Sadly if anyone differs in opinion from the government, they're branded anti-national: Justice AP Shah
Former Delhi High Court chief justice AP Shah has come down heavily on the "sloganeering and flag-raising" as nationalism tests, currently in the upswing in the country. Justice Shah, during the MN Roy Memorial Lecture in the national capital spoke of the wellspring of democracy in free speech and other fundamental rights and liberties, barring which nationalism regresses into an "antiquated cult".
Justice Shah opened with the famous lines from late MN Roy, firebrand revolutionary, whose critique of nationalism was as trenchant as Rabindranath Tagore's:
“A parochial, selfish, narrow-minded nationalism has caused so much misfortune and misery to the world. A mad and exaggerated form of this cult of nationalism is today running rampant….”
This statement made by MN Roy in 1942, Justice Shah said, resonates well in modern-day India, where everyone is being forced to adhere to the same set of beliefs, diet, choice of love, choice of words, among other things.
"Today, we are living in a world where we are forced to stand for the national anthem at a movie theatre, we are told what we can and cannot eat, what we can and cannot see, and what we can and cannot speak about. Dissent, especially in the university space, is being curbed, and sloganeering and flag raising have become tests for nationalism. We have a 21-year old university student who is subject to severe online hate, abuse, and threats, only because she dared express an opinion."
Justice Shah gave the example of Gurmehar Kaur, the 21-year-old Delhi University student who was trolled endlessly because she dared to have an opinion different from what the official narrative would want us to believe. Shah lamented that entire universities are being branded anti-national and intellectual freedom is being stymied by the current administration.
Shah said of MN Roy:
"MN Roy was a leading intellectual and thinker, and an activist philosopher, who was deeply involved in the Humanist Movement. He was critical of the fundamentals of Indian nationalism and the ideology of nationalism in general, particularly in light of fascism and nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War."
Justice Shah drew attention to the excesses of conservative nationalism, particularly religious nationalism, and said:
"In any society, at any given point of time, there will always be people holding divergent views. Such views are integral and inevitable in a healthy, functioning democracy."
Justice Shah pointed out that intellectual freedom and dissent is being curbed like never before.
"Today, sadly, in this country I love, if anyone holds a view that is different from the government’s “acceptable” view, they are immediately dubbed as “anti-national” or “desh-drohi”.
He added:
"This marker of 'anti-national' is used to intimidate and browbeat voices of dissent and criticism, and more worryingly, can be used to slap criminal charges of sedition against them."
Justice Shah warned against the "dangers of telling one story", and said nationalism can't be the ruse to trample on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of citizens. He said that there's no "right concept of nationalism" and that the Indian version was a response to the British colonial state as a unifying factor.
"This was then, an anti-colonial nationalism, where the primary identity of an Indian was not their religion, caste, or language, but their unity as equals in their demand for freedom."
He added what MN Roy considered of nationalism in the height of the anti-colonial movement.
"Nationalism, in Roy’s eyes, had thus become a synonym for revivalism, whose advocates were consigned to glorify the past and advocate for a return to the bliss of the middle ages and a simpler life...."
Justice Shah also mentioned Tagore's criticism of nationalism:
"Writing in 1917, Tagore said, 'when this organisation of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all powerful at the cost of the harmony of higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity'."
He added that Tagore "cautioned against such an exclusionary and self-aggrandizing form of nationalism that was based on a hate culture against an imagined or actual Other, who was viewed as the enemy."
Justice Shah similarly cautioned against the revivalist focus of the current discourse of nationalism, and said that the RSS version of nationalism - Hindu Rashtra and Akhand Bharat - precludes the religious Other, thereby making the same mistake as Hitler's Germany did in first driving out and then carrying out the world's biggest genocide against the Jews.
"As religious nationalism, it endorses the two-nation theory, which envisages a nation under Hindu rule, a Hindu Rashtra in Akhand Bharat (a United India). This is premised on the belief that only a Hindu can claim the territory of British India as a land of their ancestry, i.e. pitribhumi, and the land of their religion, i.e, the punyabhumi. Muslims and Christians are viewed as foreigners, who are not indigenous to the territory of India, and whose religion originated in a separate holy land."
Justice Shah then went on to show how ingrained free speech and other liberties to a modern, secular democratic republic. His cautions on the unwarranted and draconian use of sedition laws against young students, intellectuals and dissenters ring a loud bell, to say the least.
His lecture will remain as one of the strongest defence of rights and liberties in a constitutional democracy such as ours, and it would serve us well to pay heed to the former chief justice of Delhi high court - a leading light of the struggle to regain India's lost freedom.
Read the full speech here.