On March 20, the Prime Minister of India warned a certain “foreign author” to refrain from “playing with our national pride.” Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee referred, of course, to our own beloved Professor James Laine, who is currently persona non grata in the World’s Largest Democracy for his heterodox writings. This is a rare and beautiful event, and we should all take pause to savor it: in this historical moment, we glimpse the one instant in which Farce and Tragedy, transmuting from one to the other, appear momentarily indistinguishable. In this column, I concentrate on the role of nationalism and history in the development of a situation that today excites both laughter and tears.

Professor Laine’s thought crimes have caused Indian politicians of all hues to engage in the competitive construction of gibbets and gallows for some months now. I consider the events of March 20 revealing because the Prime Minister had not long ago criticized those who attacked our resident scholar; Mr. Vajpayee’s volte-face is not the product (as some might—wrongly—have it) of a toothless octogenarian’s onrushing senility. I, for one, can accuse Mr. Vajpayee of nothing worse than slight ineptitude: he failed to sense in time that his political opponents would adopt his techniques. Now, with elections imminent, he must forcefully apply the tactics with which his party—the BJP—came to assume primacy in India

As with fundamentalists of any stripe, these tactics involve little more than the masterful employment of hatred and shame; but the architects of Hindu fundamentalism reanimated the decaying carcass of Indian nationalism with the spirit of Hindutva—a concept best translated as the idea of Essential Hindu-ness. This quiet victory has occurred because Indians have increasingly been taught to think that India is a Hindu country, that Hindutva defines the national character and that this is a legitimate reassertion of a cultural sovereignty that was destroyed by Muslim and British invaders. For the majority of believers (among them notables such as V. S. Naipaul), the zombie of co-opted nationalism has a curiously pleasant visage. When India seems to do well, one can bask in the complacent knowledge that our avowedly Hindu leaders have ceased to placate the minorities and foreigners and are getting the job done. When things are less than satisfactory, it is time to put the minorities and other foreigners in their place (with nuclear bombs if necessary) and so to assuage the honor of an India shamed.

The truth-statements that support such a view of the world are fundamentally unsustainable; the reality of everyday life and heuristic experience constantly intrudes and disrupts the fantasy that suggests that India will be a “superpower” or the “third largest economy in the world” in 2015, 2020 or 2050. The illogic of the national delusion—that an India infused with Hindutva will finally succeed—must necessarily draw support from the historical past. The past, therefore, must irrefutably validate the present; it must show that India will be resurgent, that it will ascend to its rightful place in the community of great civilizations once the taint of foreign contamination has been erased. To suggest the presence of other pasts—pasts in which Muslims were neither perpetually foreign nor implacably opposed to the intrinsic “genius of India”—is deeply subversive, because it brings into the realm of possibility other presents and other futures. This, then, is the nature of Professor Laine’s crime: his scholarly efforts have violated a regime of falsehood that has come to envelop public discourse in India today. The Prime Minister of India, elected as the moderate face of a significantly less moderate party, has now joined in the enterprise of contorting history to suit the vision of his cohorts.

This history has been designed to nourish the revivified remains of Indian nationalism. Indian historians have wisely remained silent. They have seen high school textbooks revised to show Muslims as the treacherous foreigner, and they have seen their more vocal colleagues hurled out of the universities. Some have begun humming strange new tunes; Partha Chatterjee, one of India’s most famous historians, said in a recent interview that “what is appropriate for a scholarly discussion may not be appropriate for a broader audience. Certain things that can be said in the Marathi press, which has a tradition of critically discussing great men, won’t be accepted from a foreigner [sic].” This, then, is a defense of intellectual freedom from one of India’s foremost intellectuals. Let us not, however, regard Mr. Chatterjee in too harsh a light. He knows, surely, of a certain Shrikant Bahulkar, an aged gentleman of 80 years, who was subjected to the humiliation of having his face blackened by a mob of men because he supplied Professor Laine with the translations of literary texts, thus cooperating in the assault upon “Indian pride.”

The elections will soon pass, and it is more than likely that all will be soon forgotten and forgiven. Perhaps Professor Laine will be welcomed to India without arrest warrants and handcuffs. Perhaps Indian historians will be able to present their scholarship in the World’s Largest Democracy without fear of India’s home-grown fascism. Perhaps Mr. Vajpayee will redeem himself by atoning for his public repudiation of the principles of India’s Constitution, that forgotten document which guarantees free speech to all. But I worry.