A Minority of One

'Any man, more right than his neighbours, constitutes a majority of one' - Henry David Thoreau.

The times have changed, and the tables have turned. We have taken this beautiful idea, articulated by Thoreau in praise of independent thought and civil disobedience, and flipped it on its head. Far from having to deal with the lack of independent thought, we are now plagued by the other extreme: a cacophony of disparate voices. Identities, as they stand today, are so fragmented, that every man, for himself, constitutes a minority of one. There seems to be a strange fissiparous tendency that divides Indian society into tiny fractions, each claiming to possess an independent, authentic identity.

We have been reminded, time and again, by the great intellectuals in our midst, that India is a mere 'idea', whose very existence is a miracle - we are an improbable nation that must be grateful for the fact that we have been brought together in an accident of history, probably apt enough to be called the greatest socio-cultural experiment of modern civilisation. We are actively encouraged to 'celebrate our diversity', our leaders and administrators are exhorted to govern with sensitivity, with compassion and discretion, and appreciate the fact that India is a heterogeneous, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society of sharp contrasts, juxtapositions and multiple, alternate realities, only coincidentally co-existing in a perverse twist of fate. Sounds like a lot of poppycock? Well, apparently not: these are not mere incoherent ideas, these are the basic axiomatic principles which have crept into the discourse of governance in this country.

We are not just 'Indians', we are Hindus and Muslims, men and women, upper and lower castes, haves and have-nots. But that is not enough. We must also be tribals and peasants, capitalists and communists, conservatives and liberals, literates and illiterates, billionaires and the homeless, public servants and private masters, possessed and dispossessed, landed and landless, gay and straight, sane and insane. No other country, no other society, seems as eager to fragment itself into individual constituencies. With every passing year, a new 'idea of India' seems to emerge, one that was born from a parent 'idea' that divided itself into many new wholes - each one of which is only destined to undergo another socio-cultural mitosis to emerge unrecognized as multiple identities.

To be able to think about why this is so unnatural, let us only contrast ourselves with the other great society of our times, our accomplices in keeping that flickering flame of democracy alive: The United States of America. In some senses, America is an even more unlikely social experiment - a nation that did not exist for much of human history, one that had only started learning to walk, when we in India were well into a ripe old age of civilisational existence. The Americans are a country of immigrants - born out of not just multiple nationalities and ethnicities, but multiple streams of thought and principles of existence. They came in as Germans and Brits, Poles and Czechs, Sicilians and Africans (the latter being brought in forcibly). But one would be hard put today, to find any distinct cultural remnants of their immigrant past, in our American brothers. Instead, what has emerged, is a rather homogeneous American way of life. In fact, it has metamorphosed into a culture so alluring that the whole world appears to be in the throes of their allegedly crass, debauched 'culture' of pop music, fast food, corporate zeal and war mongering.

Of course, the debate on which of these two separate 'models' of civilisation will triumph in the long run, is an open one - when you are in the middle of an experiment, you are powerless to obtain any foresight into its result, or to course-correct. But as Keynes would have said, we are all dead in the long run - and what this experiment with celebrating diversity and distinct identities is doing to us in the meanwhile is dangerous, to put it mildly. Under the guise of empowering multiple constituencies and granting them special rights and privileges, we in India are only incentivising further fractious tendencies in society. In acknowledging the right to special treatment of any one section, we are playing with fire, encouraging the emergence of more such demands.

So does that mean we should discard the process of empowering our people, of reversing the injustice and neglect that they have suffered through history? Absolutely not. But two wrongs never made a right either. The solution to these problems, the salvation of  the downtrodden, heathen peoples of this country, lies not in the myriad 'schemes', 'programmes', 'missions', 'reservations', or 'reports' that the state so condescendingly doles in their name, but in the unglamorous process of everyday governance. Put simply, the state just needs to do its job. It doesn't necessarily need to do it better for some people and less diligently for the rest, in order for the wounds to heal and for 'development' to ensue.

For all the alarm raised against the tyranny of the majority, today there is none left in India. There is no one section of our country that can count itself as a numerically superior group anymore - we have all reduced ourselves into minorities, with the population of each tending towards one.

National Integrity - Looking Beyond the Obvious

I often hear the platitudinal cry for "National Integration" repeated in the mainstream media - usually uttered by some pseudo-secular politician canvassing for votes. More often than not, the notion of the nation, and its integrity is narrowly confined to the idea of religious unity. We are repeatedly reminded of the dangers of religious nationalism, as if nation-building is the exclusive domain of the self-proclaimed secularists. I often wonder - how much of the hate-mongering that takes place in the name of religion is actually a reaction to obsessive secularism? Could it be, that by harping on the religious fault-lines in the Indian nation, by actively classifying sections of the population as "religious minorities", our 'secular' leaders consciously (and shamelessly) accentuate those rifts? Is true secularism not meant to be defined by the complete abstinence, on the part of the state, from the proclamation of any sort of religious identity, be it that of the minority or the majority?

I do not seek to deny the very existence of religious divisions in the Indian nation - that would be presumptuous, even foolhardy. Yes, we have stood divided at multiple points of our history. But I beg to ask - which modern society has not lived through checkered chapters in its history? The Americans had Slavery, the British had Colonialism, the Europeans had Fascism/Nazism, the South Africans had Apartheid. Most major modern civilisations have skeletons up their cupboards - but no country seeks to make those apparitions the centre-pieces of political debate. One simply moves on. Wounds heal, sins are atoned for, reconciliation follows. Keeping the bogeyman of religious division alive - through discrimination, appeasement and false sympathy - is regressive thinking at best; and a dangerous, debilitating threat to nationhood at its worst.

Amidst the din of religious-identity politics (masquerading as secularism), what tends to get lost is a threat which, I believe, is far more potent in its 'nation-breaking' ability: Racism. I dither to classify regionalism (or at least separatism) in the same bracket - for in my opinion, that devil lies interred in the cemeteries of India's twentieth-century-past (the recent bout of peace in Kashmir could be evidence?). Racism, however, is alive and kicking in twenty-first century India. Episodes such as the recent murder in Delhi of a young student from Arunachal Pradesh, and the assault on Ugandan women in the same state, only underscore the point - that Indians are a deeply racist people. That we, as a civilisation, have extremely debauched, depraved notions of race, skin-colour and genealogical superiority. And, sadly, these racist notions are furthered by our politicians (people like AAP leader Somnath Bharti), our movie stars (who shamelessly endorse skin-lightening products) and I dare say, our parents and community-elders. The latter's greatest failure lies in bringing up an entire generation, reinforcing in them an 'Us' vs. Them' mentality.

What has been systematically ingrained, must also be systematically purged from the psyche of a nation - we must stop indoctrinating our children into believing that people from North Eastern India, are in any way, different from the rest of us. We, as a society, must learn to celebrate duskier role models, not seek to bleach them in inane television commercials. The tacit, slow subversion of India's National Integrity is progressing through these, outrageously well-accepted notions of race and colour. The greater enemy, they say, is not one who is visible - rather, the one who is hidden, ensconced in the deepest corners of our social consciousness - it is about time that we hunt it out and exterminate it from this country.