The Concepts of Fatherland and Motherland: History and Politics
The Shared Origins of Humanity: A Scientific Perspective on *Homo sapiens*
The Story of Migration: The Human Journey from Africa to the World
The Case of Assam: The Historical Settlement of Diverse Communities
Regional Identity and the Question of Migrant Labour
The Employment Crisis and the Reality of Internal Migration
Identity Politics and the Threat of Polarisation
The Constitution, Democracy, and the Challenge of Pluralism
Human history reveals that people across the entire world belong to a single species: *Homo sapiens*. In this article, Dr Suresh Khairnar critically examines the concept of the "Fatherland-Motherland," the history of migration, and its utilisation in contemporary politics.
What are Fatherland and Motherland?
Greetings friends, I was inspired to write this article because our Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, during his visit to Israel on February 26th, repeated a racial phrase written in Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s book 'Hindutva' in response to the honour bestowed upon him. For the last hundred years, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been spreading misinformation regarding this theory. Since Narendra Modi was an RSS pracharak for the better part of his life, he repeated the same in Israel, a nation that is trying to settle after being a victim of Hitler’s theory of racial superiority. However, following that same theory, they are now torturing and wiping out the Arab people of Palestine. Have the Jews learned nothing from the experiment of fascism a hundred years ago? And our Prime Minister calls himself a ‘Vishwaguru’ (World Teacher). Yet, Benjamin Netanyahu is committing such atrocities against the people of Gaza that the International Criminal Court has declared him a war criminal. Meanwhile, the heads of the nations of Lord Buddha, Mahavira, and Mahatma Gandhi have gone there and repeated the talk of Motherland-Fatherland. This is why I felt inspired to write this piece.
When we hear the migratory Cuckoo bird’s calls every spring, or when Salmon and Hilsa (Ilish) fish migrate from the sea to freshwater once a year, we Homo sapiens forget that there is no other migratory creature on Earth more significant than us. People of all colours—white, black, yellow—and various facial features living in any part of the world today are all members of the same family.
In the language of anthropology, we are called Homo sapiens. Initially, humans thought of themselves as orphans, but in reality, we are current members of the species known as the tailless apes or Great Apes. These currently include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzee is one of our closest family members. Approximately six million years ago, a female great ape had two daughters; the descendants of one became chimpanzees, while the other became our grandmother, named Lucy. Her remains were found a hundred thousand years ago in the African country of Kenya. This means all people in the world belong to the same lineage of our great-great-grandmother and have spread across the globe like migrant labourers from Kenya. Due to the climate and diet of different regions, differences appeared in our body colour, size, and features. Otherwise, according to the facts revealed after DNA testing, everyone living across the world today is a Homo sapiens. According to the research of the scholar Vishnu Prasad Rabha of Assam, the people called the first 'Columbuses' of Assam are the tribals of the Karbi caste. Before them, people of the Khasi caste settled, and even before them, people came from the hills of Southeast Asia, Kampuchea, and Laos, known as Mon-Khmer. Similarly, people of the Mising lineage settled in Assam via Arunachal.
The Bodo people, who are discussed the most today, also settled in Assam from Tibet via Nepal, Bhutan, and North Bengal. The most influential were the Ahoms in the 13th-15th centuries, who ruled this region for six hundred years; they came from Mongolia at the end of the 12th century due to their martial skills and ruled for nearly six hundred years.
Apart from this, a large number of people from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and neighbouring Bengal have settled in a region as exceptionally rich in natural resources as Assam to earn their livelihood. For example, regarding work related to tea gardens alone, in Assam's population of thirty million, the total number of people from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh is more than ten million.
In the 1980s, a student organisation in Assam called AASU started a movement against people other than the original inhabitants settling in Assam. Because of Assam's dense forests, centuries-old tea plantation farming, plywood factories processing wood, and later the discovery of natural oil leading to the mining of oil and other minerals, labourers were brought from states outside Assam for hundreds of years. Consequently, at least more than half of Assam's population became non-Assamese.
Due to the resulting feeling of insecurity among the original inhabitants, the Assam Students' Union (AASU) became the most influential youth organisation in 1980. It even held sway over Guwahati University. In the eighties, we visited Assam for the first time, specifically to see and understand the movement launched by AASU, staying in the hostel of Guwahati University with the protesters to talk to all kinds of students.
In a conversation with a senior Assamese professor, he said, "We Assamese people are very leisure-loving. All types of hard labour are done by non-Assamese people. The day they all leave, we will go hungry."
Betel nut is produced in large quantities in the state of Assam, but the betel nut traders are mostly Marwari people. Similarly, the owners of the tea gardens that enhance the natural beauty of Assam over lakhs of hectares are also mostly from the Marwari community. Hardly any of them live in Assam; most live in Kolkata. That is why the office of the Tea Board is also in Kolkata. The same is the case with the plywood industry; most of its owners are Marwaris. In all these industries, the labour class is also mostly from outside Assam. Since Bengal is a neighbouring state of Assam, the number of Bengali people in the field of education is high. From lawyers, doctors, professors, and teachers to clerks and officers in various government departments, Bengalis are more numerous. For this reason, the Assamese language is being written in the Bengali script, and Bengali words are being used extensively in the Assamese language.
After India's independence, regional sentiments began to surge in many provinces. After the division of the Madras province, Andhra Pradesh was created. Similarly, because Marathi identity took the form of a movement in the sixties, the three states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka were formed. Later came Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. At the beginning of the 21st century, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand were created, and from the division of Assam, states like Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, and Arunachal were formed.
Since independence, nearly double the number of states have been created in our country. However, discontent continues in all regions of India regarding unemployment, poverty, and linguistic and cultural identity. Currently, the problem in Manipur between the Kuki tribals and Meitei non-tribals is becoming more and more violent day by day. So far, more than three thousand people have died.
The problem of migrant labourers was exposed to the whole world during the COVID-19 period. The government is deliberately trying to hide the figures, but according to other sources, this figure is at least around one hundred million. Despite 79 years of independence, because every state is unable to provide sufficient employment to its people, people are forced to go thousands of kilometres away from their birthplace—from Bihar to Kerala, from Bengal to Maharashtra and southern provinces. Similarly, people from southern provinces are forced to move from one place to another for their livelihood.
The RSS and its political unit, the BJP, are taking advantage of this situation. Instead of addressing the real questions of providing employment and rights over resources, they are baking their political bread by entangling people in the unscientific mess of Motherland and Fatherland under the guise of caste and religion. But they cannot travel much further with this.
Just as Trump in America started an anti-immigrant and tariff war immediately after returning to power, but as soon as China, Mexico, and Canada threatened retaliatory action, Trump had to take a U-turn just today. And now, the Supreme Court of America has declared it illegal.
In the nineties, it was America and the Western countries that started globalisation with the slogan that the whole world is one. Moving away from that and talking only about "America First," the decisions to withdraw from the World Health Organisation, the UNO, and several international institutions are likely to be suicidal for America itself.
Therefore, using only the unscientific rhetoric of Fatherland-Motherland to incite people, hiding political failures, and practising the politics of polarisation is wrong in every way. This is what BJP leaders, the Prime Minister, and Chief Ministers are doing at present. This is against our Constitution, and through such discussions, they are posing a threat to the unity and integrity of the country.
Dr Suresh Khairnar,
March 13, 2026, Nagpur.
