Prayers to Mother India cannot hide efforts to suppress dissent

March 15, 2016 11:51

To someone who agrees with neither Jawaharlal Nehruvian students nor self-proclaimed nationalists, their views must sound parochial. The comparison may not be obvious, for parochial conventionally means limited to a small region. But it will become clearer if we look at the etymology of parochial. Oikos means a house in Old Greek. Paraoikos means someone near the house, a neighbour; that leads to paroikia, a neighbourhood. Once Christianity arrived in Greece, the meaning became more specific: the neighbourhood of a church. Those living in the neighbourhood would go to church; they would be homogeneous in their religious belief, or parochial. So if we remove the judgmental part, parochial means sharing a belief. Nationalism in the sense it has acquired in Delhi is quintessentially parochial: it is a shared belief in a goddess called Bharatmata. Read more

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