Nationalism or Patriotism? Hindutva or Hinduism? Tharoor talks to Brut about the ideas of Indianness and Indian nationhood.
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00:00I mean, I find Hindutva essentially non-Hindu or anti-Hindu in its refusal to celebrate
00:08acceptance and its refusal to celebrate the diversity of truth and its refusal to accept
00:14the fact that there are many paths to reach the same realization.
00:18Do all of us in India belong to the Indian nation equally?
00:21Or do Hindus belong in a special primordial way that others don't qualify for?
00:26You're Indian, you have the same rights as anyone else who's Indian.
00:30You can be a good Muslim, a good Bengali and a good Indian all at once.
00:33Saying that, a patriot is prepared to die for his country.
00:38A nationalist is prepared to kill for his state.
00:57Basically, there are lots of different types, but you can boil them down really to two.
01:02One is those bits of nationalism, those kinds of nationalism that come from immutable factors
01:08you get stuck with from birth.
01:10Your race, your religion, your ethnicity, your language, your region.
01:13Those things are one kind of nationalism.
01:16And the other kind of nationalism is what's called civic nationalism, which is not anchored
01:21in identity, but rather in constitutions and institutions.
01:25And at the end of the day, the liberal democratic culture infused into civic nationalism
01:33gives you a very different kind of nationalism from one that says that because I am born
01:39in this country of this color and worship in this way, I belong to that country.
01:45So in India, for example, civic nationalism says it doesn't matter what your religion is,
01:50what language you speak at home, what the color of your skin is, which region you come from,
01:55what your race is as far as you're concerned.
01:57All of those things don't matter.
01:59If you're Indian, you have the same rights as anyone else who's Indian.
02:03And that idea is what civic nationalism actually celebrates.
02:07You can be a good Muslim, a good Bengali, and a good Indian all at once.
02:15Savarkar, who came up with the concept of Hindutva.
02:17Golwalkar, who was the longest serving head of the RSS from 1940 to 1973.
02:23And then Dindayal Upadhyay of the RSS sent to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, who headed it.
02:28The Bharatiya Jan Sangh was the precursor of today's BJP party.
02:32They all rejected that constitution and they said this is not right.
02:36They said the constitution seems to say that the Indian nation is a territory called India
02:43and the constitution is written for all the people on it.
02:47Wrong, they say.
02:48A territory is not a nation.
02:51A nation is a people and the people of the Indian nation are only the Hindu people.
02:56And all those who are not Hindus are here only as guests or as interlopers.
03:02They're welcome guests like the Parsees and the Jews who are model minorities
03:06and far too insignificant numerically to threaten anybody.
03:10Or they're like the Muslims and the Christians whom these people consider to be interlopers or bandits
03:15who can either live here on sufferance as, in effect, second-class citizens
03:20rather than have the same rights as Hindus in a Hindu Rajasthan.
03:24Now, this is a fundamentally different idea of nationalism from the civic nationalism that I talk about.
03:30This is the battle of belonging.
03:31Who belongs?
03:32Do all of us in India belong to the Indian nation equally?
03:36Or do Hindus belong in a special primordial way that others don't qualify for?
03:41And this battle has to be fought out for.
03:43I think everyone knows which side of the battle I'm on.
03:46I believe passionately in an inclusive nationalism.
03:49So the answer to your question isn't a simple one.
03:51It depends on what you understand Indian nationhood to be.
03:59Well, it's very simple because the truth is that patriotism is nothing more than love for your country
04:04the way you love your mother.
04:05You love your country because you belong to it and it belongs to you.
04:09It is not at all linked to the state or the passport.
04:13It's not about disliking anybody else.
04:16It's essentially love for your own.
04:19And it's often linked up in a country as vast and diverse as India.
04:23It's made up of many little local patriotisms.
04:26The patriotism that you feel about the place you were born in.
04:29The language your mother spoke to you when you were in her lap.
04:33The foods you eat.
04:34The music you've grown up singing and that drives you to tears.
04:38These things will vary in a big country like ours.
04:40Certainly, what you hear in Bengal may not be what I hear or eat or dress in Kerala.
04:45But all these little local patriotisms come together in the collective patriotism of Indianness.
04:51We all have our own private Indiannesses within us.
04:54That's patriotism. Nationalism, on the other hand, is much more linked to the state.
05:01Much more linked to the system. Much more linked to the government.
05:04The citizenship. Saying that a patriot is prepared to die for his country.
05:09A nationalist is prepared to kill for his state.
05:13And others have said things like the famous line of a marvellous writer who said that,
05:22I think it was Charles de Gaulle who said that,
05:25patriotism is about love of your country and nationalism is about hatred for other countries.
05:31It was partition of the soil to begin with, with the division of the country in 1947.
05:44And it didn't divide, as you know, on Marxist versus capitalist or any ideological grounds.
05:48It didn't divide on North versus South or East versus West or any geographical grounds.
05:53It divided on a simple principle. Is religion the determinant of your nationhood?
05:59And Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League said, yes, yes, we are Muslims and we belong to a Muslim nation.
06:06And people like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad, Dr. Ambedkar, they all said no.
06:14Our freedom struggle was for everybody. Our nation is a nation for everybody.
06:19And religion has nothing to do with it.
06:21What I argued with a couple of the decisions of this government,
06:25particularly when they introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act,
06:30and then they came up with a threat articulated by the Home Minister in the Parliament,
06:35that it would be followed by a nationwide NRC or National Register of Citizens.
06:40I said, now you've really achieved the victory of Mr. Jinnah.
06:44And I said, this would be a partition in the Indian soul, not just in the Indian soul.
06:50Collectively, if you look at all those who are comfortable in Hindi, we may indeed have a bit of a majority.
06:56But the problem with the Hindi speakers is they then assume that that majority entitles them
07:04to make Hindi the national language and to impose it on everybody else,
07:09which would be a disaster for India's unity.
07:12You can't have in a country of such diversity,
07:15one national language thrust on everyone's throats,
07:18which would be the language of government, of parliament, of administration, of public discourse.
07:22The problem with that would be what?
07:24That suddenly, Mr. Singh, Mr. Shukla, Mr. Sharma,
07:30would be able to do everything in the language they've heard from their mother's lap,
07:34at their mother's breast.
07:36Whereas Mr. Reddy, Mr. Subramaniam, and Mr. Chatterjee would suddenly find themselves
07:41Whereas Mr. Reddy, Mr. Subramaniam, and Mr. Chatterjee would suddenly find themselves at a disadvantage.
07:46Now, that would inevitably create divisive tendencies in the nation.
07:51And that's why English was retained as a linked language.
07:55Because, let's face it, after 200 years of colonialism and now a few decades of globalization,
08:01we've seen what a useful thing it is to have English.
08:03But that doesn't make us any less Indian or any less in love with our Indianness.
08:07It just means that our Indianness incorporates and embraces multiple languages.
08:16So, Hinduism is a religion.
08:18It's a way of connecting yourself to the divine or what you understand to be the divine.
08:23And the wonderful thing about Hinduism is that it's completely open-minded and eclectic about it.
08:28You can imagine the divine in about 333 million ways.
08:33So, if you want to imagine God as being completely formless, without qualities, without shape or form or gender, you can do that.
08:40If you want to imagine God as a ten-armed woman riding a tiger, the goddess Durga, that's fine.
08:46By the same logic, if you want to imagine God as a bleeding man suffering on a cross, the Hindu sages have no problem with that.
08:52They say that all ways of worship lead ultimately to the same divinity.
08:57You worship as you see fit. That's the Hindu idea.
09:00Swami Vivekananda taught us,
09:08That's the Hinduism.
09:14It's about identity and it's a political doctrine.
09:16It says that those who belong to the Hindu community, whether or not they worship Durga or Vishnu or Shiva or Rama or anybody else,
09:27those who call themselves Hindus belong to a political community and that that political community should take precedence over everyone else.
09:36What the Hindutva people say is much more like the non-Hindu faiths that say we are the only truth.
09:43The Hindutva people say if you want to survive in this country and flourish in this country, you accept our truth.
09:49I find Hindutva essentially non-Hindu or anti-Hindu in its refusal to celebrate acceptance, in its refusal to celebrate the diversity of truth,
09:59in its refusal to accept the fact that there are many paths to reach the same realization.
10:09I used to say when I was living in America and making speeches to American audiences about India, I would say,
10:14you guys think you're a melting pot, but we are not. What are we? We are a thali.
10:18We're a collection of different dishes in different bowls.
10:22Because we're in different bowls, we don't necessarily flow into each other.
10:25But we belong together on the same platter, the thali, and we combine together on your palate to give you a satisfying meal.
10:33So that's my idea of Indian nationhood. That's what I celebrate as unity in diversity.
10:38The diversity is visible, but we're all unified on that thali.
10:41And the RSS and the Hindutva Brigade say, no, no, no, we are actually a khichdi.
10:45We're all mixed together. We're all Hindus. There might be a piece of aloo here or a piece of gajar there,
10:50but ultimately we're mixed together and it's a saffron khichdi that we all have to belong to.
10:54So if you want to worship something else, you can call yourself a Christian Hindu or a Muslim Hindu.
10:59We won't mind, but you have to acknowledge you're basically a Hindu at the bottom.
11:02That's what they call diversity in unity rather than unity in diversity.
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