Partition & the Fantasy of A
Ashis Nandy
29 August 2009
Times of
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-4945817,prtpage-1.cms
The writer is a political psychologist.
Human beings have lived with states for millennia. There were even republican states in ancient times. Nation states are new; they came into their own in 17th-century
However, a nation state requires a nation and an ideology of nationalism. Simple, old-fashioned, non-ideological patriotism is not enough for it. More so if it is a republican state, led by new, insecure, nervous political leaders worried about its diverse, 'ungovernable' citizens and psychologically not yet closely linked to the state.
That is why V D Savarkar, despite being an avowed atheist and dismissive towards Hinduism as a religion, had moved towards the idea of Hindutva, which redefined the Hindus as a nation and Hindutva as their national ideology. This was years before Muhammad Ali Jinnah spoke of Hindus and Muslims as separate nations. And Savarkar was honest enough to admit it: "I have no quarrel with Mr Jinnah's two-nation theory. We Hindus are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations."
It is absurd to believe that Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel were immune to the seductive charms of a nation state. Both were modern, knowledgeable, western-educated persons, in awe of
Indeed, Jinnah demanded a looser, federal polity built around powerful provinces as a way out of partitioning the country. The Indian National Congress first accepted the idea and then ditched it. Paradoxically, the power that Jinnah demanded for the provinces was in many ways less than the power the chief ministers of some Indian states have exercised in recent years.
This background explains why, 60 years after the event, partition and the roles in it of individual leaders haunt our political culture. We are still debating in our hearts our birth trauma. We cannot accept that our midwives, too, were children of their times and spoke from within the colonial world in which they lived. We use them as archetypes to battle our fears, anxieties and self-doubts. We are what we are, we suspect, because of their choices, not ours.
We also deny the invisible obstetrician at our birth the colonial regime. Not in the popular sense that it divided and ruled, which all rulers do, but because it framed the theory of state within which the first generation of our rulers from Jinnah to Nehru and Patel thought and moved, for they believed that the theory was universally valid. Gandhi dissented and paid with his life for that. Even now, he has not been forgiven by
The British loved to partition. They partitioned four hapless countries and all have been disasters.
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