In 2004, the Supreme Court held, subject to the proviso of due deference, that every Indian citizen could, as a matter of right, fly the national flag at a place and time of her choosing. In 2016, the same court imposed on every Indian citizen a responsibility — place- and time-specific — to pay ritual homage to the national anthem.
For reasons the SC bench alone seems privy to, the judges made a rather arbitrary choice of occasion when this display of patriotism would be coerced. Cinemas across the country would be obliged to play the national anthem prior to the main screening. To ensure a climate of respect, the management of every venue screening a film was to close all exits and ensure a posture of reverence by the audience gathered within.
In this transition between upholding a citizen’s right to engage in an expressive act of belonging and imposing it as a coerced act performed under confinement, the SC gestures towards a growing deficit in the body politic. It is a vacuum in which posturing that breaches all norms of civility has flourished.
At the 2015 Republic Day march, Vice-President Hamid Ansari stood to attention when the national anthem was played, but was ruthlessly trolled on social media as a “jihadi” for his failure to salute the flag. As a former diplomat with extensive experience in protocol, Ansari was aware that saluting the flag was a duty enjoined only on those in uniform. Those not wearing the soldier’s uniform showed their respect without the military salute — an important distinction that several on the dais followed that day. But Ansari alone was singled out for excoriation by the overheated community that claims the title of true patriots.
Patriotism was once dismissed as the “last resort of the scoundrel”, perhaps unfairly. This characterisation evades the explosive political potentialities inherent in the sentiment. Patrie, the Latin original the term descends from, has fostered several others, such as patrimony and patriarchy.
In its early constructs, patriotism was about attachment to the land, a sentiment that would remain incomplete in the absence of ownership. Only those who had title to the land by virtue of their “work”, belonged to the “patrie”. Property was truly of the essence in cementing that sense of belonging to the homeland.
“What therefore is the homeland,” asked Voltaire in a famous 18th-century text, before furnishing the answer himself: “Wouldn’t it be by chance a good field, about which the owner, lodged comfortably in a well-kept house, would be able to say: ‘this field that I cultivate, this house that I built are mine; I live here under the protection of laws that no tyrant can break. With those who own, as I do, fields and houses assembled for their common interests, I have my voice in this assembly, I am a part of the whole, a part of the community, a part of the sovereignty: there is my patrie”.
It would later be said, especially in the 19th century, when working-class disaffection frequently erupted to threaten the privileged order in Europe, that the proletariat did not have a nation.
Patriarchy was the other side of the bargain, the notion that there were some within the patrie who were of superior virtue and alone could be trusted with its fortunes. Patriotism was the touted recipe for social cohesion, but these components of the doctrine were designed to alienate at least the two large constituencies of workers and women.
A form of constitutionalism built on liberty, equality and fraternity, was a principle of cohesion devised to soften these rough edges. Constitutionalism went beyond the symbols of the patrie, to the substance of a common belonging in shared ideals of justice. Symbols gained allegiance only when they went beyond a formal promise of freedom, to the substantive assurances of welfare and development for all.
The older patriarchal definition, though, refused to fade away. At every juncture of failure on the delivery of substantive promises, patriotism tended to surface afresh, represented in symbols of political authoritarianism.
Symbolism is important to deflect authentic political demands and focus minds on otherwise elusive concepts.
The elaborate rituals of religious practice have become an end in themselves, because they sustain the subjection of the flock to the diktat of the brokers of faith.
The national duty of patriotism is administered by a secular clergy — the police, bureaucracy and judiciary — different in degree rather than kind, from older and ill-remembered theocracies.
The initial impact of the new theocracy was felt in Kerala, where an international film festival began soon after the SC order, requiring the State’s very discerning cinema-goers to perform their ritual obeisance multiple times on an average day. Hyper-nationalists were not content with this infliction and soon turned their malign attention towards a film director who proposed a less irksome way of enjoying cinema while honouring the national anthem. In a further coup of unreason, the new theocrats goaded the local police to arrest a writer and theatre activist, Kamal C Chavara, who had in a very different context, written satirically about the empty symbolism of nationalist observances when basic rights were denied.
The principle of ‘constitutional patriotism’ moves the needle decisively. From a conception of India’s Constitution as the defence of freedom, it now stands transformed into a coercive imposition on all who are seen as outside the patrie.