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Why have ‘liberals’ reduced themselves to being anti-nationals?

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“Pakistan did not kill my father, war killed him”… remember this forgettable quote by a young ‘liberal’ from Delhi? Well it so happens that her mentor went a step further and tweeted this:

Even though it was appalling, still it made me think twice about the definition of the word “liberal” which I was taught during school days. Does being a liberal means you need to continuously poke your own country, its culture, its organizations? Calling spade a spade is justified but denouncing your own army and indirectly calling it a loser. Is this a new mantra we need to learn to be classified as a “liberal”?

With these disturbing thoughts, I searched for the meaning of this world and to my surprise it was same as what i was taught as a kid:

“open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.”

Dictionary says you need to discard traditional values but unfortunately many of our front runners in the Indian leftist version of liberalism have replaced “traditional values” with “nationalistic values”. Whatever is national, whatever invokes nationalism, discard it and that’s how you join the left-liberal gang.

Way back in April 2016, a directive from HRD ministry was sent out to all educational institutions instructing them to host tri-colour as a mark of respect to the national flag. Panelists on various new channels debated against this directive and some even went on to the extent of saying that this will provoke nationalistic extremism.

The totally heart wrenching moment was when during one such heated debate Major General G.D. Bkashi broke down into tears. Leftist liberals must have celebrated that moment as a victory of their version of liberalism over nationalism, but the fact remains that, the moment an army veteran broke down to tears due to a debate over tri-color, we as a society should have pondered over the most pitiful political discourse which our country was heading into.

End of the day its us, the ordinary citizens who are to be blamed for promoting such a narrative. Why on earth should nationalism be even a agenda driven by political parties during an election? Why must we, the voters, let political parties tell us what nationalism is? And above all, why must a right-winger’s nationalism be different from the liberal’s nationalism, especially in a country where the problems at the grass root level are still prominent?

Nationalism being dragged into the mainstream political discourse is simply due to the inability of the ruling party to defend themselves on the count of solutions they have offered for tackling social and economic issues. On the other hand, opposition has nothing to offer when it comes to social issues.

Quite evidently they don’t have much of a leverage in tackling these issues given their track record of past 70 years, so obviously they don’t want to go deep into any constructive discussion around the prominent problems of our society. They are simply afraid of the rhetoric they may have to face if they ever touch these sensitive topics. So for the sake of opposition they simply oppose whatever is thrown at them by the ruling party which in this case is Nationalism.

Everyday a new term is being coined by liberals, the most absurd one being “Hyper Nationalism” which it seems, has been picked up from an English grammar example of a superlative adjective. I’m pretty sure that there is a term “Moderate Nationalism” as well to fill up for comparative adjective and the famous example of “Moderate Nationalism” for Liberals I am sure is “bharat tere tukde honge inshaallah…inshaallah”.

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