“Hum Bharat Ki Mata Nahi Banenge”: Resistance and Rage

One of the rallying cries of Delhi University women students’ group Pinjra Tod has been “Hum Bharat Ki Mata Nahi Banenge” (“We Won’t Be the Mothers of India”). On February 28, when students and teachers of Delhi University and other academic institutions walked in rage and mourning through the familiar lanes of North Campus to condemn the violence perpetrated by members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the student wing of RSS) and Delhi Police in and around Ramjas College few days earlier, many fellow protesters asked me why I was holding a banner “I won’t Mother India”, that may invite unnecessary censure. In media interviews, the Right-wing students' group had justified their hooliganism by referring to some imagined “anti-national” sloganeering during the English Literary Society seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’ in Ramjas college. It is not clear which slogans were categorized as “anti-national” – “ABVP se Azadi” or non-compliance to the symbol of Bharat Mata. Incidentally, the political resolution adopted by Bharatiya Janta Party’s National Executive on March 20, 2016 reads –

Nationalism, national unity and integrity are an article of faith with the BJP. Refusal to hail Bharat – say Bharat Mata ki jai – in the name of freedom is unacceptable. Our constitution describes India as Bharat also: refusal to chant victory to Bharat tantamounts to (sic) disrespect to the constitution itself…. Bharat Mata ki jai is not merely a slogan…. It is the heartbeat of a billion people today. It is the reiteration of our constitutional obligation as citizens to uphold its primacy. The BJP wishes to make it clear that it will firmly oppose any attempt to disrespect Bharat and weaken its unity and integrity. (Bharatiya Janata Party 2016)

A nation is seen as a volatile space that makes and unmakes the norms of citizenship and by extension those of the “outsider”, “stranger” and “foreigner”. It selects or recognizes only those citizens who adhere to these established norms and aspire towards the ideal. This adarsh nagrik (ideal citizen) has to be constructed against a binary, which in contemporary times has come to be the figure of the “anti-national”. Being an extremely fragile concept, the nation’s sovereignty needs to be constantly reiterated through the creation and circulation of “enemies” across dominant discourses of culture. Since a nation is imagined as a large family, any voices of dissent can be seen as acts of disloyalty and consequently a threat to this imagined unified body. Thus, one Gurmehar Kaur is reduced to a traitor since she not only dared to take a stand on campus violence but also advocated peace with India’s ultimate enemy, Pakistan. In recent past, the anti-national as the new enemy of the state has come to be associated with university spaces that have threatened to challenge the illusion of “mera Bharat mahan” by exposing a majoritarian worldview. This new category of the undesirable citizen is to be seen as an anomaly, if not an outcast against the revered figure of the soldier who guards the international boundaries and contributes to the longevity of the nation. In ‘Cultural Roots’ Benedict Anderson notes that the cenotaphs and tombs of “Unknown Soldiers” despite being probably empty are “saturated with ghostly national imaginings” (Anderson 2007: 44). The Ramjas College violence is enacted almost exactly a year after Jawaharlal Nehru University students and Rohith Vemula, the Dalit scholar in University of Hyderabad became “anti-nationals” for questioning the policies of the central government and the capital punishments awarded by the Indian judiciary in cases of terror attacks. Since such death sentences become public spectacles satisfying the “collective conscience” of the nation (as stated in Afzal Guru’s judgment), challenging them is tantamount to exposing the shortcomings of the highest court of law and by association that of the Indian democracy (Roy 2013). Moreover, the cries of Azadi during the students’ protest movements have brought back into the public domain two of the most sensitive issues concerning the Indian polity that the politicians usually shy away from –Dalit rights and Kashmir.

As a critic of colonialism and virulent nationalism, Aubrey Menen, an Indo-Irish novelist writes – “The virtue of patriotism can also decay. It can become monstrous and its monstrous form is the inflated nationalism against which the patriot… is now struggling” (9). Since nationalism is measured through tokenism and compulsory obedience to national symbols, retrieved or re-appropriated by the state, they often take the form of slogans that label and identify both “nationals” and “anti-nationals”. “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” appropriated by the Right Wing thus becomes the ultimate test of patriotism for the average Indian. It is important to remember that the iconography of the Bharat Mata has little to do with the Hindu Right and was largely embraced by Indian National Congress as a unifying pan-Indian symbol during the freedom movement. Such anthropomorphizing of the land (a European concept) is essential to make the idea of the nation more believable for the Hindu majority who rely on idol worship. The figure of Mother India may be traced back to Abanindranath Tagore’s 1904 painting and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s hymn, 'Vande Mataram' published in his novel, Anandamath (1882). It is during the freedom struggle that Tagore’s saffron clad saint-like Bharat Mata gets a more Durga-like militant avatar but ironically seeks masculine protection and finds legitimacy within the nationalist discourse. According to U Kalpagam, “the multiple valences possessed by the allegorical construct of Mother India within nationalist discourses” include “‘feminist assertions of women’s power as mothers of the nation”, “terrorist invocations of the protective and ravening mother goddess” and “Gandhian lauding of the spirit of endurance and suffering embodied in the mother” to name a few (Kalpagam 2000: 648). Incidentally, with respect to representation of a gendered nation in India’s calendar art, Sumati Ramaswamy writes – “the geobody is feminised in a highly specific way, as a Hindu/Indian woman whose body is generally demurely clad in a saree and wearing all markers of traditional identity” (180). Therefore, the racialized image of a fair Hindu goddess as the representative face of the nation becomes divisive for projecting a dominant culture that ignores atheists and imposes idol worship on the country’s religious minorities. It is also guilty of dehumanizing the figure of the Indian woman through her deification. Moreover, it imposes sanctity over the nation thereby keeping it beyond any form of scrutiny. Consequently, the symbol has been used numerous times to legitimize mob violence, as also evident from the action of rogue lawyers at Patiala Court who attacked JNU students and professors in 2016. In another instance, Maharashtra MLA, Waris Pathan of All India Majilis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) was suspended from the House after he refused to utter the slogan for religious reasons. Brett Bowden writes – “it is this extremist adherence to nationalist pride that has been implicated in precipitating upon humanity some of its darkest moments and more horrendous of crimes” (240). When love for the country has to be reiterated through compulsory sloganeering, that love itself is both diluted and breeds exclusivity. This is not the love that leads to political awakening (to think of Pinjra Tod’s “karenge politics, karenge pyar”) but one that celebrates privilege and even violence against fellow individuals on grounds of race, caste, class, religion sex/sexuality and nationality.

The key aspect of this performance of one’s patriotism is its visibility that is used by the state machinery to distinguish between the “national” and the “anti-national”. Being an extension of the nation which is imagined in anthropomorphic terms, the body of a citizen becomes the site of discipline and inscriptions through which the state constructs a Foucauldian docile body. Thus the marginalized has to “look like” or assume a certain degree of body image to assimilate into the mainstream or even to be allowed within the “nation”. This is particularly true of Muslim and Queer bodies that have come under increased surveillance across the world because of religious and sexual profiling. While India as a multi-cultural nation has celebrated sartorial varieties across communities, Islamophobia at the international and national levels have led to a renewed anxiety over the visibility of a Muslim body. Consequently, this has resulted in arbitrary arrests of Muslim youths on terror charges as made most conspicuous recently by the testimonies of Mohammad Aamir Khan who was acquitted after spending fourteen years in prison and Mohammad Waheed Shaikh who was arrested for his alleged role in 2011 Mumbai blasts. Umar Khalid, one of the JNU students charged with sedition, remarks – “In jail I felt like that Reluctant Fundamentalist who wanted to grow a beard, wear a skull cap and wanted to say that even then you cannot ask the questions you are asking” (Mustafa 2016). The visibility of the “anti-national” is however not just contingent on sartorial accessories and/or sloganeering but has to do with a larger debate of who and what constitute Indian culture and the dichotomy (if any) between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. While Kashmir has once again been pushed back to the periphery by university students seeking refuge in the Preamble and more specifically in cries of “azadi within India”, one wonders if the current generation has embraced the Constitution as the absolute, oblivious of Bhim Rao Ambedkar's concerns over treating it as a holy grail beyond all debate and discussions. In his November 25, 1949 address, Ambedkar reminds us – “There is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater" (Chhibber 2016) One wonders if Bharat Mata will continue to be a contested symbol in days to come or have we already given into the trap by imagining alternate Bharat Matas in Radhika Vemula or Fatima Nafees?

 Bibliography

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