Latest news with #YogendraYadav
The Wire
14 hours ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Nationalism Is a Dishonourable Social Construct
Two thought-provoking pieces by Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar made for a fascinating debate on the texture and trajectory of Indian nationalism. Yadav argues that the rich legacy of Indian nationalism from our freedom movement which was about 'belonging without othering' and unity sans uniformity, has been overwhelmed in the last decade by a Nazi version that upholds national interest over individual freedom and identifies the government with the nation. But he also blames the liberal, secular elite for the regression in the pristine nationalist spirit, charging them with a 'deracinated cosmopolitism' that ignored the cultural and spiritual undertone, because of which they lost touch with the common man. Palshikar is emphatic that nothing can mitigate the virtual dismantling of nationalism by the current regime through practice and ideology which, he believes, is not backsliding 'but a resolute replacement of Indian nationalism'. He contends that excoriating the secular-liberal elite as abettors for the crisis in Indian nationalism, as Yadav has done, is to attach significance to a marginal force. Of much greater import were the deep fissures that were evolving in the late 19th and early 20th century between an inclusive Indian nationalism and its phoney alternative that was 'rooted in othering and instrumental unity without genuine belonging.' To add my twopenny bit, notwithstanding the toxic faith-based majoritarian nationalism germinating on the side, our nationalism was not in a bad place until the 1980s. Yogendra Yadav may turn up his nose at my lived experience of an that was pluralistic, inclusive and grounded in democratic values where we didn't need to prove our Indianness or be judged by the clothes we wore or the size of our eyes; nor did we feel the need to tamper with historical facts or denigrate our freedom fighters in order to craft an alternative Hindutva nationalist vision. I remember an unselfconscious nationalism, respectful of religion but not obsessed with it, a milieu where our patriotic instincts were fired up by the histrionics of 'Mr Bharat' Manoj Kumar and the dulcet tones of Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar. There was no deliberate fostering of deep cultural and spiritual traditions but that 'shallow modernity and deracinated cosmopolitanism' worked very well for us. If only we could get back that nationalist spirit. In debating Indian nationalism – good and bad – these two public intellectuals have broached a subject of the greatest significance. It has turned the world upside-down, particularly in the last decade. The nationalism that we witness today is the depraved patriotism of the mob. In truth, nationalism has been commandeered to legitimise all forms of bigotry. In the crazy world that we live in, the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, are released and hailed as nationalists whereas the protestors in Los Angeles fighting for justice against the authoritarian Trump regime are hounded as anti-nationals. It is necessary to draw a distinction between nationalism and patriotism in terms of the emotive quality of loyalty to the nation. Nationalism invokes blind support for everything the country does –a syndrome that incites aggressive assertion and a lust for power, whereas patriotism is tolerant, humane and critical of actions that are destructive of the values that the country cherishes. Is it any wonder then that the world's great minds were not enamoured of nationalism? H.G. Wells condemned nationalism as 'a monstrous can't that has darkened all human affairs.' He believed that our true nationality was mankind. Rabindranath Tagore was no devotee of the constrictive tendencies associated with attachment to the nation which he viewed as 'holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion.' Dr B.R. Ambedkar was wary of a nationalism 'that is at once a feeling of fellowship for one's own kith and kin and an anti-fellowship feeling for those who are not one's own kith and kin.' He warned that loyalty to the nation was endangered by competitive loyalty to religion, to culture and to language. The iconic revolutionary Bhagat Singh represented a nationalism that was the very antithesis of what's being practised today. His nationalism was anchored in his atheism and signified much more than driving out the British. It meant ridding our society of the evils of casteism, untouchability and communalism. Sadly, today he is glorified but his revolutionary nationalism that was centred on the oppressed and the poor has been overwhelmed by one that is cruelly majoritarian and focussed entirely on the needs of the privileged. 'Where guns boom' Today's nationalism bears an eerie correspondence with the German experiment of the 1930s that played on the fears and prejudice of the majority. The most obvious similarity is between the Nazi doctrine of nationhood based on an exclusive ethnic German-Aryan homogeneity and rabid antisemitism vis-a-vis our indigenous fascist mobilisation constructed on a deviant interpretation of religion and morbid hatred of the Muslim. And just as Hitler expanded his enemy list of Jews to include communists, Catholics and liberals, the current regime has gone way beyond targeting Muslims and Christians as the archetypal 'Other', to branding all dissenters as the 'ant-national, tukde - tukde gang'. Prime minister Narendra Modi has been given the credit for bestowing the name 'Operation Sindoor' to the military operation post Pahalgam, so clearly his camp followers think it's a great appellation. But how blasphemous to bestow an offensive military campaign with the moniker of 'sindoor' which is so sacred to the institution of the Hindu marriage, especially for the woman. It is as inappropriate a name as the one given by the USA to its largest non-nuclear explosive weighing 9,800 kgs, labelled 'the mother of all bombs'. That great humanist, the late Pope Francis was outraged: 'A mother gives life and this one gives death…What's going on?' The fig leaf of national interest and security have been used by this Government as a pretext for the furtive secrecy surrounding the Pahalgam horror and the aftermath. The nation is still in the dark about the murderers, the intelligence failure, the number of our planes shot down and fate of the pilots, Jaishankar's self-defeating forewarning to Pakistan, Trump's alleged intervention, our suicidal foreign policy that has all our neighbours gunning for us and a lot more. The bizarre decision to keep Operation Sindoor alive is clearly intended to avoid owning up to failure on multiple fronts. Arthur Miller had observed that 'when the guns boom, the arts die', but with Operation Sindoor it is not the arts but truth that has got buried. The nationalist fervour gripping the country has confused and equated loyalty to the nation with fealty to the government, though crafty ones like Shashi Tharoor have used it for their own self-serving purposes. Nationalism is the subterfuge for officially sponsored propaganda, downright falsehoods, jingoism, moral grandstanding and for treating dissent as anti-national. Modi's flurry of ' goli khaao' speeches following the ceasefire, are testimony to this ugly manipulation of nationalism. Look at what nationalism has spawned across the world. The likes of Zionist nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu and MAGA white racist Donald Trump – post-modern versions of the Fuhrer and Duce – flaunt the badge of nationalism to wreak death and suffering. Let's all agree that Howard Zinn was spot on when he observed: 'Nationalism – that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – is one of the great evils of our time along with racism and religious hatred.' Mathew John is a former civil servant. Views are personal. This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
The nation, the state and the other: Hindutva's imprint on nationalism in India
Yogendra Yadav ('The nationalism we forgot', IE, May 27) stresses a familiar distinction between two nationalisms, one that emerged in the crucible of the Indian freedom struggle and another that he repeatedly calls 'European nationalism', specifically citing only Germany (presumably of the 1930s and '40s). He invokes a vivid label — 'belonging without othering' — to characterise the distinction. The nationalism pursued in the freedom struggle exemplified this label. The nationalism in Europe precisely did not, neither does the nationalism in currency in India today. Much of the essay elaborates how this current form of nationalism in India has resulted in undermining the rights of citizens to speak critically of the government. Being a nationalism defined by hostility towards the other — both outside our borders as well as inside — it extends this hostility to its internal critics as well, viewing all criticism as treasonously aligning itself with the outsider. By contrast, a nationalism that refuses 'othering' in its understanding of belonging views its internal critics as enriching the plurality that such a refusal permits (in contrast to the 'uniformity' demanded by the very act of 'othering'). This latter pluralist nationalism was the worthy legacy of the freedom movement and Yadav concludes his essay by laying the fault for the rise of the offending nationalism in India today at the doorstep of what he thinks of as a secularised, internationalist, modernist ethos that was cultivated in post-Independence India, which eschewed all nationalism, thereby creating a 'nationalism' vacuum that is now filled by the Hindutva conception of the nation. It would seem, then, that for Yadav, the betrayal of the legacy of the freedom movement began with the secularised modernity adopted after Independence and that betrayal gave rise to its opposite, the religious majoritarian Hindutva nationalism of our present time. Suhas Palshikar ('Who stole my nationalism?', IE, May 31) is right to accept the distinction between these two nationalisms and sensible too in expressing some scepticism about Yadav's diagnosis of its fault line. He holds more squarely responsible the contemporary perpetrators of Hindutva, but closes by tracing their nationalism to elements within the national movement more than a century earlier. I'd like to briefly give the related genealogies of these two nationalisms because that will bring out why it is not enough to see the 'nation' as their main topic. The topic is equally — and inseparably — the 'state'. Sometime in the mid-17th century in Europe, as a result of the rise of modern science, traditional justification of state power, as residing in the divine right of the monarch who personified the state, had lost its appeal. So, a new justification was sought, no longer in theology but in political psychology. At the same time, two developments occurred that shaped this revised justification. Since the Westphalian peace, a new entity had emerged (the nation) and power, whose locations had hitherto been relatively scattered, became increasingly centralised. In the centuries that followed, these twin developments conjoined and culminated in the fusion of the nation and the state, a fusion expressed by a hyphen: The nation-state. So, the political psychology that provided the new justification of state power took the form of generating a feeling for what was named by the left-hand side of the hyphenated conjunction (nation) and — because it was fused with what was named by the right-hand side of the hyphen — that feeling would legitimise the state. Much later this came to be called 'nationalism'. And the question was: How was this feeling to be generated? Everywhere in Europe it was generated by a standard ploy: Find an external enemy within the nation (the Jews, the Irish, the Protestants in Catholic countries, the Catholics in Protestant countries…), despise it and subjugate it, and declare the nation to be 'ours', not 'theirs'. When numerical and statistical methods came to be applied to the study of society, notions of majority and minority emerged and the ploy came to be called 'majoritarianism' — and since these categories were often defined by religion, it was, in those cases, called 'religious majoritarianism'. It is worth remarking that in tandem with this genealogy in Europe of one of these nationalisms is the genealogy of the doctrine of secularism. Nation-building exercises on the basis of such religious majoritarianism inevitably led to religious minoritarian backlash, and it was the civil strife created by this that gave rise to the doctrine of secularism, which blamed the influence of religion on the polity for such strife, and sought to repair the damage by articulating an outlook in which all religion (whether of the majority or the minorities) was ushered out from having any direct influence in the polity and the institutions of state. I mention this point about secularism because the genealogy of the other nationalism can be presented by explaining why Gandhi showed no interest in secularist doctrine. His argument was quite straightforward. The doctrine is there to prevent a certain damage created by European nationalism and since that damage had not occurred in India, it would be slavish mimicry to adopt it. Indian society has, for centuries, been characterised by an unselfconscious pluralism of religions and cultures living side-by-side and so Indian nationalism will re-play this pluralism in inclusive mass mobilisations against imperialism — and both he and Nehru conspicuously sought to do so, especially with Muslims, both in the Khilafat period and later with the Muslim Mass Contact campaign. Secularism is only relevant when this unselfconscious pluralism has been undermined and replaced by the civil strife that warranted it in Europe. Moreover, since the strife came via a nationalism that was at the heart of a legitimation of a certain form of centralised state power, that very idea of a state should be shunned in India — Gandhi's innovations in thinking of governance in highly decentralised terms were as much part of his alternative nationalism as its pluralism that Yadav asks us to cherish. It was those ideas of governance more than the pluralism that were dismissively repudiated by his own party in the years immediately after independence. A word, in conclusion, about Palshikar's tracing of Hindutva nationalism to much earlier elements in Indian nationalism. We need in these matters a distinction between the notion of 'roots' and 'antecedents'. There were indeed antecedents to contemporary Indian nationalism in Mahasabhite (and Savarkarite) ideas of an earlier time, but to call them the roots of the present would require tracing an organic causal path that connects the two. No one has done that. The roots of contemporary Hindutva nationalism lie no further back than a few decades, starting with the respectability that the Hindu right gained in opposing the Emergency (which the centre-left abjectly failed to do), and also in the ferociously concerted and highly effective effort that it then made to combat the effects of Mandal in exposing how divided Hinduism was by caste. Finding an external enemy (the Muslim) within the nation that all Hindus must oppose was that unifying move. No doubt there were antecedents to such attitudes during the freedom struggle but they were marginalised by the dominance of Gandhi and Nehru and though this certainly left unresolved questions, these do not amount to the roots of current Hindutva nationalism. The writer is Sidney Morgenbesser professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Hindustan Times
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Census that has to be more than just a head count
The Union government announced this week that the long-delayed census will be carried out in two phases with the reference date of March 1, 2027. For the Union Territory of Ladakh and the snow-bound areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the reference date will be October 1, 2026. Late April, the Centre announced that caste enumeration will be a part of the next decennial census. This is a significant shift. I have previously argued in these pages that a carefully conducted caste census offers more positives than negatives, but two considerations must be taken seriously. First, the data must be collected with care. Second, the data must be made accessible — not just to policymakers and researchers, but to the people themselves. India's three most urgent structural challenges over the next two decades are clear – job creation, rising centralisation, and the growing social and economic marginalisation of Muslims. A well-designed caste census can speak to all three. This is not to suggest that such a census will resolve these challenges outright, but it can meaningfully illuminate specific aspects of each. The first challenge concerns employment — or rather, the lack of meaningful, secure work for large segments of India's population. Caste in India has long been closely tied to occupational hierarchies. We need a clearer map of who is doing what work today, which jatis dominate the public sector, which remain concentrated in casual labour, who has exited traditional caste-based occupations, and who remains locked into them. Without this information, it is difficult to design effective affirmative action policies, employment guarantees, skilling programmes, or education pipelines. For instance, using data from its caste census, the Telangana government has created a sub-quota for particularly marginalised Scheduled Caste (SC) jatis within the broader SC reservation quota. This does not increase the overall SC share in public jobs, but ensures that historically left-behind Scheduled Caste (SC) jatis have a fairer chance. If the national caste census includes occupation data by jati, it can illuminate why some communities remain trapped in insecure, informal work while others diversify. Unless we make caste visible in our understanding of labour markets, we cannot address the structural roots of inequality in employment outcomes. The second is centralisation. India is among the most centralised countries in the world: only 3% of all public expenditure is made by local governments, compared to 51% in China. Key governance decisions are made in Delhi and there is simply not enough wiggle-room for federal and local governments. Yogendra Yadav has previously argued that a caste census is a diagnostic tool — the X-ray before the prescription. But a well-executed caste census can be more than an X-ray of a broken limb. It is a high-resolution, full-body scan. It offers a hyperlocal picture of Indian society — who lives where, who owns what, who does what — allowing for policies that respond to the specificities of place. Over time, the objective should be to invert the current governance model — one in which Union and state governments play a supporting role while village and municipal governments chart their own development paths. A caste census can help accelerate this transition. One long-standing concern with decentralisation, articulated most forcefully by BR Ambedkar when he described villages as 'dens of ignorance', is the risk of elite capture: The possibility that decentralised governance will merely consolidate the power of dominant castes. India — and its villages and towns — has changed considerably since Ambedkar made that assessment, but the problem of elite capture exists to varying degrees. A caste census can offer a granular view of where power is concentrated and where it is more diffuse. It can help identify which local governments are dominated by a single elite group and which display broader representation. This allows policymakers to tailor the pace and sequencing of decentralisation — perhaps beginning where elite capture is lower, building capacity and trust, and expanding from there. A caste census, therefore, enables us to approach decentralisation more intelligently. The third challenge is the growing marginalisation of Indian Muslims. A 2024 study by Asher, Novosad, and Rafkin shows that Muslims are now the least upwardly mobile group in India — faring worse than even Dalits and Adivasis when it comes to educational progress over generations. Another recent analysis by Himanshu and Guilmoto (2024) using data from Bihar's caste census finds that Muslims, as a group, are located near the bottom of the state's economic distribution — in some cases, below Mahadalit groups. What's more, the study finds that this deprivation is strikingly uniform: Across jatis like Pathans, Sheikhs, and Ansaris, economic indicators remain consistently poor. This makes a strong case for targeted policy action. But politics at the national level may not allow for it. States, however, can. A caste census gives state governments the tools to recognise and respond to intra-Muslim variation and provide tailored support — in housing, education, political representation — to those who need it most. Crucially, none of this is possible unless the data reaches the people. In India, data flows from citizen to State — but rarely the other way around. This must change. Marginalised groups should be able to view their own position relative to others — both within their localities and across districts. Platforms such gram sabhas can be used to disseminate findings, supported by civil society and domain experts. When citizens see that their mohallas and communities have done worse than others, they are more likely to mobilise and demand change. Equally, elected representatives — from ward members to MLAs — should receive localised reports that compare their jurisdictions with others. This is how data becomes a tool for accountability — not just for the state to monitor citizens, but for citizens to challenge the state. India's caste census, then, must do more than count heads. It can be both a mirror that reflects the structure of society and a lever for meaningful, democratic change. MR Sharan teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Last Among Equals: Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages. The views expressed are personal
Indian Express
31-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Suhas Palshikar writes: Who stole my nationalism?
This is in response to Yogendra Yadav's spirited exposition of 'Indian' nationalism ('The nationalism we forgot, IE, May 27). India's imagination and practice of nationalism from the early 20th century was an audacious intellectual and political project by any standard. Its elaboration and defence in the piece by Yadav is a valuable reminder of what could have been. While agreeing with his description of Indian nationalism, it is necessary to also register a small but critical disagreement with his argument. As Yogendra bhai puts it, Indian nationalism is under assault today; it is being replaced by a 'phoney nationalism'. And yet, he chides us that locating the problem only in the current moment would be wrong and lazy. That is where my disagreement may be located. Let me mention two disagreements. Following from them, there is a third disagreement about the trajectory of the challenge to Indian nationalism, coupled with a question on the semantics of 'forgetting', in the hope that this will broaden the scope of the debate. One disagreement, which may seem like a quibble but is crucial to understanding the death of Indian nationalism, is the point about not locating the backsliding in what the current regime has done. Indeed, any major socio-political tendency has a deeper lineage than the present. In that sense, let us agree that merely blaming the currently fashionable idea of phoney nationalism is not an adequate analytical response to what has happened to the idea of Indian nationalism that promised 'belonging without othering'. Nevertheless, it is not possible to ignore the present moment, which has formally and frontally disbanded Indian nationalism not merely through the subterfuge of practice but through the assault of ideology. Today, 'belonging' is replaced by a conditionality: One doesn't belong, someone else decides who belongs, and who must belong, to the nation on the basis of one trait or the other. Is it not commonplace today to decide who is a Pakistani by identifying the person's religion, irrespective of whether that person is a colonel or a district magistrate? Don't we witness the othering of communities not just on the basis of religion, but also on the basis of the size of their eyes? So, one 'belongs' only on the sufferance of those who claim to own this nation. Thus, the pseudo-nationalism of today doesn't allow citizens to belong without preconditions and without tests of patriotism. A politics that mixes — via vigilante violence and state patronage — forced attachment and an ideology of othering has become the lingua franca of the phoney nationalism of today. Against this backdrop, the 'backsliding' — or, in fact, disbandment and delegitimisation — of Indian nationalism must be located in the contemporary moment notwithstanding the failures to consolidate it in the past. As a matter of fact, it is not backsliding but a resolute replacement of Indian nationalism. But of course, I would agree with Yadav that this process did not start in 2014 — or with Narendra Modi. December 1992 marked a major departure from the imagination of inclusion and accommodation. And as we know, December 1992 itself was a culmination of a long history of imagining the nation only through othering. This process formally took an organisational shape exactly a century ago. However, we still cannot ignore the significance and force that the decade since 2014 has brought to bear on the dramatic demise of Indian nationalism. This long history of the gradual challenge thrown at Indian nationalism forces me to disagree with Yogendra bhai on a second point. He finds the post-Independence elite and the ruling ideology responsible for the disconnect between citizens and Indian nationalism. Again, let me begin with agreement. A section of 'secular-liberal' elites did ignore the cultural dimension; it even overlooked the potential of traditions emanating from religion. But it is an exaggeration to blame this section for the crisis faced by Indian nationalism. This section was far too tiny to have any influence; worse, it was mostly English-speaking and lacked any real connection with the masses. On the other hand, not just the political class but a strong element among Indian language-speaking intellectuals were not averse to searching for sources of belonging from within Indian traditions and linguistic resources. They kept on struggling on the dual fronts of the meanings of traditions on the one hand, and the meaning of 'Indian' on the other. It wasn't just Gandhians and Lohiaites; even among communists, there was a recognition of the fact that traditions presented both things — elements of modernity and traditionalism, inclusive ideas as well as elements of exclusion. Moreover, while we need not hesitate to admit the many failings of the elite and the political leadership of the post-Independence era, in holding them responsible for the current crisis of Indian nationalism, we may be making the mistake of ignoring the deep rivalry between Indian nationalism and its phoney alternative. Throughout the 19th century, a sense of identity rooted in othering and instrumental unity without genuine belonging began to emerge as the language of collective action — particularly among the upper castes. Religion was imagined devoid of religiosity, God was imagined without devotion, communities were imagined without empathy. These tendencies were alive and posed a challenge to Indian nationalism when it was nascent. While the nationalist movement succeeded in bringing an inclusive Indian nationalism to the centre stage, the alternative, too, was shaping up all through the late 19th and early 20th century. India's elites — political, cultural and economic — were often torn between these two intellectual forces. While Mahatma Gandhi (and Jawaharlal Nehru) undoubtedly attracted many individuals from the upper castes, these same social sections were more favourably inclined to the narrow, vicious, macho and exclusionary European duplication of nationalism. Freedom in 1947 did not settle the deeper foundational dispute — it only postponed it. With occasional glimpses of superficial debates around Hindi and gau raksha in the 1960s, the simmering debate remained alive. For a variety of reasons of social turmoil and political deviations, the foundational dispute over the meaning of nationalism entered a critical phase around the 1980s. The larger point, therefore, is this: The audacity of the project of Indian nationalism itself signified that it would have strong challenges and many inner hiccups. A fuller history of its rise and fall may include the failings of its supporters and the inaction of its well-wishers but the limitations of the nationalist project lay in its very audacity. Because it was ambitious, it was difficult to realise and more difficult to sustain but easy to malign. Its fall cannot be explained without realising that its ideological rival always existed. What has happened in the past three to four decades is that Indian nationalism has been effectively replaced by the phoney. It's not that I/we forgot Indian nationalism, it was stolen. The story of Indian nationalism should, therefore, not be a story of forgetting but the story of it being stolen. The writer, based in Pune, taught Political Science
Hindustan Times
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
How the Left and Congress misread Operation Sindoor
Not so long ago, Yogendra Yadav, otherwise a fierce critic of the Narendra Modi government, told me that among the things those opposing the BJP got wrong was how to respond on issues of national security. The three 'most precious resources we have for politics,' he said, '...we have gifted these away to BJP — nationalism, religion, including Hindu religion, and cultural heritage and tradition.' The responses to Operation Sindoor (and I don't mean Yogendra Yadav personally) from large swathes of the Left, liberal Left, progressives (call it what you will) show this basic lesson has still not been learnt. And worse, there is complete denialism about this deracination. If anything, there is a show of supercilious moral superiority to anyone who points this out. The Indian Left is, unfortunately, utterly out of touch with wider public sentiment. It remains squeamish about expressing unqualified appreciation for the armed forces. It is disparaging of war, even in times of war. And it is unable to understand the idea that the country is larger than the government. This remains a key reason that the right wing is able to make electoral mincemeat of them. Intellectualising what comes to most Indians intuitively, a simple emotional surge for flag, anthem and military, confines this section of the Left only to echo chambers. I was astonished to see the level of disconnect between those still trapped in textbook ideas and how most of the country thinks and feels. I experienced this first hand when author Salil Tripathi mocked me on X for evidently 'rolling my eyes' at the statements of former Pakistan Hina Rabbani Khar on a Piers Morgan show where I was her co-panelist. Yes, I probably did roll my eyes at one brief point when Khar obfuscated on how Osama Bin Laden was kept in hiding by the Pakistani deep state. But I also hammered home the protection and impunity offered to terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan by its army. Khar fled the show early, unable to answer anything directly. But Tripathi and his followers said I was guilty of 'temporary patriotic nonsense' and that I should be very embarrassed. Everything that plagues the extreme Left's commentary on Operation Sindoor was encapsulated in that every moment. Or take the semiotics debate around the name given to the military operation against Pakistan. Or the commentary on Aishwarya Rai sporting sindoor at her first appearance at Cannes. Mohammed Zubair, fact checker, thought there was a big conspiracy that I shared this image of Rai, editing it once to wonder whether her image was a reference to Op Sindoor or merely a sartorial statement. He took a screenshot of my post as if he had uncovered a scandal. Tomorrow, will the Left criticise Himanshi Narwal — whose image of sitting by the body of her husband, Lt Vinay Narwal, became the defining image of the Pahalgam terror attack — for wearing the traditional red bangles or chura that signified her days-old marriage? Whatever be one's personal gender politics, it is ludicrous to ignore the cultural zeitgeist or to literalise its underlying emotion when the context is so much larger. Of course, the Opposition can and must ask questions of the ruling government. There are legitimate concerns over where the terrorists of Pahalgam are, what lapses led to the terror attack, or why US President Donald Trump insists on claiming credit for a halt in hostilities that were unequivocally triggered by India's military victory. And, yes, there are legitimate concerns about India-Pakistan re-hyphenation in the West, thanks to Trump's bizarre rhetoric. But surely, any serious line of questioning cannot suggest that external affairs minister S Jaishankar gave away war plans to Pakistan? Anyone who understands military operations knows Jaishankar's statement was merely about India conveying a non-escalatory approach to Operation Sindoor. To distort that into a wild accusation of treason and then wonder aloud how many planes India has lost, is entirely uncalled for and takes away the legitimacy of any other good point you may want to make. Thankfully the Congress dropped this attack a couple of days after Rahul Gandhi led it. But political damage to itself had been done. Yes, as the main Opposition party, the Congress does not find itself in an easy position. It is damned if it does and invisible if it doesn't. The BJP will claim political points for Sindoor and the Congress wants to contest that. Fair enough. But it can't counter the BJP by disowning its most brilliant asset on the issue — Tharoor — and other colleagues such as Manish Tewari. And it can't counter that by using the talking points of the adversary on whether any fighter jet was shot down. Not when Air Marshal AK Bharti already answered that by saying, 'in a combat there will be losses but all our pilots are home'. Tharoor has shown that it is possible to forge a politics that is pluralistic and patriotic. Many Indians may lean centre-left on economics, many of us may identify as liberals on matters of inclusiveness and social equity, but on national security, most of us are centre-right. I know, I am. The Left — and the Congress — is unable to grasp that inconvenient, but obvious truth. Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal.
