Time we bury our own Thackeray

If we carry on being the Muslim version of Thackeray, Pakistan will remain in an existential and practical crisis.

A few weeks ago, the modern father of Hindutva, Balasaheb Thackeray, passed away. For over four decades, Bal Thackeray, the founder of the Shiv Sena party, had been the face of ultra-nationalists who were variously anti-immigrants, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, etc. Thackeray was also connected to various underworld gangs with competencies in extortion, killings and general terror. This mix of Hindu nationalism and ‘don’ behaviour made Thackeray a hateable figure and made any intellectual engagement with his ideas impossible. However, Thackeray’s basic premise, based on the thought of VD Savarkar, was not that irrational and jingoistic and exhibited an attempt to understand modern nationalism in the Indian context. Savarkar’s ideas also have food for thought for us, in Pakistan today.

VD Savarkar was a product of the British Raj, where the notion of an ‘Indian nation’ was deeply contested. While people like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were arguing for a composite nation where everyone living in India with their different religions, languages, customs and practices were ‘Indian’; Jinnah only defined the nation in religious terms. Still, there was no real and deep definition of what a ‘nation’ meant in this vast subcontinent. Here, Savarkar opined that the people who were ‘Indian’ were those who “live as children of a common motherland, adoring a common holyland”. So if you called India ‘home’, you might be of whatever religion, race or caste but you were ‘Indian.’ An atheist, Savarkar was careful not to give a purely religious colour to his articulation of nationhood. He further argued that according to his homeland theory, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs were ‘Indian’, while Muslims and Christians were non-Indian, as both looked to foreign lands as their spiritual homes — they had a very tenuous connection with India as the ‘motherland.’ Savarkar reinterpreted being ‘Hindu’ in cultural and political terms, not religious ones, and so ‘Indians’ were also ‘Hindus’.

Obviously, this theory has a number of problems with it but what it does highlight is the complication of understanding modern nationalism in the Indian context. When Savarkar was writing, India had been consolidated from Kashmir to Kerala for the first time and was going to emerge as a nation-state. Just as ultranationalism was used to consolidate Germany, Italy and France, Savarkar wanted to use it to consolidate India. And, quite naturally, since the Indian independence movement was anti-British, the ‘anti-outsider’ element was critical in his argument. Gandhi and Nehru brought disparate parts of India together against the ‘outsider’, the British, and so consolidated this unwieldy subcontinent. Savarkar was just taking it to its logical conclusion of excluding all ‘non-Indians’ from the country.

Pakistan is also facing the same confusion of who is a ‘Pakistani’. The question, even today, for Pakistan remains whether Pakistan should formulate a composite or essentialist nationalism. Just like Savarkar, we have followed an essentialist definition and have made Pakistan an ‘Islamic country’ rather than the ‘homeland for Muslims’ (and also others), as argued by Jinnah and the Muslim League. Therefore, whoever does not believe in the ‘Islamic’ vision of the country is not treated like a Pakistani. And then, obviously, this ‘Islamic’ definition excludes certain views. Thus, with time, the vision has become even more limited, with various interpretations of Islam constantly being charged of being not ‘really’ Islamic.

From a certain vantage point, the ideas of Savarkar and, by extension, Bal Thackeray’s, are not that different from what we in Pakistan believe. That is why the lack of understanding of their viewpoint and the vitriol against them in the Pakistani press is rather amusing. In some ways, Bal Thackeray is the mirror image of what our state, and let us accept it, most of us, have been advocating and believing in since the inception of the country.

In the end, I want to point out the very obvious. If we carry on being the Muslim version (and that, too, of a certain kind) of Savarkar and Thackeray, Pakistan will remain mired in an existential and practical crisis. Unless we leave the essentialist and exclusionary ways of Savarkar and Thackeray and develop a composite nationalism, we will remain in the vicious circle of religious, ethnic and class tensions and warfare. It is time we also bury our Bal Thackeray.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2012.