Samuel Johnson made a famous pronouncement in April 1775, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Patriotism is not to be identified with nationalism, or love for one’s birth place, a dedication to make one’s land a source of well-being for all its inhabitants. Unfortunately, the humans have inherited the benefits and the evils of the evolution under the Darwinian law of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
An innate tendency to survive and prosper at all costs leads some to silence the others and submit them to one’s individual or class interests, denying them their right to share the fruits of their labour and live in dignity. In the name of “national culture” the dominant groups try to impose their political will and thought upon the rest of the population to keep them subservient.
The laws of nature as studied and defined by Hegel as dialectic of thesis and antithesis, and by Isaac Newton as laws of physics, every action generates its equal and opposite reaction. These laws of nature help to maintain the equilibrium and balance, which unfortunately the homo sapiens is unfit and unable to respect. That’s when revolutions become necessary or unavoidable.
There can be no such thing as undifferentiated rules for all, and wisely enough the form of justice or dandaniti in ancient India followed a dharma based on the wisdom of its sages, but also achara, the traditions of the professional and local communities, respecting the diversity of community customs.
The recent ideologies of sanatana-dharma are a political subversion of the classic vedic dharma. They could have gained some support in the process of the freedom struggle from the colonial rule, but they are misplaced in the modern democratic India. Any stubborn pursuance of any such ideology, ignoring all counter-cultural warnings of the sincere and well-wishing nationalists, is bound to be counter-productive and lead over time to an implosion beyond repair.
However much the political leadership of a modern nation may think of itself as legitimate authority, the globalisation and internationalism has come to stay and human rights of national citizens can no longer be violated with impunity. India should be proud of its Amartya Sen, a nobel prize winner, who contributed to the world community the criteria for human development index.
In his magisterial writings about The Idea of Justice (2009) Amartya Sen challenges any national violation of human rights, reminding the nationally “patriotic” violators that such rights are not any constitutional gift that can be taken away or limited by any dictatorial or elected state authorities.
Amartya Sen is not the first Indian to reflect and teach about the perils of nationalism. He is an heir to similar thought defended and expounded by the creator of India’s national anthem, the first Indian Nobel winner, Rabindranth Tagore, the Gurudev. Mahatma Gandhi’s first refuge, earlier to Sabarmati in Gujarat, was Tagore’s Santhiniketan. It is believed that it was Tagore who first called Gandhi a mahatma.
Both knew what they wanted for the people of India and shared their ideals, but respected each other’s different paths. Such healthy respect for diversity of views reinforced the struggle and led it to a happy conclusion.
Now more than ever, it is important that Indian leaders should read Tagore’s Ghore bhaire written in 1910, a novel that conveys Tagore’s own transition from Hindu revivalism to universal brotherhood, from nationalism to internationalism, from the acceptance of rigid Brahmanism and Hinduism to the religion of man.
Against this proud background of Indian enlightenment we need to dispel any clouds of patriotic chauvinism and nationalistic imprisonment that fears and feels threatened by the wings of freedom which the Indian people so anxiously dreamt, desired, and fought for, under the foreign colonial dispensations.
Tagore’s famous cry for freedom needs to continue ringing in the ears of all India-loving citizens. In the age of globalisation it should be India’s gift, just not for its own people at home, but to the entire humankind still in bondage of various kinds the world over:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Obviously, the ideals will never correspond to the evils of the real world, and we will still see sporadic ugly violations of the ideals. Petty individual and class interests will continue to find place in the local and national politics. Tendencies to demonise minorities and to find faults with dominant and domineering majorities in democratic polities will never entirely disappear. But none of these blemishes, however grave, should not blind the nation-loving citizens so much as to throw out the baby with the bath, endangering the gains we have achieved.
(The author is Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (Goa) 1979-1994; Retired Cathedratic Professor of the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Teconolgias (1996-2014)
