Part-III Two republics, one Flag: affective and anxious nationalism in eighty years of Indian politics

Nationalism rooted in affection, and nationalism maintained by anxiety — a chronicle of the incidents a nation has chosen to forget, across eighty years of Indian politics

The Architecture of Anxiety

What followed 2014 was renovation, not invention — the patient encroachment upon, appropriation of, and occasional erasure of old symbols: a new Parliament dressed in Hindu ritual, a G20 summit staged before a bronze Nataraja, a monthly radio homily, postage stamps quietly reshuffling memory. Where symbolism left off, suspicion did the rest. In 2015 a Dadri mob lynched Mohammad Akhlaq over a beef rumour; the accused were later photographed in the front row of a chief minister’s rally. Amit Shah twice called migrants termites in the 2019 campaign. Twelve days after Pulwama, the Balakot strikes gave the government a measurable pre-election bounce. Kashmir’s post-370 communications blackout became, by December 2019, the longest internet shutdown ever recorded in a democracy. And an eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest, Stan Swamy, died in judicial custody in July 2021, never convicted of anything.

But the anxious state keeps a second ledger alongside the first, and it is worth opening in full, because a nation cannot be judged only by what frightens it — it must also be judged by how loudly, and how often, it has been made to answer for that fear. Even before 2014, Delhi had already learned the template: the gang rape and death of a young woman in December 2012 filled India Gate with a rage no party could claim credit for suppressing, forced the UPA government into the Justice Verma Committee, and rewrote the criminal law on sexual offences within months. The republic since has rarely gone twelve consecutive months without some fresh accounting to render. In Madhya Pradesh, the Vyapam examination scandal — impersonation and bribery reaching into recruitment and medical admissions under an unbroken BJP state government — grew so large and so lethal to those connected with it that the Supreme Court took the unusual step of transferring the entire investigation to the CBI in July 2015; convictions were still being handed down in December 2025, a legal afterlife stretching across three general elections. That same year, farmers’ anger over a proposed loosening of the 2013 land acquisition law forced Prime Minister Modi into one of his earliest retreats, letting the ordinance lapse in August 2015 rather than fight it through Parliament; students at the Film and Television Institute struck for a hundred and thirty-nine days over the appointment of a politically favoured chairman, and though they did not win his immediate removal, his tenure quietly ended without renewal in 2017.

The following January, the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad turned caste discrimination in higher education into a subject no campus in the country could avoid discussing, and within weeks the arrest of JNU’s student union president over allegedly anti-national slogans made the university itself the country’s most visible battleground over what nationalism was permitted to mean. That July, cow-protection vigilantes publicly flogged Dalit men at Una in Gujarat; the resulting Asmita Yatra walked nearly four hundred kilometres to Ahmedabad, and it took until 2026 — a full decade — for a court to hand down five-year sentences to five of the accused. Agrarian anger turned lethal at Mandsaur in June 2017, where police shot five protesting farmers dead over debt and prices, a precursor in miniature to the far larger reckoning still to come; that same season, a wave of lynchings tied to cow vigilantism produced the Not in My Name vigils in cities across the country, achieving no single legislative victory but giving mob violence a permanent place in the national conversation about minority safety. In April 2018, Dalit organisations shut down large parts of the country in protest at a Supreme Court ruling they read as weakening protections against caste atrocities; Parliament reversed the Court’s own judgment by statute within months, one of the rare instances of street pressure directly overturning a judicial reading of the law.

Anti-CAA protests and the Shaheen Bagh sit-in, examined again below through the idea of constitutional patriotism, belong on this same ledger, as does the farmers’ movement of 2020–21 that finally forced the repeal of three agricultural laws in November 2021 after more than a year of encampment — though the movement’s darkest hour came earlier that October, at Lakhimpur Kheri, where a convoy linked to a Union minister’s son struck a crowd of protesting farmers and eight people died, the son himself facing years of subsequent prosecution44. The pattern continued past the farm laws’ repeal: residents of Lakshadweep protested an administrator’s sweeping local reforms in 2021; young recruits burned trains over the Agnipath military scheme in June 2022; the Gujarat government’s 2022 remission of eleven convicts in the Bilkis Bano gang-rape case was overturned by the Supreme Court in January 2024 after eighteen months of sustained civil-society pressure; Olympic wrestlers camped at Jantar Mantar through the first half of 2023 accusing their own federation’s president, a sitting BJP MP, of sexual harassment, a case that ended in his acquittal in August 2026; ethnic violence in Manipur beginning in May 2023 had by late 2024 killed some two hundred and sixty people and displaced more than sixty thousand, the gravest single governance failure of the entire period; a second farmers’ march on Delhi in February 2024 left a twenty-one-year-old protester dead at the Punjab border, Ladakh’s demand for statehood and constitutional safeguards, led in part by the engineer-activist Sonam Wangchuk, turned fatal in September 2025 when police firing killed four protesters in Leh; and in the summer of 2026 the cancellation of a NEET medical-entrance exam sat by two million students, after its paper leaked, produced the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party movement, whose pressure drove the Union education minister to resign that July.

Carried away from Jantar Mantar, but not from the struggle. Activist Sonam Wangchuk waves as he is moved from Jantar Mantar to a hospital in New Delhi on July 18, 2026. Photo Credit: Salman Ali/PTI. Image Credit: https://fl-i.thgim.com/public/incoming/tnxeya/article71244260.ece/alternates/LANDSCAPE_1200/sonam%20wangchuk%20forcefully%20removed%20jantar%20mantar.jpg

The forests kept their own separate score. Police gunfire killed thirteen people protesting a copper smelter’s pollution at Thoothukudi in 2018, and the plant was permanently shut; Mumbai’s Aarey Colony, Assam’s Dehing Patkai rainforest, and Goa’s Mollem sanctuary each produced sustained tree-by-tree resistance to infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2021, with the 2020 draft environmental-clearance rules alone drawing some 1.7 million public objections during a national lockdown. Adivasi communities in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand forest won a unanimous state-assembly resolution against coal-block expansion in 2022 that neither stopped the mining nor ended the protests; Joshimath’s Himalayan foundations began visibly cracking in January 2023, displacing residents and indicting years of unheeded warnings about hydropower construction in fragile terrain; the Great Nicobar mega-project and Kerala’s Vizhinjam port each drew years of litigation over indigenous rights and coastal erosion that remained unresolved as late as 2026; and that same year, in Madhya Pradesh, villagers facing displacement by the Ken-Betwa river-linking project staged a Chita Andolan, lying on symbolic funeral pyres to argue that losing their land amounted to dying, until police forcibly cleared the site in July.

At the pyre of their own tomorrow, the people of Bundelkhand asked only this: justice—or death: Local tribal residents stage a symbolic pyre protest against the Ken-Betwa River Linking Project in Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region, invoking the slogan, "Nyay do, ya maar do" ("Give us justice, or kill us"), to demand justice over the project's impacts. Photo Credit; Dhruval Parekh / DTE. Image Credit: https://cf-images.assettype.com/downtoearth%2F2026-07-08%2Fotu4utct%2F6-pyre-protest.png?w=1024&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max

And running beneath both columns, the government’s own accounting problems multiplied. Electoral bonds, which let donors fund parties anonymously and made the BJP by far the largest beneficiary, were struck down as unconstitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court in February 2024; the Rafale fighter-jet purchase drew years of opposition allegation that the Court ultimately declined to send for independent investigation; the opaque PM CARES pandemic fund drew demands for a CAG audit that were never granted61; the Pegasus spyware allegations produced a Supreme Court technical committee whose 2022 findings were inconclusive, while the Court itself noted the government’s own refusal to cooperate fully; Karnataka’s 40% commission slogan helped end BJP rule in that state in May 2023; the Adani-Hindenburg affair caused historic market losses before the Supreme Court declined in January 2024 to strip the matter from the market regulator, the CAG’s own audits that August found dramatic cost overruns in the Bharatmala highway programme and, more troublingly, claims paid under the Ayushman Bharat health scheme to patients already recorded as dead; and in February 2024 the Supreme Court did something it almost never does, personally examining ballot papers from a municipal election in Chandigarh, finding the BJP’s own returning officer had deliberately defaced eight votes on camera, and simply declaring the opposition candidate mayor by judicial order rather than sending the matter back for a fresh count.

None of this proves that any single government invented fear from nothing, and fairness requires saying so plainly: farm laws were repealed, Bilkis Bano’s convicts were sent back to prison, electoral bonds were struck down, a rigged mayoral election was personally corrected by the country’s highest court, and a corrupt examination cost a sitting minister his job. The republic’s suspicion of its own government is not merely a symptom of anxious nationalism; in each of these cases it was also the cure.

The Republic Talks Back

Yet the beloved nation has never gone quietly. Tagore warned that nationalism as a machine of collective power demanded an idolatry morality could not survive; Gandhi answered that his patriotism was not exclusive but all-embracing, rejecting any patriotism that rose on another people’s distress. In the winter of 2019, Shaheen Bagh’s women sat down for a hundred and one days, reading the Constitution’s preamble aloud on Republic Day — practising something close to what Dolf Sternberger first named and Habermas later made famous as constitutional patriotism. The farmers who camped at Delhi’s borders for thirteen months, buried more than seven hundred of their own before the laws were repealed in November 2021, made the same argument in a rougher dialect. Arendt observed that human action requires plurality — more than one point of view in the room; a nation that tolerates only an echo has achieved not unity but a well-organised silence.

A Universal Malady, and What Love Actually Requires

None of this is a peculiarly Indian vice. Sheikh Hasina governed Bangladesh for fifteen years on a nationalism built from her father’s statues; when a student uprising forced her to flee by helicopter on the 5th of August, 2024, the statues came down within hours. An American administration presently builds a National Garden of American Heroes — two hundred and fifty statues, forty million dollars, timed to a semiquincentennial — while quarrelling over which older statues must fall or be restored. The fortress-nation is a universal temptation available to any government tired of the harder work of being loved.

Coda: The Poet Had Already Given the Answer

It seems fitting to leave the last word to the man who saw all of this coming before any of it happened. Rabindranath Tagore delivered the argument whole in a set of lectures given in America and Japan in 1916 and 1917. What he wrote then reads, still, as though addressed directly to every party named above — Congress, Sangh, Left, Trinamool alike:

I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others will be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us, and those who are constantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens will be eliminated. … The gigantic organizations for hurting others and warding off their blows, for making money by dragging others back, will not help us. On the contrary, by their crushing weight, their enormous cost and their deadening effect upon the living humanity they will seriously impede our freedom in the larger life of a higher civilization. … Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles. … We must never forget in the present day that those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge organizations of slavery in the disguise of freedom.

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