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The Times of India March 31, 2004 CITIZEN SONIA: RACIALISM HAS NO PLACE IN SHINING INDIA By Shiv Visvanathan Shining India is now a fact of life. But as it shines across middle class, diasporic culture, claiming that opportunity has found a new geography, one must look at its shadows. One major issue is the debate around foreigners, especially whether we can have someone of foreign origin as leader of our country. Packaged as an election issue, it hides more fundamental problems of citizenship, hospitality and history. Let us begin with three events. Recently, when Varun Gandhi joined the BJP he stated clearly that he was not going to attack his aunt Sonia Gandhi. She, with equal civility, replied that she wished her nephew the best. It was a beautiful event ???¤" civil, courteous and utterly correct. Its ritual beauty was broken in the next few days with Varun Gandhi's idiot joke that he would rather be a leader than a reader. Poetical merit apart, it had all the makings of a BJP gag. On the 16th evening, BJP advertisements on TV hailed the national movement of Gandhi and Patel and asked whether this should pass to a foreigner. If the BJP were merely saying that Sonia doesn't deserve the legacy, it is commenting on a dynastic problem; it is stating that Sonia is part of a lesser epigoni, third generation mediocrity of a great family. But, when the BJP says she has no right to be a PM, it is not merely being crude but raising issues of history, prejudice and citizenship. What is the foreigner's issue? Is it only the argument that someone of foreign origin cannot lead the country? Or is it a more racial argument that someone "White" sticks in our throats? Or is it a tactical ploy of the Sangmas and the Pawars when they have run out of ideological steam and are not feeling particularly bright? There is also a semiotic issue here. Sonia projects herself as the Bahu, as daughter-in-law, as part of an Indian family. To the logic of the nation state, she offers the framework of the family. She might have been an outsider but she has been ritually incorporated. Given her loyalties and behaviour she must now be seen as Indian and as family. In reply, the BJP claims she is a foreigner. They portray her as an alien; tacitly suggesting her very foreignness makes her vamp-like and therefore, unredeemable. Unconsciously, they even play on the foreignness of the name without realising that Bollywood, the great leveller, with its song You are my Sonia has already indigenised and internalised that name into the local imagination. You are my Sonia could not be Advani's favourite song. But it does show that local cinema can be more cosmopolitan in style than BJP. The BJP's idea of the foreigner reveals a misreading of Indian history. It also marks the difference between the openness of Indian nationalism and the narrowness of the BJP's idea of the nation state. Indian nationalism was not just an act of liberation but an attempt to rescue and redeem the British. In that lay its cultural confidence. Simply and statistically no other national movement was as open to foreigners as ours was. Allan Octavian Hume was father of the Indian National Congress. Annie Besant was president of the Indian Congress. Are we going to erase their names from history because they were foreigners? Imagine if the foreigner's issue had begun then? Think of the foreigners who gave to India and Indianness and cosmopolitanism. Think of Madeline Slade, Sister Nivedita, the bio-logist Patrick Geddes, the botanist Albert Howard. Think of the Theosophists. Are we going to erase or rewrite history a la Stalin? Should we turn them into non-persons because they were foreign in origin? The idea of Shining India can have no integrity if this is our attitude to the foreigner. What begins as a celebration, a feel-good festival can actually become an obituary of a parochial self? Beyond illiteracy of history, there is the question of citizenship. It is around citizenship, around the rituals of inclusion and exclusion, that a democratic imagination is built. The issue of citizenship has to face the mobility of our populations. One is not just talking of nomads and pastoral groups, most middle-class Indians are migrants now. What we do to Sonia at national level we might do to our migrants at a local level. Are we to express a diasporic confidence that Indians are becoming senators in Canada and America and yet maintain double registers for a reverse wave? Would the BJP object to a citizen of Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan origin becoming a future leader? Beyond hospitality and the crucial question of rights, it is the idea of India itself. India is a clearing house, a composite, and a compost heap of imaginations from the French and the Danish to the Portuguese. Why not a dash of local Italian? The alternative to this openness is a touch of racialism. Are there seeds of race in the BJP manifesto? If so, one has to conclude that BJP is a party open to technology but not to people. One has to admit its manifesto confuses legacy, dynasty and citizenship. Finally, and most disconcertingly, it violates the Indian rules of hospitality to become officially racial. In that sense it might be following the apartheid models of Europe rather than the pluralism, hospitality and openness we are proud of. The price for the BJP's illiteracy of citizenship and history is too high. Shining India cannot shine with rituals of exclusion and impropriety. ----------------------------------------- Courtesy:Harsh Kapoor/SACW www.sacw.net |
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| << March31, 2004 - [India Thinkers Net]A Blueprint for National Secular Alliance (NSA) |
April02, 2004 - [India Thinkers Net] Prof IK Shukla .....re-A Blueprint for NSA >> |
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