If we choose the nation-state as the crucible or founding platform of our patriotism (and that’s the pattern in all sovereign countries in our times), then any one of our several identities cannot be made the adjective with which to qualify the abstract noun “patriotism” — that is, if we are serious about being an Indian patriot.
You cannot be a Gujarati or a Bihari or a Telugu or a Tamil patriot and an Indian patriot in the same breath for the simple reason that Gujarat and Bihar (along with other states) go to make India, and this has been the long sought outcome of a protracted struggle to claim Indian nationalism. Of course, you can be justifiably proud of being from one state of India or another, or of being born into a family pursuing one religious faith or another (or none at all). But that is another matter.
In his recent interview to the international news agency Reuters, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who has made apparent his burning ambition to become the next Prime Minister by seeking to short-circuit the prospects of others in his own party, has shown a less than adequate understanding of such issues.
In a country as diverse as India — where a “million mutinies” reside cheek by jowl (and this is considered India’s strength) — such an inadequacy would ordinarily render one ill-equipped to be a national leader.
Mr Modi should reflect on how he himself might react if a prominent figure in the country, especially a senior politician, described himself as a “Muslim nationalist”.
The last person to do so was Muhammad Ali Jinnah and he vivisected India. Mahatma Gandhi, who Mr Modi in the same interview says he admires, represents the opposite case. Gandhi was a staunch Hindu in his spiritual outlook, and a staunch nationalist by far. But he was not a “Hindu nationalist”.
No one could make him that just because he was born into a Hindu family. Mr Modi seems to think that is all it means to be a Hindu nationalist! If so, he is deserving of our pity. But that can’t mark him out for top leadership. In reality, a “Hindu nationalist”, even if the term “patriot” is suffixed to it as a red herring, means a “Hindu supremacist”, akin to the “White supremacists” of apartheid-period South Africa, or the “Aryan supremacists” of Germany before the Second World War.
Since the Gujarat chief minister is a self-professed “Hindu nationalist”, it may be redundant to be overly critical of him for comparing the Muslim victims of the 2002 pogrom in his state with “puppies” that came under the wheel of his car quite by accident.