Do you buy only Indian products, avoid FB and Twitter, dictate terms of patriotism and forbid freethought? No? You are an anti-national!
BJP activists in Patna protest against Arvind Kejriwal and Om Puri over their recent remarks on the surgical strikes. Pic/PTI
What does it mean to be a patriotic Indian? This is an important question a lot of us need to answer because a large number of people have begun answering it on our behalf over the past couple of years. Earlier, they used to voice their opinions in private because a majority in this country would find their regressive statements laughable, but a surge in jingoism on the backs of paid social media campaigns have emboldened them to come out and question the rest of us.
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Stand up for the anthem, they say. Because not standing up is disrespectful to Indian soldiers at the border. Cover your legs, they add, because only people from the West walk around in shorts. Show us how Indian you are — only buy products made in India, they insist, putting up these updates on foreign-made platforms like Facebook and Twitter with the help of smartphones made in China and America. Their leaders exhort us to do the same, tweeting while on ‘study tours’ abroad.
Take pride in your country, they tell us — the same people who do their best to destroy our streets, poison our lakes and uproot our trees the minute they need to score political points during a festival. Take pride in your country, they tell us from America, the nationalists who mortgage their homes and land in exchange for green cards. Embrace your history, they say, putting up tiny Indian flags on manicured lawns in the suburbs of New Jersey.
Support your soldiers if you are a true nationalist, they scream at us, the people who didn’t say a word when told about the coffin scam of 1999, involving caskets reportedly purchased at 13 times the original amount, when there were irregularities in the purchase of frozen meat for troops in 2007, or when bribes were allegedly offered to clear the purchase of sub-standard Tatra trucks for our armed forces.
Murder our enemies, they say, and cheer when these murders happen in order to prove you truly are Indian. Congratulate the assassination of Pakistani soldiers the minute your government announces ‘surgical strikes’ without trying to understand what ‘surgical strikes’ mean, without verifying the reports, without asking for proof, without stopping to think about what these strikes mean for people living along the border, who are also supposedly Indians like us and must risk being killed in the cross-fire so some of us can ‘like’ these news reports on Facebook.
Attack other Indians who are not nationalists like the rest of us, they say. Don’t allow them the luxury of an opinion, even if the Constitution we all claim to respect guarantees them that right to voice their opinions. What does the Constitution know anyway? Forbid them from speaking. Label them terrorist-sympathisers, Maoists or, heck, go ahead and call them ‘pseudo-secular liberals’ because our semi-literate leaders coined that term and have encouraged so many of us to use it.
Where do these nationalists go when their nationalist leaders are accused of looting the country, I wonder. Where do they go when others like them refuse to pay taxes? What about the Indians who admitted to black money deposits of over Rs 65,000 crore recently? If they were all nationalists, why didn’t they pay their taxes to help support the nation they claim to love? What about political parties who question our nationalism? Consider the fact that members of the parties that question our patriotism also belong to some of the most corrupt organisations in India. Consider the fact that the BMC, controlled by ‘nationalist’ parties like Shiv Sena and BJP, reportedly spent Rs 2,700 crore on preparing Bombay for the monsoons in 2015. Where did that money go? It couldn’t have been on our roads that look as if they were built for Rs 20. In 2014, the state’s Anti-Corruption Bureau’s records showed that inquiries against just three municipal corporation officials had unearthed illegitimate assets worth Rs 1.27 crore. Where was their nationalism at the time?
Political parties that shout from the rooftops about nationalism, patriotism and loving our country almost always harbour Indians with the most number of criminal cases registered against them. These are crimes against the country they supposedly love more than we do. This is probably why I don’t know what it means to be a patriotic Indian anymore. I used to think I was one. These days, however, it often seems as if some Indians are more Indian than other Indians.
When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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