Former Vice-President Hamid Ansari has said “strident nationalism has taken over the political and cultural landscape and is making India intolerant, arrogant and insecure and undermining fraternity”.

In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire news portal, Ansari said “a version of nationalism that places cultural commitments at its core and promotes intolerance and arrogant patriotism has tended to intrude into and take over the political and cultural landscape”.

Referring to it as “hyper-nationalism” and “strident nationalism”, he said it was threatening dissent and making the country insecure about its place in the world. It is undermining the fraternity that has held together the many different peoples, cultures, religions and ethnicities that make up the country, according to Ansari.

The interview was to mark the publication of Ansari’s autobiography By Many A Happy Accident: Recollections of a Life.

Ansari, who was born in Calcutta and spent his formative years in the city, pointed out that the process leading to this hyper-nationalism began with the 2014 general election results and reached fulfilment with the 2019 outcome. Ansari said the 2019 verdict represented “the success of populism… assisted by authoritarianism, nationalism and majoritarianism”.

Ansari, who had for long been associated with the Congress, said hyper-nationalism had caused “a subversion of core values”, leading to an erosion in secularism.

“The term secularism itself has almost disappeared from the government’s official vocabulary”, replaced by a “politico-ideological effort… to superimpose… the primacy of a religious majority”.

India was becoming a Hindu country, Ansari felt.

Another consequence of this cultural hyper-nationalism was that “our commitment to the rule of law seems to be under serious threat”, Ansari felt. He said the country had lapsed into “arbitrary decision-making and even… mob rule”, with a “noticeable decline in the efficacy of the institutions of State”.

According to the former Vice-President, another worrying consequence was that hyper-nationalism had made “the fault lines in our society more visible” and rendered the country more fragile. Fraternity has weakened and insecurity has grown, he observed.

On the higher judiciary, Ansari said: “The approach of the superior judiciary… does little credit to an iconic institution and damages public confidence.”

Asked what all this meant for India’s minorities, specifically Muslims, Ansari said it was making them insecure. He said their confidence in getting justice from the government had diminished.

He said he did not believe that the Citizenship Amendment Act was necessary to give refuge to persecuted minorities. The government already has the power to do so, Ansari pointed out.

Asked if cultural hyper-nationalism and its implications were reversible or whether the process had gone so far that it could not be rolled back, Ansari said a turnaround was possible but depended upon the choice the Indian electorate made.