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

Every nation is, at bottom, a story told about strangers. Few nations have ever asked quite so many strangers, of quite so many kinds, to tell it in chorus. Somewhere between a farmer threshing wheat in the Punjab and a fisherman hauling his net through the tide-country of the Sunderbans lie some 2,000 kilometres of subcontinent, and if the two of them ever sat down to share a meal, they would need an interpreter to cross the short physical distance between Punjabi and Bengali — two tongues among the 22 the Constitution has troubled itself to recognise, out of the 121 languages the census records, out of the 19,000-plus mother tongues that ordinary citizens once returned, unprompted, in their own words, when asked simply what they called the speech of their childhood. Layer upon this more than 700 tribal communities whose dialects are older than the Sanskrit epics; layer upon it the Dravidian farmer of the Kaveri delta and the Indo-Aryan trader of the Gangetic plain, the Mongoloid hill people of the Northeast whose faces and festivals lean as naturally toward Southeast Asia as toward Delhi, the Austroasiatic Munda communities whose ancestors were very likely tilling this soil before the word Indian had occurred to anyone at all. Geneticists, tracing blood the way historians trace treaties, have found that nearly every population on the subcontinent carries, in different proportions, the same two ancient lineages — one that entered from the northwest, one that was already waiting here — mingled so many thousand years ago that the dream of a pure anything survives nowhere but, in the pamphlet, never in the chromosome.

This was never a new labour. 2,000 years before nation was a word spoken on this soil, the emperor Ashoka had his edicts of mercy carved into rock and pillar in Brahmi and in Kharosthi, in Greek and in Aramaic, so that a Bactrian trader and an Odia peasant might read the same decree of compassion, each in his own alphabet. faiths were born here — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh — and more arrived by ship and camel caravan and simply never left: the mosque, the church, the fire-temple all learning, over centuries, to ring their calls to prayer within earshot of the temple bell. Wrapped today inside 28 states and 8 union territories, written in more than a dozen scripts — the round, unbroken curves of Tamil beside the angular, flag-topped strokes of Gurmukhi — lives one in every six human beings now breathing on the earth. This is the material Benedict Anderson had in mind, more abundantly than most nation-builders ever had to work with, when he called the nation an imagined community — imagined not because it is false, but because it exists nowhere except in the willingness of these millions, speaking past one another in a hundred tongues, to believe in it together. What Anderson did not say, though history has said it often enough, is that the imagining can happen in two entirely different keys. It can be summoned by love, which asks nothing of the stranger but recognition — a nod exchanged across the distance between Punjabi and Bengali, between temple bell and muezzin’s call. Or it can be summoned by fear, which asks the stranger to first prove that he is not the enemy.

A Single Womb, Two Destinies:

India has spent eighty years learning to speak of itself in two grammars at once — sometimes within the same decade, occasionally within the same breath of the same speech. The two nations were born of a single labour, on one sweltering August night in 1947, and the labour was violent enough to leave scars on both infants for life. Somewhere between two hundred thousand and two million people lay in the wreckage of that single administrative pencil-stroke that split a subcontinent, and no one, to this day, has managed to count the dead with any certainty — only to mourn them with an increasingly exact and increasingly useless precision. Some fifteen million more walked, rode bullock-carts, or were carried across a border that two men had drawn with a ruler and a fortnight’s borrowed acquaintance with the land. The infant republic that staggered out of that migration inherited, in the very same hour, both a mother’s tenderness and a mother’s terror — and has never, in eighty years, fully decided which inheritance to spend first.

Brotherhood’s Frost: Nehru, and the Guns of Sixty-Two

Jawaharlal Nehru spent the Republic’s first years composing what was, at heart, an act of courtship. His India — argued into being through The Discovery of India, sung into being through Panchsheel, the five principles of peaceful coexistence that he and China’s premier Zhou Enlai wrote into a joint declaration in 1954— asked Naga and Tamil, Sikh and Muslim, prince and peasant to fall in love with an idea larger than any of their older, narrower loyalties. Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai, the crowds sang: Indians and Chinese, brothers. It remains one of the more generous experiments a newly freed people has ever dared attempt. That wager was called on the 20th of October, 1962, and by the ceasefire a month later some 1,380 Indian dead against roughly 720 Chinese had turned brotherhood into a punchline overnight. Krishna Menon was offered up to appease the fear the defeat had unleashed, and Nehru told a shaken Parliament that a trust freely given had been repaid with betrayal. The prime minister who had spent a decade asking a hundred tongues to love one idea now watched that idea curdle into suspicion of enemies foreign and, soon enough, domestic. He did not outlive the wound by more than two years — proof, historians still argue, that a nation’s fear can break a heart as literally as any illness, and that the fortress is only ever what affection becomes when it goes unanswered.

Congress Invents an Enemy, and Finds it Useful

It is a peculiar amnesia of contemporary Indian debate that the machinery of manufactured dread is treated as a saffron patent, filed only in Nagpur. The plainest Gandhi-cap white got there first. On the 12th of June, 1975, Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court found Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice in her own Rae Bareli constituency and barred her from elected office for six years — a verdict later called of great courage by a future Chief Justice of India, delivered by a judge Kuldip Nayar wrote could not be coaxed³. Thirteen days later, at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, the old socialist Jayaprakash Narayan stood before hundreds of thousands and asked the army and the police to disobey any order they judged unlawful — his long-cultivated Sampoorna Kranti, Total Revolution, arriving at its single most dangerous sentence. That same night, Indira Gandhi discovered a conspiracy so vast and so precisely timed to coincide with her own unseating that only the wholesale suspension of civil liberty could possibly contain it.

For nineteen months the press wrote what it was permitted to write; the opposition — Desai, Vajpayee, Advani, JP himself — slept where it was permitted to sleep, mostly in prison, under a law that did not trouble to specify a crime. In April of 1976 came Turkman Gate: bulldozers sent by Sanjay Gandhi’s Delhi Development Authority razed the old Muslim quarter near Jama Masjid, by one account because the prime minister’s son wanted an unobstructed view of the mosque from where he stood; police opened fire on residents who tried to stop them — six dead by the official count, independent researchers placing the true toll as high as several hundred, the number still disputed because no honest inquiry was ever allowed to finish it. And beneath the very same tricolour, a nationwide programme of coercive sterilisation, several million procedures strong, treated the poor citizen’s own body as a species of enemy territory requiring pacification. All of it was conducted with a straight face and called discipline. Congress president Dev Kant Barooah supplied the era’s most honest sentence when he told the party faithful, without visible embarrassment, that India was Indira and Indira was India — precisely the formula a fortress-nation always eventually produces: the identification of the country with a single indispensable protector, without whom, naturally, chaos and foreign wolves.

The Only Man in the Room: Indira Gandhi with the Congress men, Delhi, 1967. Clicked by Ragu Rai.

Photo Credit: https://media.assettype.com/homegrown%2Fimport%2F29715-One.Man_.Government.Ministers.Folding.Hands-2.bp_.blogspot.com_.jpg?w=1024&auto=format%2Ccompress

1971, 1984, and the Interest That Comes Due

Fear-nationalism, to be fair to it, does occasionally win wars, and 1971 was the genuine article. When Pakistan’s army turned its guns on East Bengal’s own Bengali population, Indira Gandhi sent the Indian Army in behind the Mukti Bahini, and on the 16th of December Lieutenant-General A. A. K. Niazi surrendered ninety-three thousand troops to Lieutenant-General Jagjit Singh Aurora in Dhaka, handing over his own revolver as Bangladesh was born⁷. Even Vajpayee, her fiercest opposition critic, rose to call her Abhinav Chandi Durga — the war-goddess reincarnate, wearing a sari and a mandate⁷ — and for one bright season the personality cult acquired the alibi of substance.

But personality cults are loans, not gifts, and the interest comes due on schedule. The very Garibi Hatao — Remove Poverty — that had swept her to victory in 1971 soon curdled into the crueller pun Indira Hatao, Remove Indira, and by March of 1977, having endured discipline, sterilisation vans, and a demolished mile of Old Delhi, the electorate threw her and her son Sanjay out entirely — the first defeat suffered by the party of independence since 1947⁸. Three years of the Janata Party’s own squabbling proved a poor substitute for grievance, and in January 1980 the country brought her back with a two-thirds majority on the flattest slogan imaginable, Elect a government that works — forgiveness arriving, as it so often does in fortress-nations, not because the old fear had been answered but because a newer one had simply moved in to replace it⁸.

Total revolutionary: The police beat Jayaprakash Narayan, who - according to Pranab Mukherjee - was above petty politics. Image Credit: https://media.assettype.com/homegrown%2Fimport%2F29715-Total-revolutionary-The-police-beat-Jayaprakash-Narayan-who-Mukherjee-says-was-above-petty-politics..jpg?w=1024&auto=format%2Ccompress

A Toy Gun, and the Wages of Devotion

On the 20th of December, 1978, two brothers named Pandey turned a Calcutta-to-Delhi flight (Indian Airlines Flight 410) into a small theatre of filial politics — brandishing what would later prove a toy pistol, declaring themselves soldiers of the Youth Congress, and asking not for money but for a mother’s freedom: release Indira Gandhi, drop the case against her son Sanjay, topple the Janata government that had jailed them both. Sixty passengers slipped away before the hijackers, their gesture more devotional than dangerous, surrendered on Palam’s tarmac. History, ever generous to the useful, absolved them the moment Indira returned to power in 1980 — the case quietly dropped, the hijackers rewarded twice over with seats in the Uttar Pradesh assembly, Bholanath Pandey dying at seventy-one in August of 2024, remembered still, tenderly, as the man who once hijacked a plane for love of a leader⁹. It is the same arithmetic, worn in a different decade’s clothes: Warren Anderson, chief of the company whose gas had just killed thousands at Bhopal, arrested on the 7th of December, 1984, and flown out of Madhya Pradesh within hours aboard a state government’s own aircraft, gone from India before the dead had finished being counted10 — proof that the fortress-nation guards not only its fears with tenderness, but its friends.

Bholanath & Devendra Pandey hijacked Indian airline flight 410 while traveling from Calcutta to Lucknow & forced to land it in Varanasi. They demanded the release of Indira Gandhi & withdraw all cases related to emergency. Photo Credit:

https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/sites/media2/indiatoday/images/stories/1976Septermber/delhi-650_041415051931.jpg

Where consent was traded for clocks and ghee: Sterilised men are given ghee and clocks as rewards for undergoing vasectomy. At Dujana House 6 Sept, 1976. Image Credit: https://media.assettype.com/homegrown%2Fimport%2F29715-Sterilised-men-are-given-ghee-and-clocks-as-rewards-for-undergoing-vasectomy-Dujana-House-6-Sept-1976.PD-PIB-New-Delhi.jpg?w=1024&auto=format%2Ccompress

References:

1.“Partition of India.” Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7 July 2026,

https://www.britannica.com/event/Partition-of-India

2.“70 Years of ‘Panchsheel’: China’s (Un)Peaceful Betrayal.” Institute for Security and Development Policy, 30 Apr. 2024,

https://www.isdp.eu/publication/70-years-of-panchsheel-chinas-unpeaceful-betrayal/

3. “Why Indira Gandhi’s Election Was Set Aside by the Allahabad High Court 46 Years Ago.” Bar and Bench, 12 June 2021, www.barandbench.com/columns/why-indira-gandhi-election-set-aside-allahabad-high-court-46-years-ago.

4.“Jayaprakash Narayan: Loknayak & JP Movement 1974 — Biography.” Anantam IAS, anantamias.com/jayaprakash-narayan/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

5.“Remembering the Massacre at Turkman Gate: From a Memoir of the Emergency.” Scroll.in, 14 Sept. 2021, scroll.in/article/1005254/remembering-the-massacre-at-turkman-gate-from-a-memoir-of-the-emergency.

6.“In Pics | Non-Gandhi Congress Presidents (Post 1947).” Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com/archives/in-pics-non-gandhi-congress-presidents-post-1947-1147257-1451995. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

7.“1971 Indo-Pak War: How Pak Surrendered to India’s Might.” Maps of India, 15 Dec. 2019, www.mapsofindia.com/my-india/history/1971-indo-pak-war-how-pak-surrendered-to-indias-might.

8. "Desai Unseats Gandhi as Prime Minister of India.” EBSCO Research Starters, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-government/desai-unseats-gandhi-prime-minister-india. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

9. Rai, Pankaj. “Bholanath Pandey: The UP MLA Who Hijacked a Plane to Free Indira Gandhi during Emergency.” India Today, 23 Aug. 2024, www.indiatoday.in/india/story/bholanath-pandey-up-mla-congress-indira-gandhi-release-emergency-flight-hijack-varanasi-delhi-2587109-2024-08-23.

10. “A Brief History of the Criminal Case Outstanding Against Union Carbide in Relation to the 1984 Bhopal Disaster.” The Bhopal Medical Appeal, www.bhopal.org/continuing-disaster/the-dow-chemical-companys-bhopal-related-legal-liabilities/the-criminal-case-against-ucc-and-dow-chemical/a-brief-history-of-the-criminal-case-outstanding-against-union-carbide-in-relation-to-the-1984-bhopal-disaster/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.