Source: Indian Express, May 31, 1999
A View of the World
by Shashi Tharoor
The crisis that has erupted in the Congress party over the issue of
Sonia Gandhi's eligibility to lead the country has brought to the
forefront a vital question that has, in different ways, often engaged
this column -- the question, "who is an Indian?"
Three powerful Congress politicians, Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and
Tariq Anwar -- with classic Congress secularism, a Hindu, a Christian
and a Muslim -- have essentially answered that question by averring
that Mrs. Gandhi is unfit to be prime minister because she was born in
Italy. In the extraordinary letter they delivered to her and leaked to
the newspapers, the three party leaders declared that "It is not
possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education,
competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian, born of
Indian soil, to head its government." They went so far as to ask her
to propose a constitutional amendment requiring that the offices of
President and Prime Minister be held only by natural-born Indian
citizens.
This territorial notion of Indian nationhood is a curious one on
many counts, and particularly so coming from long-standing members of
the Indian National Congress, a party that was founded under a
Scottish-born President, Allan Octavian Hume, in 1885 and amongst whose
most redoubtable leaders (and elected Presidents) was the Irish Annie
Besant. Even more curious is the implicit repudiation of the views of
the Congress' greatest-ever leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who tried to make
the party a representative microcosm of an India he saw as eclectic,
agglomerative and diverse.
The three musketeers of the nativist revolt did, of course,
anticipate this latter criticism. So they went out of their way to
reinvent the Mahatma on their side. "India has always lived in the
spirit of the Mahatma's words, 'Let the winds from all over sweep into
my room,' " they wrote with fealty if not accuracy. "But again he
said, 'I will not be swept off my feet.' We accept with interest and
humility the best which we can gather from the north, south, east or
west and we absorb them into our soil. But our inspiration, our soul,
our honour, our pride, our dignity, is rooted in our soil. It has to
be of this earth." The contradiction between their paraphrase of the
Mahatma's views (absorbing the best from all directions) and their
emotive "rooting" of "honour, pride and dignity" in the "soil" of
"this earth" is so blatant it hardly needs pointing out. Yet it
suffers a further inaccuracy: by law, even a "natural-born Indian" is
one who has just one grandparent born in undivided India, as defined
by the Government of India Act, 1935. You do not have to be of this
soil to be an Indian by birth.
But Sonia Gandhi is, of course, an Indian by marriage and
naturalization, not birth. So the usual chauvinists and xenophobes
have been quick to jump on the bandwagon started by the soil-sprung
triumvirate. So have political opportunists of other stripes. The
Samata Party's spokesperson, Jaya Jetly, for instance, in clamouring
for an amendment to the Citizenship Act, declared that it was "an
insult to the self-respect of a nation of 100 crores to have a
foreigner at the helm." Her reasoning is that Mrs Gandhi "will never
be able to fully understand the intricacies of our culture" because
"cultural impulses are gained in the early stages of life". This
argument is preposterous, since some of the greatest experts on Indian
culture, who have forgotten more than most Indians will ever know
about Bharatiya sanskriti -- from A. L. Basham to Richard Lannoy to R.
C. Zaehner -- are foreigners. Worse, by this logic no South Indian
should be able to marry a North Indian, since her "cultural impulses"
for ootappams and ottamthullal would have been set before she entered
the world of chhole bhature and karva chauth. This is a slippery path
for Jaya Jetly to tread.
Throughout its history the Congress Party has articulated and
defended the idea that Indian nationalism is inclusive, tolerant and
pluralist, and that there are no acid tests of birth, religion,
ethnicity or even territory that disqualify one who wants to claim
Indianness. As the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney has pointed
out, Sonia Gandhi "is an Indian -- by her citizenship, by her act of
living in India, and by the way she has adopted a new home. [A]n
Indian is one who accepts the ethos of India." And Mani Shankar Aiyar
turns the absurd "cultural" argument on its head by pointing out that
"it is a disrespect to the millennial traditions of India to question
the credentials of a daughter-in-law."
Sonia Gandhi herself has made her own case: "Though born in a
foreign land, I chose India as my country," she points out. "I am
Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. India is my
motherland, dearer to me than my own life." But Sonia Gandhi is not
the issue. Her personal fate is for her party, herself and above all
the electorate to decide. The real issue is whether we should let
politicians decide who is qualified to be an authentic Indian. I have
often argued in these columns that the assertion of "us" and "them" is
the worst kind of thinking that can poison the national mind. India
under the Congress has always proclaimed "unity in diversity", the
idea of one land embracing many. This land imposes no narrow
conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.
You can be a good Muslim, a good Tamil and a good Indian all at once.
You can be fair-skinned, sari-wearing and Italian-speaking, and you
are not more foreign to Ammamma in Kerala than someone who is
"wheatish-complexioned", wears a salwar-kameez and speaks Punjabi. Our
nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally "foreign"
to some of us, equally Indian to us all. Our founding fathers wrote a
constitution for their dreams; we have given passports to their
ideals. To start disqualifying Indian citizens from the privileges of
Indianness is not just pernicious: it is an affront to the very
premise of Indian nationalism. An India that denies itself to some of
us could end up being denied to all of us.
Return to South Asia Citizens Web