Stories and Nation Building #2: Present Day

In an earlier blog, we went over the story of India that was picked in 1947 at its formation. And as Pranay Kotasthane says in Missing in Action:

“It follows that since a nation is a mental construct, it can be and is reimagined.”

 

Today, he says:

“There is an alternative imagination… it believes the lack of real reckoning with our past before the British era, the choice by Nehru and his ilk of an imagination that wasn’t true… and the constant peddling of this fake narrative have not allowed us to move ahead.”

 

The “idea of India” is truly being fought over between the “adherents of the old imagination” and the “proponents of the alternative”. And as we saw in the other blog, that involves “reworking of history to fit past events into this imagination”. It happened in 1947; and another attempt to rewrite it is underway today.

 

Will India survive as a united nation? On the one hand:

“America was going through a bloody civil war that was threating to tear apart the union when it had turned seventy-five.”

America stayed intact, though the fault lines never got smoothened out. But many other countries did split. Who can tell?

 

Only time can tell. With the BJP no longer having an absolute majority, perhaps their ability to change the narrative will fall sharply. Or perhaps, too many Indians believe the new narrative and want the old one overthrown, in which case, will the other parties do what the public wants?

 

That brings us to highly complex areas. In a democracy, should the State reflect the views of the people, even if they are offensive or regressive (Who decides that anyway)? Or should the State take a paternalistic I-know-what-is-right attitude? Would we want the latter when we’ve seen how such powers are abused by the State throughout history, across the world? What if one doesn’t like the transformation that is happening? Should one fight it, even via physical means? Or should one say:

“It might lack a moral force, but it has democratic legitimacy.”