The ‘New India’ is increasingly becoming a place where the mind is never without fear, where the state accuses dissenters of being ‘anti-national’, where the government is hell-bent on suppressing all contrarian points of view, where protesting students are fired at by pellet guns and AK-47s, where brutal police atrocities on peaceful demonstrations are the norm, where jingoism is peddled in the name of nationalism, where elected right-wing representatives incite a frenzy of destructive passion to wipe out all disagreement, where the regime makes puppets of institutions and a mockery of democracy.This is the ‘New India’ we are repeatedly asked to celebrate. And this is the ‘New India’ that Gen Z is questioning.The crackdown on student protesters premised on the criminalisation of dissent has yet again brought the definition of being ‘anti-national’ to the centre of public discourse. The real contest though, is not over who can be or cannot be branded as an anti-national, but rather over the very meaning and essence of ‘nationalism’.By converting every democratic disagreement into a test of nationalism, the Modi government conveniently shifts public attention away from uncomfortable questions on governance – paper leaks, cancelled exams, privatisation, the communalisation of education, unemployment, etc – towards emotive issues. Nationalism thus ceases to be an ideal of collective belonging and becomes a political decoy that insulates the government from accountability.For challenging the fascist response of the government to mass resistance, it is important to subvert the exclusionary definition of nationalism and its misuse as a diversionary tactic.Any meaningful discussion on nationalism must begin with the basic distinction between nation and government. They are two separate entities. The nation is eternal; governments are transient. Governments come and go; the nation endures. To hold a government accountable is not to put the nation in the dock. To scrutinise, criticise and expose the failures of a government is not an act against the nation. On the contrary, it is an action that strengthens those very democratic foundations on which the nation rests.The concept of nationalism that developed in India during the independence struggle saw our country as a composite nation despite her heterogeneity and complexities. Under the aegis of this nationalism, Indians’ myriad ‘private universes of thought and feeling’ (as Nehru put it) were not stifled for an assumed greatness of a nation-state. This nationalism was so accommodative and open that diverse political and ideological currents could co-exist and work within its framework.It provided an atmosphere of freedom and debate, while making no appeal to religious or caste identities. It was based on the vision of a civil libertarian, democratic and secular nation.Yet, the principal architects of this nationalism were acutely aware of the possibility of it turning into a bane.In his essay ‘Nationalism’, Tagore criticised the European concept of a limited national identity – i.e., the “organised selfishness of Nationalism” in the West – and the dangers of India replicating an entirely foreign notion.Nehru shared not only Tagore’s political philosophy of universalism but also his discomfort with a nationalism that has narrow confines. He found it to be a double-edged sword that unified the colonised and strengthened their desire to achieve freedom, but had the potential to take on insidious forms and develop fissiparous tendencies among a free people.He forewarned the nation of a situation “when a majority thinks itself as the entire nation and in its attempt to absorb the minority actually separates them”. He knew that majority communalism more often than not cloaks itself as nationalism.Mahatma Gandhi’s nationalism was also inclusive and deeply democratic. His opposition to colonial rule was itself an act of principled dissent, rooted not in the hatred of the ‘other’ but in truth, non-violence and the conviction that love for one’s nation could never demand the abandonment of conscience and unquestioning obedience to the state. His vision of India was rooted in sarva dharma sambhava, where the strength of the nation lay not in uniformity of opinion but in the capacity to accommodate difference.In 1925, he wrote in Young India, “It is not nationalism that is evil; it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations that is evil.”The nationalism which the BJP, RSS and the entire right wing propagate does not see India as a melange of religions, cultures, customs, castes, languages and ways of life. Instead of celebrating the plurality of our country and people, it insists on a homogenised, singular identity of a Hindu race joined by blood kinship and mystical, age-old ties with a land and place (pitr–bhoomi and punya–bhoomi). Being exclusionary, it comes with the inherent threat of social disintegration rather than the promise of unification.While Tagore took a non-sectarian humanist position and proclaimed that he would never allow “patriotism to triumph over humanity”, right-wing nationalism is premised on the coercive power of a state crushing constitutional rights and critical thinking – so much so that Namvar Singh could be branded anti-national for asking the most pertinent question in ‘Decolonising the Indian Mind’ – which is how those who are oppressed by the state can identify with such a nation and its nationalism.In order to hail this right-wing nationalism as supreme, the Modi government justifies branding universities as bastions of anti-India forces and enforces a draconian clampdown on students who do not toe the line, asserting that intellectuals, writers, teachers and journalists who do not hail ‘Bharat Mata’ question the integrity of India.Sometimes, when Nehru was greeted by a gathering with a huge roar of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ (Victory to Mother India), he said he would “ask them unexpectedly what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted”.“… And so question and answer went on, till they would ask me impatiently to tell them all about it. I would endeavour to do so and explain that India was all this that they had thought, but it was much more.” He explained that Mother India is the mountains and the rivers, the forests and the broad fields, but most importantly, she is the “people of India” who are spread out all over this vast land. Victory to ‘Bharat Mata’ means victory to the people of India.By displacing the language of democratic disagreement with the vocabulary of treason; by routinely caricaturing student protesters as ‘anti-nationals’, ‘urban naxals’ or members of the ‘tukde–tukde gang’; by thwarting crucial space for dialogue, discussion or critique; and by delegitimising dissent, stigmatising universities, endorsing vigilante justice and peddling vendetta politics, the right-wing brigade is doing the greatest disservice to the ‘Idea of India’ that the image of ‘Bharat Mata’ represents.Dr Ragini Nayak is national spokesperson for the Congress and a former president of the Delhi University Students’ Union.