Nationalism debate

Nationalism debate: Why Indian Right must produce a respectable intellectual argument

The Indian Right is abysmally low on intellectual content. That’s the reason playing to emotions is critical to its game plan. Emotional messages don’t travel well without theatrics and the drama quotient. So it does not surprise that we see a lot of both in Parliament during the great nationalism debate.

It’s only natural that we would hear more and more of defence forces making sacrifices on the border while the rest of India is having fun and of the insult to Indian deities as well as to personalities of the past - yesterday and day before we had HRD Minister Smriti Irani dragging Goddess Durga and Mahisasura into the debate. There’s has been no cogent argument for the rival idea of nationhood, only a lot of grievances. If the strategy has been to impress the audience out there, then possibly it is only catering to those already impressed. The rest continue to be less-than-convinced doubters.

That makes the nationalism debate a colossal waste of time - in fact, the whole idea of the debate is redundant if it fails to find points of convergence and only reinforces the divergences. The article singles out the Right because it’s the challenger ideology and it seeks to question and replace the earlier one. To achieve that it needs to present arguments that are compelling enough and reasoning that is palatable. None of it has been evident so far.

The more the Right argues, the more it looks bankrupt in terms of ideas. For example, how does it fit the perceived insult to Goddess Durga into its nationhood framework? “Every year, thousands of Durga Puja pandals are erected showing her in a bad light, in sexual positions,” Irani said. Aren’t the people doing it Hindus? Is this a conspiracy of the Left to give the deity a bad name? If the latter is case then a good number of Hindus must been Leftists from much earlier times. Possibly Mahisasura was one.