We are little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great, something of that greatness falls upon us also.—Jawaharlal Nehru, 1946.
The resurgence of muscular Hindu ethnonationalism under Narendra Modi’s BJP government has led to a proliferation of social media users with Indian flags in their profile pictures and avatars of an angry Hanuman, Karan Acharya’s menacing image of the usually genial monkey god. Most of them sport the motto proud Indian in their bios.
There is no rational reason to be proud of something you did not choose—like an accident of birth—or of achievements in which you had no part, like those of your ancestors. Yet most of us find it comforting to conceive of ourselves as part of a tribe and—however illogically—we want to take credit for the successes of its members. Few of us are athletes, but many of us feel invested in the fate of our local or national football or cricket team. Few of us can be heroes, but we feel a swelling of pride when eminent people produce great works of literature, make scientific discoveries, act with statesmanlike dignity on the world stage, embody our heroes on the big screen. Our own lives can be pedestrian and petty, but we have vivid imaginations that must feed on the doings of more prominent people, huge ambitions that can only be realised vicariously.
If the famous and heroic have something in common with us—because they are our co-religionists or compatriots, for example—we like to think that that shared characteristic helped them achieve greatness. Because that means that we, despite our own obscurity and mediocrity, have the possibility for greatness within us. And we don’t have to prove it, even to ourselves. We were born with it. This is even more true when such figures are prophets or deities. Gods demand our worship and, in return, promise us a bit of unearned, reflected glory.
So pride in being Indian, for many enthusiastic Modi supporters and for much of the Hindu right, means pride in being Hindu. The danger, however, with pride is that it often implies a sense of superiority over others, which can lead to bigotry and xenophobia. When pride in an ethnicity is combined with nationalism, it creates the heady but toxic cocktail of ethnonationalism, which is the belief that a geographical region is the property of only one of the groups that make their home there (usually the majority group) and the others should be—at best—discriminated against as second-class citizens. When this dangerous ideology takes hold, it generally leads to inter-group conflicts, the oppression of minorities, political polarisation, divisiveness, fear and eventually, inevitably, violence.
There is probably no country in which the resurgence of ethnonationalism is more dangerous than in India: one of the most culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse of nations, around 15% of whose citizens are non-Hindus, including the world’s second largest population of Muslims. And few countries have experienced more bloody intergroup conflicts in the recent past. The fighting between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs that accompanied the country’s foundation left around two million dead and created eight million refugees.
Yet, despite all this, Indians have a lot to be proud of. They have upheld the world’s largest democracy for seventy-two years. The odds against this can scarcely be overstated. India is an extreme statistical outlier among democratic countries: in its size, poverty and diversity. The horrors of Partition can lead us to see the birth of the country as a division—a cracking, as Bapsi Sidhwa famously put it. But it was also an extraordinary victory for unification. Before Independence, India (and Pakistan) were a patchwork of British-ruled territories, interspersed with more than 250 princely states—all of which eventually acceded to one of the two fledgling nations. It also contained—and contains—a dizzying number of ethnic and religious groups. Even Hinduism, the major religion, traditionally splits its adherents into castes: endogamous communities which, as DNA analysis has shown, have rarely intermarried over the course of two millennia. India is kaleidoscopic.
Yet, after the British withdrew—taking almost all their military and civil service personnel with them—India did not descend into chaos, as many predicted.
Instead, against all the odds, a nation was formed and it was neither a theocracy nor a military dictatorship. One of the world’s most intensely religious countries opted for a secular constitution—whose drafting committee was chaired by a Dalit (formerly called untouchable) the erudite, eloquent and snazzily dressed B. R. Ambedkar. A territory without a common tongue, with twenty-two official languages—and, estimates suggest, at least four hundred unofficial languages—united into a single nation. A country home to one fifth of humanity, and one third of the world’s poor at the time of its founding (India has since significantly reduced its proportion of poor) established a stable, multi-party democracy.
And democracy has held for seventy-two years today—no mean feat. I write this from Argentina, another former colonial nation, more than a century older (founded in 1810). Our longest period of sustained democracy to date (from 1983) has lasted for less than half that time.
These are astonishing achievements. The existence of India is a testament to people’s ability to live together, peacefully, creating, from a vertiginous array of different cultures and beliefs, a single identity: Indian. Now that’s something to be proud of.
Happy Birthday!
34 comments
Disagree with your views.
1. As the tenets of Sanatam Dharma goes- you are not born somewhere and to someone by a fluke / random card being pulled out of a deck/ hat sorting. Most Hindus believe that they could be born as any of the many many millions of genus/ life forms/ species that exist- but a human birth was accorded to them based on what “karmas’ they committed.
2. In other words- ( and a reductionist approach at that)- good deeds lead to graduation to the upper orbit in the food chain , and animalistic deeds lead to a demotion in the food chain( for more on this – you can look up the ’84 lakh yoni concept).
3. By 1 & 2 above- the practicing Hindu believes that they could have been born a pig or a bird or an American – but were born in India ( Jambudweep / Bharatvarsha), based on certain deeds in the past. This is grounded in the concept of the ‘Atma’ or soul, that discards the body after death, and takes up residence in another body , and born to a new set of parents based on the logic mentioned above.
https://medium.com/@subhashkak1/the-idea-of-india-180dfd5f8ca1
There are many who see India’s recent election results as a repudiation of the textbook idea of India. They find the results painful, as if the walls of the India of their imagination have been brought down.
They say they love India as much as anyone, so they can’t understand how the people could have been so destructive to vote the way they did.
Spring is passing, the birds cry, and the fishes fill with tears on their eyes. — Matsuo Bashō (17th century)
I want to present a different take on the election. I concede that the results are a rejection of an India that many have come to feel comfortable with, but it is an India based on falsehoods and half-truths, motivated by pseudoscience and racism.
The Old Idea of India
The old idea of India emerged from the work of British colonial administrators and European scholars motivated by the demands of the Raj, pseudoscience and racial prejudice. The British dismantled India’s schools and created a new system of colleges and universities using English as the medium of research and instruction. Their understanding of India was imperfect quite like someone claiming to know Britain ignorant of Shakespeare and Shelley, Austen and Dickens, or Darwin and Dirac. But the British ruled the narrative; Indian classics were thrown out, and Indians could enter the academy only on the terms set by them.
To provide justification for colonial rule, the British declared that Indian society was pre-rational and it needed guidance by Western ideas. Depicted thus in textbooks at all levels, Indians slowly came to believe this characterization, and this included nationalist politicians and intellectuals. So I was not surprised that even a nationalist poet like Ramdhari Singh Dinkar in his much-praised Sanskriti ke chār adhyāya parroted this understanding.
There were two main elements to this idea of India:
One: India is a land divided by rigid caste and hierarchy and its social and intellectual history must be seen within this framework and as an encounter between different races.
Two: Indian society is deeply conservative and religious and it has no real tradition of science, arts and innovation. There has been some innovation in mathematics, architecture, and philosophy, but it was done by outsiders who were descendants of invading or migrating groups. India has received most of its worthy ideas from the west and the north, and this includes writing.
After the British left, the education, administrative, and political ecosystem remained tethered to this idea. There was challenge to it from scholars who knew Indian texts and by subaltern groups, but they were strongly ridiculed. New research over the last few decades has undermined the previous model and a new generation of serious scholars has joined in the criticism. It has become clear that the idea of India conjured up by the British is false, and mostly a fabrication.
But there has also been a reaction by others in the academy who are driven by Eurocentrism and prejudice. Astonishingly, some have even resorted to fabrication of evidence in support of the old view (for example, see here).
Hi Iona. I liked your piece! Do you have any recommendations for book length projects on India? I see a lot of hot takes in the Western press on India and Hindu nationalism but not a lot of measured analysis. Also, I wanted to know your thoughts on attempts to link U.S. presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to Hindu nationalists. She is a western convert to Hinduism.
Hello 4M! I would begin with Ramachandra Guha’s “India After Gandhi” and then look at Rohit Chopra’s “The Virtual Hindu Rastra” and Rohini Mohan’s article “A Template of Hate” (for Harper’s, I think). For an alternative view, there’s also the highly readable “Why I am a Hindu” by Shashi Tharoor. I interviewed Rohit & Rohini on Hindu ethnonationalism for my podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-761174326/15-rohit-chopra-and-rohini-mohan. And there’s a great interview with Zubin Madon on Hindu ethnonationalism on the Secular Jihadists podcast: http://secularjihadists.libsyn.com/ep76-india-religion-and-nationalism.
Re: Tulsi. I haven’t been following her closely. I tend to hold off on obsessing over the US primary candidates until the Americans have chosen a nominee (then I obsess over their elections lol). She is half-Indian though and a Hindu from birth and seems to have had a troubling history of connections with the Hindu right. One to watch.
Tulsi actually does not have any Indian ancestry. Her father is Samoan and her mother is white German, and she was born in American Samoa before the family moved to Hawaii when she was two. They raised her in a multi-religion household; her father is Catholic and her mother practices Hinduism. She says that she chose Hinduism as her faith during her teenage years. In a lot of her speeches, she espouses religious pluralism and respect for all regardless of religious views, including atheists. She did meet with Modi a while back as part of her duties in Congress, but she also met with Modi’s opposition. To me, the narrative linking Tulsi to violent extremists in India seems motivated by religious bigotry. I find that the Western media does not always present the full picture when it comes to Indian politics. This is why I greatly appreciate your book recommendations and your commentary on Indian affairs.
Anyone interested in the ideas raised by this piece should read Amartya Sen’s brilliant collection of essays ‘The Argumentative Indian’.
He’s a fierce critic of Modhi style Hindu Nationalism, but more importantly Sen shows a number of things.
Like so much ethnic/religious nationalism it’s largely ahistorical and a modern invention.
That for all its ethnic conflict India has a long tradition of religious pluralism, tolerance and a tradition of public discussion as a means of working out public policy, social ethics etc.
Sanskrit for instance had the largest collection of atheistic/secular writing of any classical language.
Whatever influence British rule may have had, the roots of Indian democracy are also very much Indian.
Obviously, like all places and all faiths Hinduism has its unpleasant and parochial side, but the democratic secular religiously tolerant Indian isn’t something it just learnt from the West.
It’s a version of being Indian and Hindu Modhi & co wish to erase in favour of a narrow parochial one, which as the writer correctly points out has the potential for catastrophic outcomes.
We could do a lot worse than make sure those other Indian traditions are kept alive.
Love Sen’s book. The title though—The Argumentative Indian—always begs the question: is there any other kind. 😉
I left India in 1965 at 17 to return to my homeland, Canada. I visited India after 40 years, having been told of the major changes I would see. What shocked me was the areas in which little change had occurred – attitudes to and treatment of servants, continued caste endogamy and dowrys (technically illegal), denial of any rights to seasonal migrants, caste considerations in employment, shock at a 60-year old woman going to the bazaar alone, suppression of news about a state election in which a candidate was murdered (all travel to Bihar was banned at the time + news blackout), and so on. A veneer of cell phone and jeans did not cover this kind of thing. In spite of this, I recognise that millions are better off than they were in the 1960’s, and all Indians have a right to be proud of this.
Yes, indeed. There is still much work to be done!
Is there any other religion than Hinduism that overtly teaches anything like caste? All the others that I can think of agree that all humans are equal before God.
Please elaborate. I’d concede that Judaism has the ‘chosen people’ idea, but how does that apply to Christianity or even Islam? Mind Islam has predestination … but so does Calvinism. I see most religions as leveling humanity, tho of course if one is a believer one is ‘saved’ in some form, but it has nothing to do with tribalism. No?
Hint: there is this large group of people called WOMEN.
Ah, yes, women. But when all or almost all of our democracies were founded, women didn’t have the vote. It remains true that it is Christian nations that created all of the modern democracies, and the fact that we didn’t get it perfect on the first try seems to be besides the point — we all gave women the vote sooner or later and it is in the Christian/democratic West that women have achieved their greatest freedom, yes? Even when it comes to religion, one can look back 2000 years and note that this or that society didn’t treat women very well, but note the ‘direction’ that was being moved in:
Jesus’ best friends were women, they have the theological preeminence in several stories. Yes, he’s a Jew living in a patriarchy, but an honest reading shows him ‘pulling’ in the direction of equality. Even rotten old St. Paul: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” … no doubt what he’s reaching for, is there?
My thesis stands: democracy is a product of Christian civilization. This is not only empirically true, it is to be expected as the outgrowth of the Christian moral framework.
There is nothing in the theology, scope or creed of Christianity that favors democracy over monarchy or autocracy.
In fact, for most of the past 2000 years the christian nations were all monarchies or dictatorships.
And there was no priest or pastor who objected.
So what changed?
What happened was modern England became the first maritime nation since Athens and the Italian republics to have most of its society involved in commercial activities.
Democracy is simply the political veneer of a commercial society.
It mattered not to the English if the people were Christian colonists as in America, Hindu’s as in Indian, Muslim as in Pakistan, or Buddhist as in Hong Kong, in each of these places the British trading system left behind a commercial community — and its governing pattern — democracy.
As for the vote … the sharing of government power in a democracy occurs as its population begins to share in its commercial activities.
So, in America the commercial class began with the white males, and later was extended to all males.
As females left the home and joined the workforce the vote was extended to them…
And as adolescence gained in productive power we even let the kids vote.
Our religions adapt to any of these situations….
In fact, Christianity didn’t induce democracy, democracy created a new form of Christianity.
It was the democratic, commercial changes going on in Northern Europe that influenced the reformation and created Protestantism.
Protestantism is nothing more than the democratic manifestation of Christianity. Where the congregation gets to vote in their pastor;
and whenever they feel like instituting some new deviation in the liturgy, they break away and form a new protestant sect.
Check out the website: http://www.ourhumanherds.com
“democracy created a new form of Christianity”
I grant that there is a feedback loop, and to some extent it is a chicken and egg sort of question. I think you are totalitarian the other way, but IMHO it was Protestantism, particularly non-conformist, that created the mindset that made democracy possible. It is a stretch to say that Luther was a mercantile democrat first and a Protestant second. And there are too many mercantile nations that did not become democracies for your thesis to really be strong, but all European/white/Christian nations did become democracies even if they were landlocked and agricultural. The history of the globe supports me. Still there is a sort of natural fit between Protestant Christianity, democracy and capitalism/mercantilism, and I don’t propose that one can point to any of them as the sole originator of the others.
I think you are over looking the democracies that came {via commercialism} to India (Hindu), Pakistan (Muslim) Hong Kong (Taoism) Japan (Shinto) South Korea (Buddhism) … do you attribute these democratic developments to the influence of Christianity in these areas?
I may have missed you argument earlier, but Christianity was getting along happily for 2000 years with slaves and monarchs, then things suddenly changed shortly after the scientific and industrial revolutions that led to a boom in world-wide production and trade. — and then democracies.
What are your thoughts? DO you think something changed among the monks, priests, pastors, and popes?
Recall Ephesians 5-7: Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart
Also 1 Timothy 6:1 Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed.Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church; rather they must serve them all the more, since those who benefit by their service are believers and beloved.
“I think you are over looking the democracies that came {via commercialism} …”
What democracies? You mean the post-colonial developments?
“do you attribute these democratic developments to the influence of Christianity in these areas”
Maybe a little ‘directly’, but mostly this is the copying of the Western model. So it’s power is not that it’s Christian overtly, but that it’s Western. Mind, in the case of former colonies one might even say that democracy was imposed but whereas the ‘training’ for it certainly was, the Indians in particular certainly made that choice. In Japan of course democracy was actually imposed.
“Christianity was getting along happily for 2000 years with slaves and ”
Sure. Jesus and the early Fathers were passive as to political affairs, they tried to live with whatever ‘Caesar’ imposed. But as you yourself noted, once the Protestants started electing their pastors, it was just a matter of time till they wanted to elect their PMs too. It’s not so much that Christianity demands democracy, as that it is favorable to it. Once you’ve thrown off the Pope, and you believe in a personal unmediated relationship with God, and once all the Protestant sects have started to try to convince you of their truth, not force it on you, the individual becomes sovereign. No individual church can possibly impose itself anyway, too many of them, so some independent system must be created. Democracy can’t be far behind. The American FF understood this explicitly. You might even say that democracy comes from the fragmentation of Protestantism as much as it springs from their hearts. But can we even imagine the FF without the all-pervading English Protestant spirit that motivated them?
At the same time you’re not wrong to notice that the mind widening effects of global trade are going to feed back on political demands for freedom and also on Christianity itself. Part of what you emphasize as trade, I’d emphasize as the coincident ‘trade’ in ideas and of course simply the technology to spread ideas around. And education and literacy of course. So all sorts of things are happening at the same time and there’s a synergy.
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”
As above, early Christianity was passive as to social arrangements. Slavery was a fact of life. St. Paul does not condone it (nor actually condemn it either), he recommends living with the reality of it. Mind, there is no question that Christians are ‘called to freedom’ and that in their heaven ‘there is neither slave nor free’. I see Christianity, and even latter Judaism as ‘reaching’ for the better thing even when they aren’t quite actually there. It’s the same with all the American founding documents: they ‘reach’ for ‘All men are created equal’ tho it took another century to abolish slavery and of course the work never really ends.
“DO you think something changed among the monks, priests, pastors, and popes?”
Slowly but surely, yes. Or at least the center of gravity shifted. Catholicism tended to resist, but Protestants were often the leaders of the charge. It’s hard to imagine modern socialism without the Quakers and the Methodists getting it all going. Again, in all of the above, contrast the situation in the Islamic world.
Interesting speculation. And worth thinking over.
With all due respect, if liberalism is a religion, which it very well may be, it certainly has a caste system based on victimization.
You are mistaken. There’s nothing liberal about a caste system of any kind, including one based on a victimhood hierarchy.
“With all due respect, if liberalism is a religion, which it very well may be, it certainly has a caste system based on victimization.”
Quite so, and worth pointing out, but I was referring to the traditional religions.
This is a very interesting and well written article.
Your concern over “nationalism” is well founded, but we have to recognize that “tribalism” and “nationalism” are fundamentally part of our moral makeup.
Morality is a survival mechanism and one way it is displayed is through close identity to one’s group — sharing in its successes and being depressed by its failures.
To denigrate this instinct is to undermine the social impulse that allows us to sacrifice ourselves for others. When the Americans put a man on the moon they also erected an American flag. This instinct expresses itself in many ways and can be constructive as well as destructive.
Your second major point, the amazing achievement of India remaining a democracy under such difficult circumstances, is also noteworthy. But India, like the United States (my country), Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, etc. was fortunate enough to be led by the British and brought into their system of world-wide production and trade.
The freest nations in the world are former British colonies.
But why?? Why should this be the case?
This is because democracy is best understood as the political veneer of a commercial society. In fact, we would be better off if we began calling all such nations “commercial-democracies.”
(i.e. ancient Athens, Rome, the Italian Maritime Republics were all port cities involved in commercial trade)
It is in the marketplace that we are most equal and most tolerant. The most successful merchants are those who will trade with women and men, the young and the old, conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites. It is in the market that real equality is achieved and rewarded.
So we discover that democracy doesn’t create equality … commercial equality goes on to create democracies.
And India is probably the greatest and most amazing proof of that biological reality.
Thank you for the compliments!
I agree that capitalism (preferably with a strong safety net) is necessary for wealth generation and that it helps keep societies stable. I disagree that we cannot unite under civic nationalism, rather than religion. Americans planted a US flag when they went to the moon, not the symbol of Christ on the cross. They didn’t say (for example) “no Jews allowed here!”
I agree that we do tend to identify with group identities. I disagree that this means religious bigotry is inevitable.
“So we discover that democracy doesn’t create equality … commercial equality goes on to create democracies.”
I think there is some grain of truth in that, but is it entirely ‘commerce first’? I doubt it. Most every culture has had commerce, Muslims to this day love opening shops and trading far and wide. I think the thing that underpins democracy is Christianity — all are equal before the Lord — and naturally the democratic/Christian synthesis will produce a certain variation on the commercial theme which might be expected to feed-back into its roots positively.
Really? Then why are traditionally Christian nations almost all democracies and most democracies Christian or having a Christian colonial legacy?
Ray, this is not true. Most democracies are secular. It’s also irrelevant to India, in which only around 1% of the population are Christians.
This is not a good topic for a back-and-forth in comments, which is just going to end in frustration, since I have absolutely no intention of converting. But may I suggest you look for someone to discuss this with on http://www.letter.wiki. The two of you should sign up and have this argument there. I’m not discussing this further.
“most democracies are secular”
Of course. Christianity ‘knows’ that folks should be free to practice any religion. Mind, it took them quite some time to put that into practice, but eventually they did. Contrast Saudi Arabia. Where a country has a Christian heritage, that country will practice freedom of religion. It is an empirical fact.
“I’m afraid I am not going to convert to Christianity.”
I wasn’t suggesting it. I myself am agnostic.
“I’m not going to agree that my religion is inferior or that I am inferior and I find all this rather patronising and silly. I’m sorry. Take it elsewhere.”
I seem to have touched a nerve. Sorry you’re personalizing this Iona, I’m quite astonished that you’d take it that way given your intellect which is anything but inferior. But I’ve pushed you into a defensive mindset so yes, I’ll back off.
Ray, I am NOT going to convert to Christianity. Take this elsewhere. x
PS You haven’t “pushed me into a defensive mindset” nor am I personalising this. You are just spouting complete nonsense and I’m not a fan of nonsense. I’m not sure what your agenda is in this: I suspect either religious proselytisation or some form of alt right nationalism. Either way, I’m not here for it. Thanks so much. x
“religious proselytisation or some form of alt right nationalism”
Not really. I’m interested in the vectors that shaped history. Religion is one of them, and Christianity was certainly a player. Iona, I can hardly believe this is really you, the change in your tone, your hostility even paranoia — alt-right nationalism? Really? Proselytization? As I said, I’m an agnostic, I belong to no church. But I do think it is a fact of history that democracy and Christianity are almost always found together. Again, contrast democracy and Islam which are almost never found together, tho that is slowly changing. May one not suggest anything good came of Christianity?
First you compliment my intelligence and then you expect me to accept palpably absurd and ahistorical arguments at face value. This is patronising nonsense.
“and then you expect me to accept palpably absurd and ahistorical arguments at face value”
I don’t expect anything of the sort. I express my view of history in the hopes that I might learn something from your nuanced, intellectual, measured and unemotional response. I’m here to refine my understanding. It seems to me that saying the moon is square is palpably absurd, but is saying that there is a relationship between Christianity and democracy *absurd*? It may be mistaken but is not ‘absurd’ a bit too strong? After all, we do have the almost linear correspondence between the two across the globe. Perhaps it is just a coincidence but is it absurd to notice it? We notice a correspondence between smoking and cancer; would it be absurd to say that smoking and cancer are causally related?
Now, @Stephen Martin Fritz makes a strong case that what I attribute to Christianity is better explained as the consequence of Western/European mercantile spirit and that is certainly not *absurd* even tho I think both religion and commerce/trade/capitalism are part of the mix.
Instead of denouncing me as some sort of alt-right proselytizer who must have some evil agenda, and who ‘expects’ this or that, why not stop telling me about myself — everything you have told me about myself so far has been wrong — and address my arguments? It is certainly not absurd to claim that Christianity and democracy have no causal relationship and I await your arguments.
As for me, please note that I have not told you anything about your motives although I have noticed with alarm that a lady who has previously seemed rather delightful to read and to converse with seems to have become rather vicious. Perhaps religion or its effects on history is not a subject that you are open to discussing. I do apologize if I’d tread on sacred ground. If you reply I will respond, so if this is disturbing to you, please don’t.
For once I disagree with Iona, tho it’s a subtle thing:
> There is no rational reason to be proud of something you did not choose—like an accident of birth—or of achievements in which you had no part, like those of your ancestors. Yet most of us find it comforting to conceive of ourselves as part of a tribe
But we are part of tribes.
> Because that means that we, despite our own obscurity and mediocrity, have the possibility for greatness within us. And we don’t have to prove it, even to ourselves. We were born with it.
But we do have the possibility, tho we *do* have to prove — not that we have the possibility, but that we can actually achieve. What kid, afraid to do something, has not been given the courage by watching his friend do it? What son, watching his father do something has not understood that what his dad can do, he can do? The closer the kinship the greater the inspiration, no? If I say that I’m proud to be a Canadian, what I’m doing is simply picking the best traits of Canadians and resolving to live up to them, after all I *am* one and don’t want to let my team down. This is not a bad thing.
> which can lead to bigotry and xenophobia.
It can, but it can also be a mutual striving for excellence — teams compete, one wins, one looses, but both are better for the striving.
> Yet, despite all this, Indians have a lot to be proud of.
Contradiction? Can some ‘nobody’ laborer be proud of a democracy that he had zero input in creating or sustaining? I’d say, yes, he can if his dressing himself in borrowed robes actually helps him behave better.
Thanks My Lady. I’d like to see a rebuttal!
Of what? I think we’re in broad agreement. 🙂