Narrow ideas about nationalism betray our selective amnesia

JNU Students March For JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar’s Release

An interesting story that is running parallel in the media at this time could be our first opportunity to re-check. It is the sudden increase in the non-performing assets (NPAs) of our nationalised (and also some private) banks. The Supreme Court has called it a “big fraud”. So, the jury is out. But there should be little doubt in anybody’s mind that NPAs are certainly not genuine business failures or surrenders of our big industrial houses. If our industrial houses have indeed defrauded the country of over two lakh crore, then should the “nationalists” not be up in arms against them too? Why doesn’t their blood boil so much due to this criminal draining of our “national” resources as it does when a motley crowd of impressionable youths raise anti-India slogans? One can go lengths explaining how the economic plundering of the nation is a much serious and dangerous act than raising anti-India slogans but would the hot-headed be ready to spare a thought?

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That’s for the ordinary street nationalists. How about those in power at the Centre? They are the torch-bearers of the RSS that swears by Sanskriti (culture) day in and day out. Could they please explain to the common masses of this country how and why nearly half the NPAs have got written off after they came to power? And some of the top defaulters in the list have always been seen as being very close to them. The current dispensation at the Centre miserably failed to bring the black money they had promised to fetch back from banks abroad, but now they have a chance to redeem the failed promise by recovering the amount from these big industrial houses. Have we heard anything on this from our nationalists in and out of the government? Running the risk of being branded as Naxal sympathiser, can one say our so-called nationalists at the Centre are actually “agents of capitalist forces that suck the blood of the poor to get richer?” Would they accept if the Naxals and their sympathisers or any ordinary Left-leaning individuals dub them as anti-nationals for not proceeding against big industrial houses that fund them as well as their ideological masters? Perhaps not since loot of public money leading to impoverishment of the masses and widening of disparity hasn’t still dawned upon us as a threat greater than the small group sloganeering against the country at places like JNU.

JNU Row: What Delhi Police’s Failure To Ensure Order At The Patiala House Court Tells Us

It would also be pertinent to transgress into another area of our national consciousness to be able to let saner counsels prevail over it. It pertains to the changing contexts of our lives as part of the fast-globalising world where nations are finding their economic interests irreversibly intertwined. That’s why we have crores of Indians settling abroad to participate in the economic activity of nations other than their own. And this they are not intentionally doing to help those nations’ economies or for being able to contribute to India’s Gangajali. It’s pure careering or quest for better life. The nationalist may or, rather, should find it deeply offensive to their sense of nationalism that these young brainy Indians feel life is better outside India. But they would dare not since a vast number of them belong to their own breed and even attend shakhas abroad and even perform rituals like Satyanarayan Puja. As long as they do that, India’s nationalism is in safe hands.

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We also need to look at how those Western political systems have evolved to accept people of foreign origin not only as their political representatives and ministers but also as prime ministerial and presidential candidates. Some of them have actually risen to those positions too.Would our current sense of nationalism allow us to be that broad-minded to accept someone like Sonia Gandhi as our PM ever?

And never mind if those Indians support Indian sporting teams clashing with the teams of the countries of their residence, permanent or on contract, in the sporting encounters there. Because that’s nationalism, not sedition for those countries where they reside, isn’t it?

Lastly, hail to those, who use choicest of abuses, including those invoking “anti-nationals’ mothers’ sexual abuse to denounce them, orally or on social media, to preserve the dignity of “Mother India”. So much for their culture and nationalism. So, just wear your nationalism on your sleeves, so that you may hide it suitably when you roll it up to take on the “anti-nationals.”