A sacred nation state is the last thing our founding fathers like Nehru or Ambedkar wanted India to become.

When they wrote about the scientific temper enshrined in the constitution, they wanted this nation to be a dynamic, evolving, inclusive, debating nation full of energetic young men and women who would use logic to look at the world and defy all dogmas to come together and create a new nation.

India isn’t sacred. She was cut apart multiple times for political reasons. Some Indians look at Pakistan as an enemy state , but I can’t. They were called Indians before 15th August 1947 and fought hand in hand with our ancestors in securing freedom for this great nation.

Many Pak rulers (remember that Pakistan haven’t had a lot of democratic governments like us) have led offensives to my motherland to which we have promptly retaliated. The common feeling of an ordinary Pakistani wouldn’t favour war - much like the common interest of an ordinary Indian citizen.

If you look at history, Indians didn’t really bother about the boundaries. When buddhist monk Hyecho returned to Korea after traversing the entire subcontinent, he was asked how he felt about the five parts of India. India was treated as ‘the India’ indeed for a long time by the rest of the world.

Ancient documents suggest that the subcontinent have a collective identity and a shared cultural past despite its diversity in varied fields like language to religion and from food to deities.

I want ask if these pseudo nationals have ever bothered about what made us stick together despite the differences? What made the people persecuted all over eurasia to migrate and live peacefully in India? What about the Muslims and Parsis who migrated to India?

Now I see people talking about minority appeasement. I would like to know their consciousness rotating around this perceived appeasement feel about the transgenders getting worshipped in some parts of India for centuries while they were persecuted and hunted down all across the world?

The ‘Kama Sutra’ mentions them as ‘Tritiya Prakriti’ and acknowledges their libido. We have had years of caste based oppression and a society dominated by archaic rituals like ‘Sati’, but still we sticked with our culture of not getting offended by someone else’s priorities.

And guess who brought intolerance to this soil? The ones who went about persecuting our men based on our skin colour? The ones who tried to eradicate transgenders from our soil? The ones who forced the white man’s burden right into our throats? I am sure I don’t have to name them here.

The Indians who can’t tolerate the idea of inclusiveness and term it as ‘appeasement’ are the ones who doesn’t really digest the cultural values of the subcontinent and I have to say that they are in better agreement with the colonial masters than our shared past.

I can’t resist to state here that it’s extremely shameful for them to evoke their version of our very own celebrated heritage to boost their parochial vision about the world.

India is my nation - I love it. It isn’t sacred. It is beautiful. I don’t need anyone’s certificate for my love towards my nation. I look at it with critical eyes. I make comments. I act on things I could. I live in the hope that someone else will act based on my comments. I subscribe to my own version of critical nationalism where I look at the state as a machinery of human endeavour to come together and achieve excellence.

And I am not influenced by geographic borders when I form my opinion about an human being. If he is nice to me, I will be nice to him. In that I take a cue from our first prime minister - Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru call himself an anti-nationalist (fickle minds please don’t read it as anti-national) as mentioned in his own writings. He viewed the world as one large joint family and viewed nation states as inevitable divisions. It’s that grand vision which made him a venerated world leader. It may help reading his contributions to the non-alignment movement. How the world lend their ears to his enlightened words.

Oh!, how much I want to write about the several logical flaws of the ceremonial right across the world that invariably converges into a ‘rightwing-capitalist-arguing for meritocracy-jingoist-flourishing in hatred’ nexus. Look at the right from Israel or Italy or the Nazi Germany or Australia or France - you will invariably see this common pattern. More about it later!

The Orwell’s ‘two minute hate’ will soon take a place in India’s political discourse if things are let loose in this direction.

May entropy save the nation! Jai Hind!