a foreign national as its head of state—In the last election in 2004, the Congress Party headed by Sonia Ghandi, an Italian national who married into the famous Ghandi family. She was elected to India’s federal parliament the Lok Sahba. But Sonia never took office, mostly because of the public outcry that would have resulted.

So what happened to the country’s ‘civil nation’? Why was Sonia Ghandi never instated, and what does it tell us about India today?

The opposition, Bharata Janata Party (BJP) tells us much about the sentiments of many Indians in India. Many westerners regard the BJP and its professed Hindutva ideology-the spreading of Hindu religion as the defining feature of India–with suspicion, and in the Western context there is good reason to do so.

The BJP ruled Maharashtra from 2002-2006 in coalition with Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena. The Shiv Sena is a party with wide support in Maharashtra, and its policy is surprising simple: Maharashtra for the (Hindu) Maharastrians. This has been a particularly problematic approach since India has the third largest Muslim population in the entire world (however, they are a minority in India, taking up 13.4% of India’s overall population). The tension has resulted in several riots and bloody reprisals in the last decade between Muslims and Hindus, with 900 dying in the 1992 and 1993 Bombay riots.

Thackeray who founded Shiv Sena is the seventh child of Hindu parents, the only boy, which in India means that he was probably spoiled rotten explaining his enormous ego. He is also largely uneducated and an idolizer of Adolf Hitler’s Nazism.

From here, it seems relatively simple to connect the dots—The Shiv Sena and the BJP are neo-Nazis intent on creating a pure, Hindu nation, while Ghandi’s Congress Party is helpless to stop them.

But to label the Shiv Sena and BJP is to take western centrism too far (again).

First of all, despite all the talk, the Shiv Sena is not intent on committing Holocaust against all minority groups in India. A famous quote of Thackeray’s in Time, referring to the Muslims in India went as follows: “Have they [the Muslims] behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany? If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated like the Jews in Nazi Germany”. However, it is arguable if Thackeray, who has no formal education to speak of, even understands the implications of his own outrageous claims.

This is not an attempt to apologize for what is clearly an unacceptable statement, or to airbrush Thackeray’s love for outlandish and dangerous statements. But the fact remains that India is not Canada, Germany, or any other than the largest democracy in the world. Its political conditions are wholly different from anywhere else, and in this context, the popularity of the Shiv Sena and the Bharata Janata Party, rather than telling us about the homicidal tendencies of Indian Hindus, instead suggest that India is a country looking for an identity that can unify a billion people.

Firstly, India’s Congress Party, the party started by Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaralal Nehru, claims to represent India’s diverse face; a view that a large swathe of Canada’s population can understand and respect. However, these sentiments have led to the reservation system—an extreme form of affirmative action that blankets India’s government bureaucracy, parliamentary seats, and universities. Under the reservation system, lower caste members, or economically poor “backward classes” are given up to 50% of seats. In India, where university admission is cut-throat and often riddled with envelopes stuffed with money, this is a huge concession. In practice, it means that Brahmins (the highest caste) cannot gain admission to some schools unless they have above a 90% average. A lower caste student can gain admission with a failing average.

Why would such a ridiculous policy remain in existence, and indeed, be allowed to spread to more public institutions in the country? Quite simply: the poor vote, and the rich do not. Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, a book about Bombay’s new reality under the Shiv Sena, recounts a story of seeing voter turnout lists by location. The slum areas had an 88% voter turnout, while the rich area of Malabar Hill had a mere 12%, and so the Congress has been able to maintain power by passing legislation that appears to work to the advantage of the marginalized poor, but do not attack the root cause of marginalization. Reservations do not mean that these lower castes (who have historically been undereducated) receive better education before university, so when these young adults walk into any post-secondary institution they are already in way over their head in comparison to their Brahmin compatriots.

Politicians in India are usually referred to as goondas or gangsters, with an armed guard bearing AK-47s, they are widely acknowledged to have very cosy ties with India’s underworld. 24% of the Lok Sahba, India’s national parliament, face criminal charges. 40% of Maharashtra’s provincial parliament also face criminal charges.

In such a situation, is it any wonder that the Shiv Sena exists? As opportunistic and systematic legislation continues to exploit already sensitive divisions in India’s society, the Shiv Sena is a violent political reflection of a nation searching for national identity, more concrete than Ghandiji’s philosophical “civic nation”.