Modi is completing the nation-building process

The unfinished business of nation-building being attempted was always guaranteed to be difficult since new perceptions and sensibilities have to be implanted and become the default norm. It will unavoidably challenge extant fissured self-identification and imperil them, nothing more assured to unsettle and provoke unrest.

The unruly demonstrations across India over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) obscure the profound historic changes unfolding in India. The contemporary socio-political tsunami unleashed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is Ashokan in scale and guarantee them immortality if the follow through and implementation of their policies succeed. In the historical context of disunity, it was the catastrophic warring between the Rashtrakutas of the South and the once mighty empire of the troubled Gurjara-Pratiharas that opened India’s doors to a thousand years of unimaginably destructive and cruel enslavement. The prolonged desolation was to be followed by the racist British marauders in the 18th century. They are still being defended by “coolie” Indian academics in a tradition of self-hatred that ingrained itself during colonial rule. But something massive is now afoot, the meaning of which will become truly clear in historical retrospect.

It was the Mahatma that decreed that India should not acquire the standard accoutrements of nationhood that violated his bizarre eschewal of physical survival necessary to ratify his timeless sainthood, in the tradition of Jesus Christ. His chosen Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not altogether abandon this underlying moral imperative, though circumstances severely circumscribed its realisation and it finally perished in the icy Himalayan wastes in 1962. The unavoidable task of building the nation, begun majestically by the incomparable Sardar Patel, with pragmatism, iron will and sagacity, had faltered after his death in 1950. In subsequent decades, the efforts to create a nation out of long extant internal fissures and suicidal rivalries were stifled by the struggle to retain political power at the centre, while the periphery’s sense of belonging to one nation ebbed away.

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