A salad-bowl America

By M H Ahssan

With one simple sentence, Barack Hussein Obama, America's first Afro-American president, redefined the past, present and future of his country and the rest of the world. He said: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers." Quite apart from the fact that Hindus figure prominently -- probably for the first time in a president's inaugural address -- Obama's statement commits America to look at itself not as a melting pot Christian nation, but a salad bowl of peoples whose religious and racial identities may remain distinct for a long time to come.

The statement essentially says what we in India have been saying for ages without actually meaning it: unity in diversity. It contains a message for the whole world that pluralism, diversity, and multi-culturism are vital for the survival of nations.

The western idea of nationhood has always been that of a melting pot -- where the original ingredients forget their past and instead congeal into a new identity. Today's global reality is that of a salad bowl -- where individual ingredients retain their distinct identities even while collectively constituting a salad bowl.

Hinduism is a salad bowl of castes, religious beliefs and languages; India is a salad bowl comprising many other salads. It is a super salad bowl. We are a nation of minorities, where even Hindus do not have a singular identity -- which is what is driving the votaries of Hindutva nuts. It is best if they realised that Hinduism, and much less India, cannot be melted together into a singular identity. Our strength lies in our salad bowl character, not our homogeneity.

This is gradually becoming true of the rest of the world, too. Only Obama has had the courage -- for a US president, that is -- to say that America's is a "patchwork heritage". Driven so far by a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp) consensus, the vast majority of Americans have willy-nilly acknowledged a broad Christian identity for themselves, never mind that the US constitution specifically forbids a role for the state in religion. It is suicide for presidential nominees to forswear a belief in god -- leave alone embrace atheism or agnosticism. Hence, the significance of Obama's stress on "non-believers".

Americans had come to believe that nations are welded together by language, religious and cultural traditions, a Judeo-Christian ethos, as posited by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations. Even as wave after wave of immigrants poured into America, over time they merged into an American identity that was essentially Wasp.

If America has been a melting pot rather than a salad bowl for so long, it is an accident of history. It just happened that the bulk of the early immigrants were the religious types, trying to escape the European enlightenment and the rising tide of rationalism. They went to the new world with the idea of building a god-fearing nation driven by Christian values. In reality, they were a divided Christian nation and the constitutional clause separating church from state was inserted because the various Christian groups feared that their rivals may declare their own versions of Christianity as the official creed. They sought constitutional neutrality to keep the others out, and not necessarily because they believed in secularism. True belief in secularism developed after the rise of modern industries in the north, which needed cheap labour from the deeply-religious (and racially-oriented) south.

Look closely, even the old America was not truly a melting pot. At least two ingredients, black and white, did not mix. But over the last 50 years, continuous immigration from Latin America and Asia has converted America into a truer salad bowl. Demographers say that Hispanics will soon overtake Afro-Americans as the largest ethnic group, even as the Chinese and Indians become financially powerful like the Jews.

While India has always been a salad bowl, the rest of the world has been wedded to the idea of melting pot homogeneity. Obama's statement makes it clear that the idea is outdated. All large nations -- from Britain to France to Germany to India to Russia -- are salad bowls, and have to evolve policies that promote diversity at the micro level and unity at the broader level. You can have uniformity only in very tiny nations (Iceland, Norway, Finland), or very authoritarian ones (China), and that too only if you discriminate against outsiders (Japan).

But migrations are a reality for most countries. India can never avoid the huge influx from Bangladesh or Nepal or Sri Lanka; America can't avoid the Latin influx, nor can Europe avoid the African deluge.

Equally clear is what you cannot do in salad bowl nations. You cannot weld them together by force. Consider the failures: Yugoslavia, the former USSR. Soft states like India seem to be able to hold together better than the hard ones. Despite 50 years of brutal repression and forced assimilation efforts, Tibet remains China's worst worry. Ditto for the Uighur minority in Xinjiang.