Column

The Indian government has created a flutter with its decision that only citizens can represent the country in international sporting events. That has sent many of the star tennis players like Prakash Amritraj, Shikha Uberoi and Sunita Rao into a tizzy because they are US passport-holders and they have been playing for India in the last few years. It will, of course be sorted out amicably because governments have a way of juggling rules, and they know how to use them to raise and remove barriers. This would lend itself to a Kafkaesque novella if nothing else.

There is no need to pooh-pooh the passport. It is a useful travel document, which helps the person as well as governments to make crossing borders if a smooth, if a slightly cumbersome, affair. Anyway there have been globe trotters through the ages and across countries and continents and all of them managed without the magical passport. Let us not forget that the passport in its present form is a 20th century device. There were ways of checking out things in the earlier periods. But then millions of tourists who crisscross the globe now were unheard of in the past.

There are mischievous elements only too eager to make holding a passport as a necessary document to proclaim not just your legal identity — which is sensible —but also your deeper, almost mystical, national identity — which is baloney.

The problem cannot however be dismissed with a wave of hand because this nationalism business is both legal and emotional. Even the dyed-in-the-wool cosmopolitan cannot deny that the tug of nationalism is a natural thing. The problem arises when it is made into a means for hating people of other nationalities. Europeans have learnt after 20th century’s two world wars, deaths of millions of people and destruction of cities that nationalism can be a nightmare. And they have been trying to move away from it as gingerly as possible.

Nationalism has not disappeared. It persists in the sporting arena, in the arts and in literature. France and Germany were fierce rivals in the early part of the last century and they stood in opposite camps in the two wars. But thanks to efforts of statesmen in both the countries in the 1950s and the gradual emergence of European Union over the decades, Germany and France sit on the same side of the table in international councils.

But when it comes to football, the rivalry remains as intense, but without the deathly violence of the battlefield.

In Asia the scene is quite different. Nationalism of the negative kind still rankles in the minds of leaders if not so much of the peoples. China and Japan, South Korea and Japan are unable to forget the scars of the past. But they are connected with each other in an intimate and intricate way in the economic field. Will economy do the trick? It seems that it just might. Recently, leaders of China, Japan and South Korea met to discuss the global economic crisis, and they have even sought ways of dealing with it collectively.

It seems India and Pakistan are yet to arrive at that kind of a working relationship and keep the rancour under wraps as it were. It holds true of the people in the two countries. Remember that Indians can boast of Sachin Tendulkar and Pakistan can hark back to Imran Khan while dealing with the rivalry in cricket. At the same time, there are many admirers of Tendulkar in Pakistan as of Imran Khan in India. But the two governments have not found an acceptable way of maintaining calm without losing face.
There is much that politicians can learn from the people, which they do not.

There is the delectable irony in the fact that the sweetest national song, Saare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara has been penned by Sir Mohammed Iqbal, the father of the idea of the idea of Pakistan. Iqbal has also written lyrical Urdu poems - ‘Naya Shivala’, ‘Aftaab’ (a rendering of the Gayatri mantra) and ‘Ram’, which exhort and celebrate the ideals of Hinduism.

Nationalist rivalries can seen at their best at the moment in the attitude of the Irish, Scots and the Welsh towards the English. They have an intense dislike for the English culture and literature, even though they use the English language to express it. Remember, the greatest English novel of the 20th century, Ulysses, was written James Joyce, an Irishman.

It is then in sports and in the arts that nationalist rivalries — they are good and healthy when they confined to these realms — because they could bring out the best from those engaged in the friendly battle. The passport does not matter so much as the nationalist sentiment. And that sentiment does not have to be a bloody one either. There are civilised ways of besting the other.