All of us probably remember the time when the papers were filled with outrage from the intelligentsia following Bal Thackeray's endorsement of Adolf Hitler. The demagogue, surprisingly, stood by his admiration for Hitler even after the criticism. While this might not even be a passing thought for many of you out there, I was intrigued by the possible causes behind this 'telepathic' connection. It is true that we find it plausible that Thackeray can draw inspiration from the life of Hitler (it definitely seems more plausible than the case of Hitler himself who confessed to have been guided in his mission by the music of Wagner) but I still find that the causal connection needs to be articulated. To me, Hitler was acknowledgedly a great mobilizer of masses and a propagandist of unprecedented competence, being able to steer an entire country using his fiery speeches and idealogical harangues. On the other hand, I find myself incapable of separating this acknowledgment of Hitler from a fundamental belief that he was a psychotically deluded man to have committed the atrocities that he did. Notwithstanding his other qualities, Hitler's commitment to his belief that the extermination of an entire ethnic body could resurrect a nation from its economic and social problems is nothing but a delusion and I personally find it impossible to look at him as a role model in any mode of representation or interpretation.

Let me now quote a passage from Amitav Ghosh's essay The Fundamentalist Challenge to invoke his views on the subject of the 'telepathic connection' that I mentioned earlier (People who have read the piece will forgive me for a contrived juxtaposition. While Ghosh does not particularly deal with Thackeray's admiration of Hitler, it is I who has taken the liberty of transporting Amitav Ghosh to the present context for I believe that the views apply):

I was amazed because I could not immediately understand why extremist Hindu beliefs should translate so fluently into sympathy for a group that had no religious affiliations at all, a group whose ideological genealogy ought to have inspired revulsion in these middle-class professional men. It only became obvious to me later, reading reports from Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, and other strife-torn lands, that for this species of thinking, religion, race, ethnicity, and language have no real content at all. Their only significance lies in the lines of distinction they provide. The actual content of the ideology, whether it manifests itself in its religious avatar or its linguistic or ethnic one, is actually the same in every case, although articulated through different symbols. In several instances- Sri Lanka, for example- extremist movements have seamlessly shifted their focus from language to religion.

What then is this ideology that can travel so indifferently among such disparate political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century; an ideology that, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must also be regarded as a variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The non-sectarian, anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.

These are thoughts that must have struck many of us in some form or the other. George Bernard Shaw's following famous quote, "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it" probably applies to every other form of identity where supremacism manifests.