Hamid Ansari and the Politics of an Old Anxiety

The question is not whether Ansari is entitled to quote Nehru. He is. But Ansari has to remember that Nehru was India's first Prime Minister. He was not India's permanent political conscience. Nehru's ideas have been debated, modified and, in some cases, abandoned by the very political tradition that claimed his legacy. The Congress government's 1991 economic reforms represented a decisive departure from the highly controlled economic model of the earlier decades. Political India did not collapse because one generation moved beyond Nehru. Nor did democracy require Indians to treat every Nehruvian judgement as sacred text.

Why, then, should his political anxieties about the Hindu right be treated differently? The more revealing feature of Ansari's speech is that Nehru was not invoked in isolation. He was invoked at a memorial lecture for Noorani, whose 2019 book carried the unmistakably polemical title The RSS: A Menace to India. Ansari thereby brought together two familiar strands of the same political argument- Nehru's apprehension about Hindu right-wing politics and Noorani's deep hostility towards the RSS. That is not merely historical remembrance. It is a contemporary political intervention. And it raises a fundamental question- what precisely is wrong with cultural nationalism?

If cultural nationalism means that India's civilisational inheritance, traditions, symbols, historical memory and cultural continuity have a legitimate place in the conception of Indian nationhood, its automatic identification with communalism requires an argument not an assertion.

India is not merely a geographical territory populated by individuals holding passports. It is also a civilisation with a historical memory extending thousands of years. The Constitution establishes citizenship and equal rights; it does not erase history, culture or civilisational consciousness. The distinction between constitutional nationalism and cultural identity therefore cannot be manufactured into a binary in which constitutionalism belongs to one ideological camp and cultural assertion belongs to another.

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Ansari's formulation also raises the problem of selective secularism. There is no dispute that communal politics can threaten constitutional equality. But the test of secularism cannot be whether one is perpetually examining Hindu political mobilisation while treating religious mobilisation elsewhere primarily as a question of minority insecurity. If communalism is the problem, the standard must be applied consistently. That is the uncomfortable question the Ansari framework does not adequately answer.

India has seen religious mobilisation across communities. It has experienced separatism, sectarian politics, communal violence and identity-based political appeals of different kinds. A constitutional framework worthy of the name cannot operate with one lens for the majority and another for minorities. Indeed, Ansari himself had spoken while Vice-President about secularism as a “modality, not a dogma”, and in 2016 called for greater clarity about the principles of secularism and composite culture.

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India today is politically more competitive, socially more mobile and electorally more participatory than the India of the early decades after independence. Communities and social groups that were once politically peripheral have become central participants in democratic politics. The old Congress-era vocabulary does not automatically possess the authority to explain this transformation. This is why Ansari's speech sounds less like a new diagnosis and more like an attempt to revive an old ideological map.

Even the reaction to his remarks is revealing. The BJP and other critics attacked the formulation, while some Muslim clerics also publicly distanced themselves from it and called for greater social harmony. These reactions do not settle the argument, but they demonstrate that Ansari's interpretation cannot simply be presented as the self-evident voice of Indian minorities.

There is also a larger irony. A former Vice-President invoking constitutionalism should invite a debate about constitutional citizenship in its entirety  not merely about the alleged dangers of the Hindu majority. The constitution does not create permanent political suspects and permanent political clients. It creates citizens. That is precisely why the debate must move beyond Nehru and Noorani.

The real question is not whether India must choose between Hindu cultural identity and constitutional democracy. It is whether the two can coexist within a framework of equal citizenship. The answer to that question cannot be predetermined by describing cultural nationalism as “imaginary” or by reviving an old warning about Hindu communalism. It has to be tested against India's Constitution, its democratic practice and the lived political reality of contemporary India.

India has changed. Its politics has changed. Its society has changed. Its aspirations have changed. Perhaps the time has come for the political discourse to change as well. The India of 2026 does not need old fears recycled as permanent truths. The time has come to stop treating Nehru’s political anxieties as constitutional commandments. India is not a museum of the Nehru era, nor is Noorani its ideological referee. A confident civilisation need not apologise for its identity. India’s Constitution guarantees equal citizenship  not permanent ideological privilege to those who distrust the majority.