It is rumoured that even Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar, son of an Indian immigrant, wanted to tweet how the dance steps look ‘so wonderfully inspired by Irish Riverdance’. But level-headed bureaucrats in Dublin allegedly advised him against comparing the ‘Brown men can dance’ international moment with a globe-trotting theatrical show comprising largely traditional Irish ‘folk’ dance and music. Especially with post-Brexit Ireland needing to do far better than 2020 bilateral trade worth $947 million with India.
But it can be safely said that Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy‘s tweet after Na22’s/R3’s win was totally kosher: ‘The #Telugu flag is flying higher! I’m filled with pride on a Telugu song, that so beautifully celebrates our folk heritage being given its due recognition internationally today.’ Quite. If Bengalis all over the planet ‘especially’ celebrated with fellow Indians in 1913 when Bob Tagore became the first Indian citizen to win the Nobel, why can’t Telugus.
But you know how born-again Indians can be. Finding time from his, well, schedule, Padma Shri singer-musician Adnan Sami – an ex-British citizen of Pakistani Afghan-Kashmiri parentage (Pakistan Airforce pilot-turned-diplomat father, Kashmiri from Jammu mother) – tweeted back: ‘What a regional minded frog in a pond who can’t think about the ocean because it’s beyond his tiny nose!! Shame on you for creating regional divides & unable to embrace or preach national pride! Jai HIND!!’ And thus contributing another bum note to the nation state-nation’s states jingle. (In his 2022 Cambridge gig, Rahul Gandhi got everyone’s inner civics teacher out when he Hobsbawmed how India was a nation only in the Westphalian sense, and was actually a ‘union of states’.)
Sami had actually picked on Reddy’s ‘kupamandak parochialism’ earlier, when R3 won the Golden Globe Award in January after the CM had tweeted, ‘The #Telugu flag is flying high!’ What apparently got the Indian passport-holder (he finally became an Indian citizen in 2016) Sami’s goat was Reddy’s mention of a ‘Telugu flag’. He tweeted non-mellifluously: ‘You mean INDIAN flag right? We are Indians first & so kindly stop separating yourself from the rest of the country… Especially internationally, we are one country! This ‘separatist’ attitude is highly unhealthy as we saw in 1947!!! Thank you…Jai HIND!’ Oh, for the passion of the newly converted. Sami seems to be the only one in the room pitting regional pride against national pride. Adnan-bhai, relax, Indian flag ko sirf aur lift kara de.
This false binary of state and nation does remind me though of when as chief minister Akhilesh Yadav bemoaned the fact that Taj Mahal had become a symbol of India, and never seen as a symbol of Uttar Pradesh where it sits pretty. Poor Agra. No proprietal wrangle over, say, the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower between New York/US or Paris/France.
‘Belonging’ exists in increasingly larger concentric circles – radiating from family, friends, social/professional/(ex-)school and college groups, neighbourhood/RWA, and then melting into the more abstract ‘Facebook friend of a friend’-type state/city/town/village, and finally the state-nourished entity of nation, and beyond that ‘(our) people’ across territories. So getting a bit RRRah RRRah about one’s state doesn’t put the nation down, the same way Maharashtrians extolling Sachin Tendulkar as ‘one of us’ doesn’t leave other Indians moping. Remember, ‘desh’ and its variants in most Indian languages is a fluid concept not confined to country, Manoj Kumar notwithstanding. As for flags, I have always argued that states should very well have their own flagpole to sing-and-dance around. The state of California flag depicting a prowling grizzly bear, or the white and blue chequered flag of Bavaria has not, last heard, fuelled separatist tendencies in the US or German nation. Regional pride is not just understandable, but owing to more ‘commonalities’ (e.g. language, familiar landscapes, actual acquaintances) within a state, it can be considered more ‘natural’.
I say to each state in our gestalt gana-rajya, ‘Lift kara de your state flag.’ India is large. It will be only too happy to be visibly displayed in the multitudes it contains.
