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What does August 15 mean to India's weak and poor?

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N Jayaram
N JayaramAug 16, 2015 | 13:27

What does August 15 mean to India's weak and poor?

While reporting from Beijing in the late 1980s and until the mid-1990s, I was influenced by what came through as intense Chinese nationalism, matched by the Japanese and Korean varieties. That nationalism rubbed off on me.

And I stood for many things I have now come to repudiate. APJ Abdul Kalam, who I recently denounced much to the chagrin of an overwhelming majority of readers, was a hero to me then. I believed in nuclear weapons. My logic then was that if four white boys and a yellow boy (meaning the United States, Britain, France, Russia - then Soviet Union - and China) can have their nuclear toys, why not a brown boy?

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When India carried out nuclear tests in 1998, I was working in Hong Kong and offered an article for an Indian publication supporting the then defence minister George Fernandes' citing of the Chinese threat as a reason for India's nuclear weaponisation.

That article never got written. The tests and Pakistan's tit-for-tat ones rekindled long-dormant abhorrence for "mutually assured destruction". A decade ago, a sabbatical to pursue a Masters course at the University of Hong Kong put me in touch with a large number of liberal-minded students and teachers from all corners of Asia and the world.

Hong Kong is a place where nationalism gets a knocking for at least two reasons. First, the former British colony's sovereignty passed to China on July 1, 1997 but under a "one-country, two-systems" formula, by which the territory was allowed to retain its separate economic and judicial system for 50 years until 2047.

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In a land that came up with a term like 'vasudhaiva kutumbakam', it is strange that there is now a rise of hyper-nationalism. 

The people of Hong Kong have thus a dual identity as former subjects of Britain and are not quite the subjects of China now. Most are Han Chinese, meaning they are of the same race as the majority in "mainland" China.

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And yet they are proud - sometimes in ways that border on hostility towards tourists from up north - of their separateness. Last year's "Occupy" movement in Hong Kong mostly led by students campaigning for greater democracy revealed the presence of a significant number of youngsters who claimed not to be Chinese and aspiring for independence.

Second, Hong Kong attracts visitors and resident business people and intellectuals from almost all over the world. In just one building, namely Chungking Mansions - a warren of tiny guesthouses and shops - anthropologist Gordon Mathews has recorded footfalls by people of about 130 nationalities.

Many residents - especially foreigners - would have friends or acquaintances drawn from dozens of countries. Narrow "my country right or wrong" kind of nationalism gets blunted at least among a significant number of those thus exposed.

Moreover, there are other fascinating aspects to note regarding nationalism and nation states in East Asia. Taiwan (population 23 million) stands out as an entity enjoying diplomatic relations with a mere 22 countries - mostly tiny ones.

China claims it as a province. But most Taiwanese, including Han Chinese, prefer the current state of limbo. Since ushering in democracy in the late 1980s, Taiwan has had two native-born presidents - Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian - both of whom showed a strong pro-independence streak.

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Singapore's population is about 80 per cent Chinese and the Han Chinese pride coexists with a Singaporean identity. The same is true for ethnic Chinese peoples of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and other countries. This also holds good for ethnic Indians who have lived for generations in these countries.

Farther afield, the European Union (EU) has been an experiment in subsuming narrow nationalism under a Europe-wide entity. The scourges of the two wars in the first half of the last century on European soil not only led eventually to the United Nations but to the European Economic Community and now the EU.

At the very least, there has been no war among its member states and citizens of an EU member state can move about and reside freely in any other member state.

It is ironic that Europe is the birthplace of Westphalian nationalism that much of the world has come to embrace, especially lands that boast of ancient civilisations such as China and India. Benedict Anderson defines nation as "an imagined political community" (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 1991).

"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."

In a land that came up with terms such as "vasudhaiva kutumbakam", loosely meaning "the world is one family" and "yatra vishwam bhavatye kaneedam" (where the whole universe becomes a nest), it is strange that there is now a rise of hyper-nationalism.

In a land where Rabindranath Tagore wrote against nationalism a century ago, there is a clamour for superpower status even as in terms of social indicators such as maternal mortality, malnutrition and illiteracy, the country ranks with the worst in the world.

In the mid to late-1940s, Indians took an active part in fashioning the United Nations, just as they did in creating the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), whose constitution says in ringing words, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed."

India left its stamp on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." That India, which cherished such dreams, seems to have quickly gone astray.

A former "pracharak" of the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is now the prime minister and a Hindutva brand of nationalism has replaced "Nehruvian nationalism". Not that the latter was a namby-pamby version of nationalism.

Far from it: ask the Kashmiris, Nagas, Mizos and the Manipuris who have suffered large scale rapes and murders, thanks to the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). Ask the adivasis who are dubbed Naxalites and Maoists for resisting land grab and subjected to an undeclared AFSPA like terror, with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) unleashed on them in addition to illegal militia such as the infamous Salwa Judum.

And so echoing Frederick Douglass who asked in 1852 in the US, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July" (the US Independence Day), one might ask, what to the impoverished Dalit, Muslim, adivasi, the tens of thousands of undertrials who can't raise pitifully small sums for bail, the illegally framed Muslims in false terror cases, and the people prevented from drawing water from some wells or sending their children to certain schools... is August 15?

Last updated: August 12, 2016 | 20:48
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