Kappen Memorial Lecture, 2002

The New Millenium and the Anti-Millenial Projects

I am deeply grateful to ‘Visthar’ for inviting me to give this year’s Kappen Memorial Lecture and thus providing me an opportunity to pay tribute to one of the most eminent thinkers of this country. I had the privilege of knowing Fr.Sebastian Kappen in my Bangalore days in the early seventies and have always been inspired by his stimulating writings.

Fr.Kappen has been rightly identified with the quest for counter culture. His main preoccupation was the cultural challenge facing the people of India. He saw the process of social transformation as a transition “from inherited cultural bondages to freedom for fashioning a new humane and humanising culture”. He believed that a new social order could be brought about only by protesting against oppressive systems, by daring to dissent and ushering in a counter-culture.

Fr.Kappen wrote “The subversive creative praxis takes concrete form in political as well as cultural action – action aimed at challenging the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes and restoring to the common people the right to think their own thoughts and frame their own scale of values”. (1)

It is from this perspective that I have chosen the topic, “The New Millennium and the Anti-Millennial Projects”. Here I view millennium as a concept, a concept that combines ethics and justice, more than and distinct from the turn of a page in the calendar signifying the passage of a thousand years. The two projects I consider anti-millennial, because they militate against this concept, are globalization and communal fascism in India. More specifically I deal with the cultural imperialism in and through globalization and cultural nationalism in the project of Hindutva.

The new millennium has been celebrated twice, in the beginning of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 much to the benefit of the ‘millennium industry’. Millenium has been a great commercial success. Churches around the world conveniently forgot the Biblical import of millennium and the key-note of the celebration of the ‘Great Jubilee’ was triumphalism.

Is this the New Millennium?
In an illuminating article in the ‘Folio’ of January 2000, Romila Thapar asks, “Is this the New Millennium?”. Despite the widespread use of the Gregorian calendar in today’s world there are many other calendars which continue to be used and their millennia have other points of time. If the date of the millennium varies for different people, Thapar points out, what does have a similarity in meaning is that which we associate with the concept, the millennium as the end of a major period of time and the beginning of another. (2)

The word millennium is drawn from Christian belief. It is referred to in the last book in the New Testament of the Bible, the Revelations of John, which is a book of prophecies. It is said that Jesus Christ will return to rule the earth for a thousand years, a rule that will reinstate virtue and wipe away the tears of the oppressed. By extension the term millennium has come to be used for any period of a thousand years. “Thus historians have happily appropriated the decimal ordering for periodising long histories into millennia and centuries.”

“The Christian and Buddhist millenerian dreams are concerned with relieving the persecution of the poor and the oppressed and the rewarding of those who have been faithful in adversity. The Vaishnava dream relates to restoring the rights of those castes who have lost out in the change and those who have fled can return to utopian conditions. These millenerian dreams seem to have faded from the projection of the current millennium”, wrote Romila Thapar. (3). This projection remains unconcerned with the ethics and justice expected of the New World. We are here dealing with two projects that challenge such justice and ethics: cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism.

Cultural Imperialism
The ‘Human Development Report 1999”, in its overview, shows how globalization affects culture. Cultures in poor countries are under siege from the forces of global economic integration according to the Report. “globalization opens people’s lives to culture and all its creativity and the flow of ideas and knowledge”, says the Report. “But the new culture carried by expanding global markets is disquieting”, the Report cautions, “because today’s flow of culture is unbalanced, heavily weighted in one direction, from rich countries to poor’. The study points out that open markets are contributing to cultural insecurity in poorer nations which have removed barriers against import of arts and entertainment from the West. At the same time culture has become a commodity to be sold in the form of handicrafts, music, books, films and tourism. (4).This is a fairly good description of the present cultural crisis. But one has to go deeper into the issues to understand the nature of the cultural crisis created by globalization.

Globalization is both a process and a project. The ‘process’ is largely due to developments that are taking place as a result of advances in science and technology. This has brought about a veritable revolution in the field of communications through electronic waves. This is aptly called the information revolution. Today instant communication is possible around the world. This process is bound to gather even greater momentum. The ‘project’ of globalization is one of economic integration with a view to establishing a new form of colonization and domination. This also marks the latest and the most brutal stage in capitalism. What is important to note is that the project makes use of the process to serve its purpose. Culture which is very much influenced by the information revolution is used to serve the purpose of colonization and domination.

In the academic social sciences, students are taught to think of culture as representing the customs and mores of a society including its language art, laws and religion. Such a definition has a nice neutral sound to it, but culture is anything but neutral. Much of what is thought to be our common culture is the selective transmission of class-dominated values. Antonio Gramsci understood this when he spoke of class hegemony, noting that the state is only the “outer ditch behind which there stands a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,
a network of cultural values and institutions not normally thought of as political”. What we call ‘our culture’ is largely reflective of existing hegemonic arrangements within the social order, strongly favouring some interests over others.

As Dr.K.N.Panikkar has pointed out, “The powerful cultural onslaught the Third World countries are experiencing today is an attempt to establish cultural imperialism – culture as imperialism- as a precursor to an all-embracing domination. Through the imposition of the culture of capitalism, Third World countries are trained to prepare the ground for, to use Tehodore Adorno’s phrase, an ‘administered world’, to which corporate capital would have easy access. Cultural imperialism thus provides the groundwork for exploiting the market potential of Third World countries. Not that alone, the cultural products of advanced capitalist bloc are themselves a driving force behind the contemporary cultural invasion.” (5)

This of course is a critique from the perspective of the Third World. What is striking is that those who promote globalization and therefore imperialism have openly stated their understanding of culture precisely along these lines. David Rothkopf, managing director of Kisssinger Associates wrote in “In Praise of Cultural Imperialism”(Foreign Policy, June 22, 1997), “Globalization has economic roots and political consequences, but it also has brought into focus the power of culture in this global environment. The impact of globalization on culture and the impact of culture on globalization merit discussion. The homogenizing influences of globalization that are most often condemned by the new nationalists and by cultural romanticists are actually positive: globalization promotes integration and the removal not only of cultural barriers but of the many of the negative dimensions of culture. Globalization is a vital step towards both a more stable world and better lives for the people in it. Furthermore these issues have serious implications for the American foreign policy. For the United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the world’s information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas.” (6). Stated simply the United States will use culture for imperialist domination.

In 1996, for example, a former assistant defence secretary, Joseph S.Nye, and a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William A.Owens wrote about what they considered “America’s information edge”. They said: “Just as nuclear dominance was the key to coalition leadership in the old era, information dominance will be the key in the information age.” (7). The reality of the networks of global technology which influence our lives (computers shifting capital around the globe in seconds) can be only dimly grasped in cultural terms. This is because none of us actually live in the global space where these processes occur: an information technology network is not really a ‘human space’. Rothkopf modestly adds, “Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the history of the world, theirs is the most just, the most tolerant, the most willing to constantly reassess and improve itself, and the best model for the future”. (8) Tolerance is on the basis of a claim of superiority.

The US has taken control of the vocabulary, concepts and meanings of many fields. It obliges us to formulate problems of its own invention with the words it offers. It provides the codes to decipher the enigmas it created in the first place. In fact it has set up any number of research centres and think-tanks for this very purpose, employing thousands of analysts and experts.

As Ignacio Ramonet writes, “Wielding the might of information and technology, the US thus establishes, with the passive complicity of the people it dominates, what may be seen as affable oppression or delightful despotism.. And this is all the more effective as its control of the culture industries lets it capture our imagination. The faithful gather to worship the new icons in malls – temples raised to the glory of all forms of consumption. All over the world these centres of shopping fever promotes the same way of life in a whirl of logos, stars, songs, idols, brands, gadgets, posters and celebrations” (9)

As the capitalist economy has grown in influence and power much of our culture has been expropriated and commodified. Nowadays we create less of our culture and buy more of it, until it really is no longer our culture. Global forces are working through their Indian representatives by appropriating indigenous cultural forms and practices. The appropriation of indigenous culture and its commodification are two sides of the same coin. The cultural operators are steadily moving into the terrain of popular culture, turning it into commodities for the global media to satisfy the cultural curiosity and sense of superiority of their audience.

A far greater part of culture is now aptly designated as ‘mass culture’, ‘popular culture’, and even ‘media culture’ owned and operated mostly by giant corporations. Their major concern is to accumulate wealth and make the world safer for their owners, the goal being social control rather than social creativity. Much of mass culture is organized to distract us from thinking about larger realities. The glossy entertainment culture creates an analysis paralysis. We lose our ability to interpret and understand the issues involved. In our living rooms we have a multi-channel society and we have the freedom to choose between the same and the same. By constantly appealing to the common denominator, a sensationalist popular culture lowers the common denominator still further. Such fare has often real ideological content. Even if supposedly apolitical , entertainment culture (which is really the entertainment industry) is political in its impact, propagating images and values that are often racist, patriarchal, consumerist, authoritarian, militaristic and imperialist, all against millennium values.

Fr.Kappen succinctly described the characteristics of the culturescape of today, “…the debasing of language into a means for commodity exchange, the harnessing of science to profit making…the quantification of the human sciences and the cult of the statistical individual, the co-opting of art and artists in the service of transnational corporations, the commodification of women, the use of religion as a means of legitimizing unjust structures, the morality of inidvidualism and private interest, the glorification of aggression and military might; and the regimenting and manipulation of human needs.” (10)

The cultural element has been largely neglected in theory and practice since the beginning of international concern for development and social progress. The international organization which has been established to promote culture is UNESCO. The USA has not been a member of the UNESCO for almost two decades. This international agency is operating very much on its own. The World Bank, the IMF or the WTO never consults the UNESCO rergarding the effect of structural adjustment or trade liberalization on cultural development. Educational projects are made or approved by the World Bank not by the UNESCO. Behind that is the policy of the World Bank on education promoting a global culture which in essence is an imperialist culture.

The cultural domination by the West or more precisely by the United States is facilitated by the creation of a market society. Market economy under globalization creates a market society. Some of the features of the market society were identified in a report of the government of Denmark a few years ago. This shows that there is genuine concern in the West itself about the long-term effects of globalization on society and culture. The Report ( Copenhagen Seminar for Social Progress,1996)) said, “Traditional cultures and forms of social intercourse based on trust and mutuality would be destroyed. There would be a weakening and destruction of activities, organizations and associations of various types which based on dedication and generosity of individuals, provide the moral ‘fuel’ without which society and its major institutions cannot function. Political institutions and processes would decline, together with the notion of service; the function of teaching and educational institutions would also decline. And the medical profession and health services would entirely be commercialised. Science would be dominated by objectives of profit and power and scientific achievements would be made to serve the same purpose”. (11)

An important dimension of culture is education. In fact education is the broadest cultural activity. Therefore the impact of globalization on culture deserves special mention. The basic understanding about education rests on its relationship with society and state. It is assumed that education of individuals is for the development of their potential as well as for the good of the society and the state has the primary responsibility for educational activity. Globalization has changed this concept and relationship drastically. Now it is assumed that education is to prepare the individual for the market. So it is the market which decides which kind of education is to be given. Since the market decides, the state withdraws from education pleading it has no resources. We should carefully examine the consequences of giving emphasis only to technology in education. Humanities, languages, social sciences and even basic sciences are neglected. We are told that education must be job-oriented. While it is important to have jobs for those who come out of educational institutions we should consider what kind of jobs are we talking about and whose jobs are these. These are mainly jobs with little relationship to production in this country and contribute largely to the profits of multinational corporations. The emphasis is given to narrow individualism with no obligation to the society. The reforms in education on the whole provide channels for cultural imperialism.

We should recognize the possibility of a collective will to define cultural experience even in the face of the fragmentation and confusion of modern life . The ability to combat cultural loss exists. Cultural imperialism as a spread of modernity is really a spread of cultural loss. However, surviving this process of cultural loss is a matter of cultural will by defining and restructuring human goals.

The critique of cultural imperialism as a critique of modernity is valid. Modernity has produced an unprecedented interdependency that has ironically created a cultural incoherence of fragmented lives and diminished cultural security. As a result people are less able to define their roles in society and answer the question of why they do the things they do. This has caused anxiety and produced a worldwide malaise as a result of modernization. However even in the face of modernization’s barriers, people still have the capacity to choose and process things on an individual level. The globalized context of modernity demands it. Perhaps critics can see the potential to exercise this ability as the bright spot in the dark tunnel of cultural imperialism woes. This view reinforces the fact that human cultures are not fragile and isolated. It recognizes the amazing resilience of humans and their ability to adapt themselves and their cultures to the forces that surround them.

Cultural Nationalism
In dealing with cultural nationalism, which is the basis of Hindutva, as a project there is a problem. “Any attempt to clearly define Hindutva is doomed to failure: it is more a precept than a concept, more a myth than a rationally worked out project”, Fr.Kappen has observed. (12) However Hindutva’s main proponent, the Bharatiya Janata Party has a political project to alter the character of the nation, devaluing and undermining its secular and democratic nature.

In 1938, two years before he succeeded Hedgewar as RSS chief M.S.Golwalkar published his “We or Our Nationhood Defined”. Golwalkar’s theoretical writings clearly take Savarkar’s Hindutva as starting point but elaborate the ideas into what he liked to call ‘cultural nationalism’ as distinct from ‘territorial nationalism’. Hedgewar too had been acutely aware of this distinction. In the words of his biographer, “In those days the idea of territorial nationalism held sway in the country. Even well-educated workers had developed a strong feeling that all those who live within the geographical boundaries of the country whatever their sentiments constitute the nation’. Golwalkar wrote, “The themes of territorial nationalism and of common danger which formed the basis for our concept of nation , had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu nationhood and made many of the freedom movements virtually anti-British movements”.

In the ‘Frontline’ special issue of August 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, A.B.Vajpayee wrote an article in which he said mainly three things which assume great significance in the current debate. He acknowledged his relationship with the RSS and the inspiration he derived from it. He said that the Nehruvian consensus suppressed genuine nationalism which the BJP is now reaffirming. He added that BJP made substantial electoral gains by ‘joining’ the Ayodhya movement. Prime Minister Vajapyee’s recent statements on Ayodha and ‘national sentiment’ should be seen against these earlier statements. This is a crucial area with regard to culture and secularism. The understanding of secularism is closely linked to that of nationalism.

Hindu nationalism was an important stream in the wider flow of nationalism. It is the historic decline of the Congress that forms the crucial backdrop to the story of how and why Hindu nationalism has grown the way it has. Hindutva offers no overall socio-economic, political and cultural idelogical-programme. Its focus is overwhelmingly on the last, viz. cultural ideological and its promise deceptively simple. If the nation is to be strong it must be culturally united and it can achieve this only by clarification, recognition, acceptance and consolidation of its own nationalist ‘essence’. The project thus becomes one of cultural exclusivism and xenophobia. Claiming “the longest and unbroken history of civilizational and cultural evolution of an essentially indigenous nature”, Hindutva acts as an exclusionary force in Indian society rather than universalistic and open to the values of other cultures. In the rhetoric of Hindu nationalists boundaries between India, Hindu religion and Hindu culture are not demarcated. In fact for them India becomes identified with both Hindu culture and Hinduism as religion to the exclusion of all others. Some of the recent statements by the RSS chief Sudarshan clearly express this view.

Hindutva seeks to redefine the nation-space. Its strategy is designed to refashion the social space of the Indian nation. Through the emphasis of ‘essence’ the nation space is sacrilised and claimed exclusively for Hindus alone. The strategy behind Savarkar’s notion of Hindutva has for its central theme the redefining of the nation as a sacred space, the claim that the nation is and ought to be formed in the shape of a ‘punyabhoomi’ or holy land. This means that Hindutva tends to emphasise the particularity of social space by attempting to invest it with a unique cultural specificity. This policy has sought to reverse or turn inside out Nehruvian nation-space.

The leadership of the mainstream section of the freedom struggle, Jawaharlal Nehru in particular, was to insist repeatedly and emphatically that it was undesirable to use the terms Hindu and Hinduism to characterize Indian history and culture. Even as competing religious identities polarised around the lines of the two-nation theory were to challenge and fragment the movement, the Congress continued to reiterate that the only basis upon which the new nation could be organized was secularism and the rights of the minorities to their own religion and culture. But the rhetoric that sought to mobilise the country on the grounds of a ‘regenerated’ Hinduism served openly to exclude the minorites from the definition of the nation. For if the nation is defined by the fact that the majority belong to the Hindu religion, those who do not subscribe to the religion are not part of the nation. This is the clear and unambiguous message of Hindutva.

Some of the Surpreme Court judgements in the mid-nineties gave legitimacy to the Hindu right’s ideology of Hindutva. In one of the judgements the Court concluded that “the term Hindutva is related more to the way of life of the people in the subcontinent.” In the court’s view Hindutva is to be ordinarily to be understood “as a way of life or state of mind and is not be equated with, or understood as religious fundamentalism”. The words Hinuduism and Hindutva should not be construed narrowly to refer only to the “strict Hindu religious practices unrelated to the culture and ethos of the people of India”. So according to the Supreme Court the term Hindu is related to the culture and ethos of the people of India.

The Supreme Court decision was immediately claimed by the Hindu right as a vindication of their vision of Hindutva. But as Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur pointed out, “The Supreme Court’s conclusion on the meaning of Hindutva exemplifies the way in which the unstated norms of the majority came to be inscribed in legal principles. The Court assumes that the norms of the majority can simply be extended to apply to all Indians regardless of their religious or cultural identity. Indianisation is taken by the Court to represent the political and cultural aspirations of all Indians, in and through the construction of a uniform culture. The court does not stop to consider that this uniform culture is one based on assimilating religious and cultural minorities and in reconstituting all Indian citizens in the image of the unstated dominant norm, that is, a Hindu norm” (13)

The definition of a Hindu and Hindutva was articulated by Savarkar and
Golwalkar. Golwalkar’s vision of a Hindu nation included five
components. “The idea contained in the word Nation is a compound of
five distinct factors fused into one dissoluble whole, the famous five
distinct factors fused into one indissoluble whole, the famous five unities:
geographical, racial, religious, cultural and linguistic”. On religion and
culture Golwalkar wrote, “The great Hindu Race professes its illustrious
Hindu religion, the only religion in the world worthy of being so
denominated, which in its variety is still an organic whole…Guided by this
Religion in all walks of life individual, social, political, the Race evolved a
Culture which despite the degenerating contact with the debased civilizations
of the Mussalmans and the Europeans fro thelast ten centuries, is still the
noblest in the world.

The particular meaning that the BJP gives to the equal respect of all religionsis based on formally equal treatment. Accordingly any law or policies that provide special treatment for minorities are opposed as ‘pseudo-secularism’ or the ‘appeasement of minorities’. In the discursive strategy of the Hindu right, this approach to secularism is made to sound quite reasonable. Beneath the surface, however, this discourse of secularism and equality is an unapologetic appeal to brute majoritarianism and an assault on the very legitimacy of minority rights. This discussion on majority is important. In democracy no majority is ever assumed to be permanent, or based on a single unchanging identity alone : a majority is constructed from issue to issue and can change from programme to programme. The majority that Hindutva claims to represent is by definition permanent; the statistical majority. BJP ideologue Seshadri writes, “ Democracy in normal parlance means the rule of the majority. In every single democratic country, it is the majority culture whose ideals and values of life are accepted as the national ethos by one and all”. This discourse seeks to destroy the fundamental underpinning of political democracy – the concept of an Indian citizenship which must necessarily be abstracted from the possession of any particular attribute (religion, race, language etc). to ensure a minority its rightful place within a democratic society not only does the majority community need to recognize the contribution of the minority to its culture but it also needs to provide constitutional safeguards for the preservation of its cultural identity.The ‘Organizer’ wrote “All that the Hindu wants is that our culture should flower forth into greatness. Muslims must accept the fact that India is as much a Hindu country as Pakistan is a Muslim country or Britain is a Christian country…while politicians may play with words ‘communal’ or ‘secular’ to their hearts’ content, the fact is that the predominant culture of a country will be its basic national culture”.

Fr.Kappen speaks of the fascist features of Hindutva and its resemblance to European fascism in some of the essential points. (14) “We or Our Nationhood Defined” explicitly models cultural nationalism on Adolf Hitler. “German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindutva to learn and profit by”.

In an article “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s” in the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ Maria Casolari provides archival evidence for the foreign connections of Hindutva. Casolari says, “An accurate search of the primary sources produced by the organisations of Hindu nationalism, as well as by their opponents and by the police is bound to show the connections between such organisations and Italian fascism. In fact the most important organisations of Hindu nationalism not only adopted fascist ideas in a conscious and deliberate way, but this happened only because of the existence of direct contacts between the representations of the main Hindu organisations and fascist Italy”. (15)

Already from the spring of 1939 Savarkar-led Hindu Mahasabha seemed to have finally chosen Germany as its main reference point at the international level. On March 25, 1939 the Mahasabha made the following statement: “Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the Swastika, her patronage of Vedic learning and the ardent championship of the tradition Indo-Germanic civilisation are welcomed by the religious and sensible Hindus of India with a jubilant hope”. As Casolari points out the aggressive racial policy carried out by Germany in the name of Aryan culture must have played a fundamental role in the shift of interest from Italy to Germany.

There is a ‘cultural’ critique of secularism that has to be taken into account. It takes the ambitiously foundational view that India is in essence, a Hindu country, and that it would be culturally quite wrong to treat Hinduism as simply one of the various religions in India. It is argued that India denies its indigenous cultural commitment in not providing anything like privileged status to its own ‘tradition’, to wit the predominantly Hindu heritage. The suggestion is that India should be seen as a ‘Hindu country’ in cultural terms.

Amartya Sen replies to this critique. “There are two questions to be raised here. First even if it were right to see Indian culture as basically Hindu culture it would be very odd to alienate on that ground, the right to equal political and legal treatment of minorities (including the political standing and rights of the 110 million Indian Muslims). Why should the cultural dominance of one tradition, even if true, reduce the political entitlements and rights of those from other tradition? Sen points out that the second problem with the thesis under discussion is that its reading of Indian culture is extremely narrow. The cultural inheritance of contemporary India from its past combines Islamic influences with Hindu and other traditions, and the results of their interaction can be seen plentifully in literature, music, painting, architecture and many other fields. Sen adds that another serious problem with the narrow reading of ‘Indian culture as Hindu culture’ is the entailed neglect of many other achievements of Indian civilisation that has nothing much to do with religious thinking at all. (16)

Fr.Kappen points out that Hindutva is selective traditionalism coupled with selective openness to aspects of modernity. The advocates of Hindutva, are critical of Western conceptions of secularism and democracy. At the same time, they welcome not only modern science and technology, but also capitalism and market economy with the consumerist culture germane to it. This is not they claim, mere capitulation before modernity since they are using science, technology and capitalism as a means to goals they themselves set.

Dr.K.N.Panikkar has pointed out the impact of cultural nationalism on education. A large number of social and cultural organizations, either sponsored by the Parivar or controlled by it have contributed to the growth of communal consciousness. This is an outcome of a long-term dual strategy : the creation of institutional networks on the one hand and infiltration of the existing organizations on the other. A good example of this dual strategy is the field of education, which is central to the cultural activities of the RSS. Following the Constitutional principles, the Indian state has generally pursued a secular policy. But this is sought to be changed to give a Hindutva bias by changing the content of education. The BJP’s policy is to ‘Indianize, nationalise and spiritualise’ edcuation. (17)

What are the links between cultural imperialism or globalization in general and cultural nationalism?. The greater social and political acceptability of Hindutva in recent times, as Jayati Ghosh suggests, “has had a lot to do with the economic repercussions of a pattern of growth which leaves the vast majority of the population either untouched or even worse off, while generating spiralling incomes and increasingly flamboyant life style of a minority”. (18).Dr.Panikkar takes up the issue, “The politics of Hindutva has immensely gained from these adverse consequences of globalization, without, however, entering into any confrontation with it. Despite the Swadeshi rehetoric and an anti-Western civilizational stance, the Parivar does not oppose the ne0-colonial tendencies inherent in the working of the transnational capital in India. On the contrary there are enough signs of compromise and collaboration. The nationalism that the Parivar espouses has no anti-imperialist content and is hence only ‘cultural’ posited in antagonistic relationship with the minorities within the country. The territorial, political and economic nationalism that the anti-colonial movement represented and advocated, therefore, has no use for the Parivar”. (19)

There are many common features between cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism. Both are hegemonic. Both make universalistic claims while being exclusionary. Cultural imperialism as well as cultural nationalism is messianic. Both claim tolerance based on superiority complex and impose conditions for tolerance. While cultural imperialism marketises the global space, cultural nationalism sacrilises the nation space. While the former represents imperialism the latter has many features of fascism. In all these they militate against the ethics and justice of the millennium and may rightly be called anti-millennial projects.

“Culture is not a mere instrument of politics – it is the site at which politics is made, unmade, abused and appropriated. Far from being neutral, culture is the battleground of politics in India today”. (Rustum Barucha)