More than three hundred Indian citizens have already been deported to India in chains on US military aircraft over the past couple of weeks in February. A list of 18,000 Indians who are liable to be deported in the coming days has reportedly already been handed over to the Modi government. Private estimates put the figure of Indians in US facing the risk of deportation at over seven hundred thousand. India's foreign minister has defended the US action in Indian Parliament. Prime Minister Modi repeated the same line during his joint press conference with Donald Trump. Contrast this shameful capitulation to the position taken by countries like Colombia and Mexico which have denied permission to US military aircraft and brought their nationals back in their own planes with full dignity.
Let us now take a look at recent reports from Bhubaneswar which reflect the conditions for Nepali students in India. A Nepali woman student in the Bhubaneswar-based Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology was found dead in her hostel room on 16 February. This was apparently a case of suicide triggered by an abusive relationship with a male student hailing from a powerful BJP family in UP. When students started protesting in the campus demanding fair investigation and justice for the victim, the KIIT authorities responded by declaring the Institute closed sine die for Nepali students, asking them to immediately vacate the campus and dropping many of them off at Cuttack railway station. Viral videos show KIIT officials humiliating Nepali students as an 'ungrateful lot', taunting them about Nepal's low GDP and telling them to go back to Nepal.
Do we find any similarity and connection between the Modi government's acquiescence to the ill-treatment meted out to Indian citizens by the Trump Administration and the KIIT administration's racist arrogance towards students from Nepal? Capitulation to US domination and bullying of small neighbouring countries are in fact two sides of the same coin. The RSS responds to reports of attacks on members of the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh with a global cry of 'Hindus in danger'. The Modi government presents India as a Hindu-majority country encircled by hostile Islamic neighbours and has even amended India's citizenship law with a discriminatory and divisive clause to exclude Muslims. But here are students from even Hindu-majority Nepal being ill-treated in a BJP-ruled state. Appeasement of the self-proclaimed global big bully and attempts to play the regional big brother go hand in hand.
India's protracted struggle for freedom from British rule had given rise to a nationalist consciousness that despised oppression in any part of the world and empathised with revolutions and national liberation movements the world over. Bhagat Singh had famously combined the two slogans "inquilab zindabad" (long live revolution) and "samrajyavad murdabad" (down with imperialism) into an integrated clarion call for worldwide freedom for the oppressed. Even Gandhi, having personally experienced racism during his stay in South Africa before his return to India, could easily identify with the cause of a free Palestine. Nehru saw himself primarily as a representative of the emerging third world and shaped a foreign policy on the basis of anti-imperialist solidarity and cooperation among all the newly liberated countries of the world.
The anti-imperialist nationalism that arose from our freedom movement and defined India's identity - internally as an inclusive multi-religious multi-lingual nation and externally as a champion of national liberation and third world unity - is now under attack from the Sangh brigade's model of Hindutva or 'Hindu nationalism'. This model of aggressive nationalism seeks to coerce India's old model of 'unity in diversity' (more accurately unity through diversity) into the straitjacket of Hindu supremacist uniformity. It finds common cause with Israel's Zionist genocidal campaign in Gaza and with the anti-immigrant xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist frenzy of the far-right across the world even if undocumented Indians find themselves at the receiving end of this xenophobia as we now see in the US.
The preamble to our Constitution describes "we the people of India" as the originating power of the Indian Republic. The use of the word 'people' instead of nation marked a conscious realization of the Constituent Assembly that India was not yet a cohesive nation, it was only a nation in the making. The Constituent Assembly had firmly rejected the idea of religion-based national identity. Ambedkar was categorical that since Hinduism, the religion followed by the majority of Indians, provides religious legitimacy to the most entrenched form of social inequality and injustice in the shape of the obnoxious order of castes, a Hindu Raj, if it ever becomes a fact, would prove to be calamitous for India. Ambedkar considered caste to be the biggest obstruction to India becoming a really cohesive nation. The Constitution of course did not compromise with the idea of any kind of exclusion or discrimination, either on the basis of religion or caste, and promised comprehensive justice, equality, freedom and fraternity for all.
In the Modi era, the Sangh brigade invokes its own image of the nation and brand of nationalism to enforce its agenda of transforming secular democratic India into a fascist Hindu Rashtra. True to the old Golwalkar doctrine of reducing Muslims to second grade citizens, the Sangh brigade is busy exploring all possible opportunities to spew venom and unleash violence targeting the Muslim community. While various strategies of voter suppression are already being employed against the Muslim electorate, the Hindu Rashtra constitution draft, which was set to be released in the ongoing Prayagraj Kumbh advocates outright disenfranchisement of the Muslim community. Every voice of dissent within India risks being persecuted as part of an 'anti-national conspiracy', while members of the Indian diaspora who are critical of the Modi regime are also being denied visas and stripped of their status as Overseas Citizens of India.
In the seventy-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution and foundation of the Indian republic, we the people of India will have to take up the challenge of reigniting the anti-imperialist nationalism that had united us as a modern democracy and opened up the vistas for a future where every Indian could live a life of dignity. Without that the Indian economy is liable to get more vulnerable to the vagaries of imperialist dependence and remain permanently enmeshed in the disastrous trappings of crony capitalism, where India's corrupt corporate billionaires will continue to appropriate ever bigger shares of India's wealth and income while the bottom half will have to survive on a sub-subsistence level deprived of even the basic necessities of life.
From the 1857 anthem 'ham hain iske malik, Hindustan hamara' (India is ours, we own this land) to the constitutional affirmation of popular sovereignty defining India as a socialist secular democratic republic founded by ‘we the people of India’, our freedom movement was driven by the power of progressive nationalism. Fascism is today out to tarnish the glorious legacy of the freedom movement and destroy the democratic constitutional foundation that emerged from it. This calamity must be avoided by all means.
