But the ongoing business of ‘imagined communities,’ as Benedict Anderson phrased it, might face serious complexities if it is to be linked with born religious identities. Such approaches often tend to acquire persuasive power by making a definite religious identity a matter of self-realisation and not of choice. Harvard Professor Michael Sandel calls this ‘constitutive’ conception of community where identity comes before reasoning: ‘the self came by its ends,’ as he puts it, ‘not by choice but by reflection as knowing (or inquiring) subject to object of (self-) understanding.’ This discovery of identity may be good to some, but it can be unsettling for many as well. The best example in this regard is that of Gora, the eponymous character of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel.

Gora is a staunch Hindu nationalist, who champions Hindu customs and traditions. But he falls into the abyss of despair and becomes a problematic hero in the novel when his presumed mother informs him that he was adopted as an infant by the Indian family after his Irish parents died at the hand of mutineers. The same theme appears on silver screen with the Mahesh Bhatt’s national award winning film Zakhm. Here discovery (of unknown identities) and self-realisation both ultimately lead to a complex choice between alternative identities.

So how may such interplay of discovery and self-realisation affect our views in a diverse country like India on alternative identities in the wake of Modi’s assertion? What if every Indian starts saying I am born X and I am nationalist so you can call me X nationalist? This X factor may change in any given socio-political context. As there will be Hindu nationalist, we will also have to be at ease with the idea of Muslim nationalist, Christian nationalist, Sikh nationalist, Buddhist nationalist, Jain nationalist, and so on. The only caveat is that they may appear within a national context and not as an international phenomenon.

Would this be restricted only to religion-based nationalism? I think the answer is no given the political use of various alternative identities. So in a state like Uttar Pradesh, we can witness emergence of Brahmin nationalism or Kshatriya nationalism in the Brahmin sabhas or Kshatriya sabhas, which Allahabad High Court objected to recently. There are strong grounds to argue that Dalit consciousness could be extrapolated to Dalit nationalism in such a scenario. Whether there would be bitter infighting among Naxals in central India over calling themselves tribal nationalist, only they know better.

Though earlier I mentioned about the stupefying character of such nationalistic assertion, such ideas often, knowingly or unknowingly, pave way for international aspirations. Leave alone the question of Muslim, Christian or Buddhist nationalism per se, and consider the case of linguistic nationalism. If a Tamilian in India follows Modi and says that he is born Tamil and he is nationalist so we can call him Tamil nationalist, how would we take it? Are not people going to link such statements with the idea of Tamil nationalism espoused by LTTE? Similarly, confusion would abound if a Bengali in West Bengal starts asserting himself as Bengali nationalist or a Gorkha in Darjeeling as Nepali nationalist. Within this small region of Darjeeling, Lepcha or Bhutia nationalists will crop up in a short period.

Given everything, the statement by Modi astutely targets the kind of voters he has in his mind. They are the middle class and a coterie of intellectual leadership who want to sit up and channel the popular energies in forming new ‘imagined communities’ in the wake of UPA’s dismal performance. Modi quite understandably dreams of becoming the leader of this community. But as Tom Nairns pointed out in his seminal work The Break-up of Britain, nationalistic movements of these kinds are often hostile to democracy and populist in outlook in nature. So the question remains: if the BJP’s prospective PM nominee wishes to embrace Hindu nationalism, is he ready to face the consequences? (IPA Service)