Some years ago, I wrote briefly, on a Facebook forum called Goa Speaks, a den of Modi disciples if ever there was one. Once, I’d written that we must discuss the future of Kashmir in a rational and adult manner. I was hounded as ‘anti-national’. It is unlikely most Goans even know exactly where Kashmir is on the map. Not one amongst them would have had the slightest idea of what everyday life is like for Kashmiris. Yet here were these young men frothing and foaming at the mouth, puffing up their cyber chests and calling for my ban, as an ‘anti-national’, from the forum. So certain were they, that living almost a subcontinent away, they still knew what was best for the people of Kashmir, and that their nationalism meant claiming Kashmir for India, that they were only too willing to fly into a cyber mob frenzy over anyone questioning that assertion.
In 2010, Arundhati Roy faced sedition charges for stating, ‘Kashmir has never been an integral part of India’. On February 19 this year, Rajdeep Sardessai wrote on his blog,’ Yes, I am anti-national because in a plural democracy, I believe we must have a dialogue with Kashmiri separatists’. Independent investigations have documented systemic human rights abuses carried out by the Indian army in Kashmir. One such documentary entitled ‘Kashmir’s Torture Trail’ was aired by Channel 4, in the UK, in 2012.
It is not ‘anti-national’ to speak with compassion on behalf of people who have been oppressed for over half a century and living all that time under a state of military siege. It is not ‘anti-national’ to call upon India’s collective conscience to think of Kashmiris as human beings with their own histories and aspirations; not objects or property to be owned.
Now, here we are in 2016; the student union leader of JNU, Kanhaiya Kumar, under arrest and charged with sedition. Whatever the slogans chanted by JNU students about Afzal Guru, Kashmir or the sovereignty of India, (some of which have already been disproved), the students were at the heart of their protest, questioning India’s archaic position on the death penalty and the eternal limbo Kashmiris find themselves in.
There comes a singular moment in the history of any nation, when we must stop doing whatever it is we are doing, and protest injustice. I was too young to have been fully aware of the ramifications of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975. For my generation, this is the lowest point in the history of India’s democracy, when we are forced to ask, what is a nation?
It is at times like this, that we must heed Nehru’s thoughts on nationalism. In a 1953 letter, he wrote: ‘The feeling of nationalism is an enlarging and widening experience for the individual or the nation…a stage arrives when it might well have a narrowing influence. Sometimes…it becomes aggressive and chauvinistic and wants to impose itself on other countries and other people. Every people suffer from the strange delusion that they are the elect and better than all others. When they become strong and powerful, they try to impose themselves and their ways on others’.
It is, as if Nehru had had a crystal ball to foresee India’s grand delusions. From the destruction of the environment and the lack of any real progress in development to the often violent curbing of civil liberties and freedom of expression, the BJP government has been what Nehru so aptly described as a ‘narrowing influence’. At the regional level, in Goa itself, the BJP has declassified the coconut palm as a tree and declared the peacock a nuisance. In other states, where it exerts undue influence, the BJP has banned beef and incited violence against people who consume beef or trade in hide. Its militant cadres, under the obscene wings of the Sangh Parivar terrorise student campuses, innocent lovers on Valentine’s Day, Christians under the charge of conversions, Dalits of the alleged crime of being left-leaning seditionists, and anyone they deem to be a cultural or nationalist threat. Its administrative reach infiltrates universities and other learning institutions through choice appointments. Once in, they subtly and not so subtly influence young minds with their own version of Indian culture and nationalism, which includes displacing Gandhi and exalting his murderer Godse. Emboldened by the hyper rhetoric, lawyers, those custodians unto whom we entrust the nation’s ethical compass, attack students and journalists outside the sacred secular space of Indian courts, and the police watch unperturbed. In short, Indians are living an Orwellian nightmare.
Which brings us again to the question: what is a nation? A nation is forged on the anvil of dissent. It doesn’t narrow the influence of the dissenting individual, it broadens it. It doesn’t seek to restrict the right to express, to experiment, to question. It doesn’t regulate one’s dietary choices or sexual orientation or artistic expression or intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t brandish its majoritarian sword on the heads of its minority populations. Instead, in this great churning and threshing of ideas, it creates a space of compassion for the lesser and the minor, the grieving and the aggrieved. The question remains, are we a nation?
Selma Carvalho is the author of A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865 - 1980. Between 2011 - 2014, she headed the Oral Histories of British Goans project in London
