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On being patriots without borders

Mukul Sharma, ET Bureau Jan 26, 2010, 07.13am IST

The Republic Day parade is meant to be a show of inner and outer strength and the country's militaristic and developmental wealth. The social scientist, Shiv Vishvanathan calls it a classic representation of the Indian nation state, evoking visions of power, technology and defence, and the will to progress with each tableau being an iconic stereotype of the most comfortable collective memory available. But what, he asks, "if the tableaux on dams included the displaced; the tableaux on Bengal included the Naxalbari violence... are margins and our minorities part of the memory of displacement?"

Obviously not, since we remain silent about the defeated and the erased.

To take that argument further, we also remain silent during the event about our boundaries, those lines of actual or assumed control that in fact define us. For what are we without our surroundings? A huge part of our political lifestyle and bluster would at once become makebelieve for instance if our only neighbours were living thousands of kilometres away in Paraguay, Iceland, Borneo, Sweden or New Zealand. Wouldn't it make more sense, therefore, if the whole parade was started or rounded off by tableaux representing Pakistan, Nepal, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar?

The audience would at least get a more complex sense of its particular place in the sun. If the authorities could invite these countries, like they invite other heads of state, to also send and showcase their best available collective memories in the form of pageantry floats, they too could be appreciated and contextualised into India's history and contribute to its annual preen.

After all, we're already doing it during trade fairs aren't we? (Scoffers and cynics please note that any hostile neighbour would immediately be forced to "retaliate" by inviting an Indian tableau to participate in its own display of nationhood.

Getting such a free chance to show off soft power during this explosive period of globalisation is a bad thing or what? Not to speak of terrorist threats being diminished.) To paraphrase John Donne, no country is an island, entire of itself; all are of one world and one volume, and their sorrows should diminish us because we ought to be involved with them. We might even learn from this that all boundaries are inclusive and not made up of borders that automatically eliminate others.