The bad old days

Nostalgia is becoming a destructive force

An interesting finding emerged in the recent Hindustan Times CNN-IBN survey on the public mood. Only 53 per cent of an urban middle class section of opinion said India's ruling class is adapting well to a fast changing world. Almost half said that politicians are unable to embrace change because they lack vision.

Are we Indians still afraid of change? Do we lack leaders who can chart a vision of change? Are we trapped, as a distinguished editor has written, in the "dangerous romance of nostalgia" by which we hark constantly to an imagined era of the 'good old days', wallow in perpetual hatred of the present and have no collective dream of the future? Today, an overload of shallow nostalgia (rather than an informed sense of History) is becoming an obstacle to change.

The government's announcement of 51 per cent FDI in retail saw the BJP and Left raise the old bogey of the "foreigner" entering India. Imagery of the 17th century East India Company embarking on a new era of plunder was invoked. A stark picture was painted of helpless Indians at the mercy of cruel foreign forces. Politicians, who send their children to "foreign" lands for higher studies and who represent voters many of whose children are excelling in "foreign" careers, nevertheless propagated an age old fear of "foreign exploiters" as a means to prove their nationalist grass-roots credentials.

The globalization of the economy, now a two-decade-old process, has not produced an accompanying intellectual maturity about the West. Uma Bharti's announcement that she would set fire to Wal-Mart only showed the extent to which the Sangh continues to pander to knee-jerk, immature anti-westernism.

The Left is known for its hatred of everything American and can be relied upon to oppose everything from Wal-Mart to the nuclear deal. But why should a Right wing party like the BJP uphold Leftist economics too? Apart from considerations of small retailer vote banks, in terms of rhetoric, the BJP's and the Sangh Parivar's relationship with the "West" or with "foreigners" is in need of drastic immediate overhaul. The closeness to the US forged at the time of the Vajpayee interregnum, has sadly not created a more reasonable relationship with "the foreigner" in the Sangh mindset. India's cultural Right has embraced an ersatz westernization of malls, fashion shows and has seized upon that American invention, the internet, to disseminate its views. But it has still not hit upon the combination of cultural traditionalism and economic modernity that mark modern Right-wing movements.

The foreigner as "enemy" is an idea the Sangh Parivar has to change and change fast. To rail against foreign governments, pour scorn on degrees from Oxford and Harvard and block economic reforms on the grounds that they will re-institute the East India Company is not only to willfully and fatally misunderstand the interdependent global economy but is also a resounding failure to grapple, intellectually and politically, with massive changes of the 21st century.

The BJP is not the only party resisting a thoroughgoing systematic intellectual transformation. If the BJP is trapped in a static view of cultural nationalism, the Congress is failing to grasp the idea of a modern government. Failing to engage with Anna Hazare in a public debate on Lok Pal, seeking to police social media, treating 24X7 television as the mortal enemy and visualizing "real India" as an unchanging Pather Panchali-type rural idyll where mobs of faithful voters will line up to greet dynastic Rajas and Ranis who hand out sops by way of free food and loans, shows that the Congress too has failed to understand that information, aspiration and quest for equality are the dominant features of a fast changing country.

The discourse of royalty-among-the-people, refusal to communicate as equals, standing on ceremony with civil society "upstarts" are indicators of the Congress' failure to effect full scale intellectual reform even as it attempts to push economic reform. Uma Bharti is nostalgic for an India of small shops and swadeshi; Rahul Gandhi is nostalgic for an India without 24X7 media and an aggressive middle class.

Dalitbahujan scholar Kancha Ilaiah once said that to radically change Indian society and attitudes, the Rig Vedic hymn, the Purusa-sukta, should be publicly re-written. This is the verse that says different castes were born from different body parts of Brahma. According to Ilaiah, only a complete excising of such a hymn would rid India of the evils of birth-based hierarchy.

Similarly, today citizens and leaders alike have to be prepared to junk past prescriptions and urgently embrace the idea of change. Harking to the old days of the Third World economy when there were no 'sinful' Page Three parties, to an imagined era of nationalism when we fought the East India Company, wistfully dreaming of an all-powerful state and public sector, yearning for the days when there was no oh-so-terrible 24X7 media - the outpouring of nostalgia is an exercise in preachy moralism and not remotely constructive.

Nostalgia is a wonderful indulgence between friends and family. But if nostalgia becomes a principle of governance or a plank of opposition, it can become dangerously destructive.

In our preference for nostalgia over dreams of the future, we forget that politicians were often far less accountable then than they are now; the media much more hand in glove with the establishment then, than now and Indians of the old days were afraid to look a "foreigner" in the eye. All of that has now evaporated yet still the tentacles of nostalgia shackle us to the past. As 2011 ends, and recession looms, its time to snap those tentacles and effect a mental re-birth. As a duty to future generations, the time for nostalgia is gone. The time for mental transformation starts now.

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