Amid the raging controversy over Sangh Parivar's Hindutva agenda, Vice President Hamid Ansari today cautioned against connecting faith and history and propagating a "homogeneous" national identity when there are over 4,600 communities in the country. The Vice-President said the idea of a homogeneous nation is problematic.
"Our 4,635 communities, according to the Anthropological Survey of India, is a terse reminder about the care that needs to be taken while putting together the profile of a national identity," Ansari said while inaugurating the 75th session of Indian History Congress.
"The global scene in modern times has been replete with complexities and tensions of what has been called the national question. We live in a world of nation states but the idea of a homogeneous nation state is clearly problematic. Diversity is identifiable even in the most homogeneous of societies today," he said.
Warning against any straight-jacket edifice for national identity "that came to grief" in other societies, Ansari said the pluralist structures in India that have stood the test for over six decades need "constant nurturing". Ansari highlighted the practical relevance of history and said it helps to learn from the mistakes of the past.
He asserted that history also cannot be "faith-based". "The domains of the two exist separately and conflation does not further the cause of either." Ansari said, "History helps us to know and learn from the mistakes of the past. Those mistakes relate to frailties in judgement leading to mistakes in statecraft and governance. These as one historian has put it could be due to tyranny or oppression, excessive ambition, incompetence or decadence, and folly or perversity."
The Indian History Congress session was held at the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus for the first time in New Delhi.
Ansari said, "It is no longer a matter of debate that history has to be more than narrowly political or economic. The imperative is to make it comprehensive and inclusive of neglected groups in society." He also expressed the hope that an approach similar to the Look East policy would be formulated in the future for the region to the country's west covering the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the East African regions.
Not much historical research work has been done on certain other regions, the Vice President said. "The situation of historical scholarship relating to Afghanistan and Central Asian republics is no better. The extant works worthy of mention relate to the period before 1947. Each of these societies is relevant to us in economic, strategic and social terms... each necessitates much greater scholarly attention," the Vice President said.
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