On September 7, 1964, American television screens flickered with an innocent vignette that instantly crystallised the supreme horror of the modern age: a young girl standing in a sun-drenched meadow, plucking petals from a daisy and counting clumsily toward 10.Before she could complete her tally, her gentle cadence was drowned out by a metallic voice counting backward toward detonation. As the camera zoomed deep into her pupil, the frame was consumed by the blinding flash of a thermonuclear fireball. Over the roaring mushroom cloud, Lyndon B. Johnson delivered an uncompromising ultimatum: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”The “Daisy” advertisement was conceived as political drama, but it laid bare a fundamental civilisational truth: when tribal hubris commands instruments of total destruction, the margin between survival and obliteration becomes thinner than a flower petal. Six decades later, the mushroom cloud remains an ever-present peril, yet the catalyst accelerating humanity toward the brink is no longer confined to traditional ideological confrontation – it is fuelled by the resurgent virus of xenophobic nationalism.The pathology of exclusionary nationalismAcross the globe, the foundational concept of the nation-state has increasingly been weaponised into an altar of exclusionary, blood-and-soil dogma. It demands unearned pride in deeds never performed, fuels animosity toward people never seen, and reduces the rich tapestry of human coexistence to a zero-sum siege against an imagined enemy. This pathology continually mistakes belligerence for strength and insularity for pride. When married to nuclear arsenals, border militarisation, and ecological collapse, such chauvinism ceases to be mere political rhetoric – it becomes an existential death pact for humanity.It is precisely here that the classical promise of Swaraj demands urgent philosophical reclamation. True Swaraj – as conceived in the crucible of anti-colonial thought and moral philosophy – was never merely a transfer of power from foreign rulers to indigenous elites, nor was it the erection of higher walls around a fortress state. It was an ethic of inner mastery: a radical refusal to mirror the supremacist, dominating impulses of the oppressor. To achieve true self-rule, a society must first liberate its own consciousness from the violent neurosis of xenophobia.If Swaraj cannot free us from the paranoid hatred of the “Other,” it merely trades external subjugation for internal tyranny. In an interconnected century where humanity’s collective survival hangs in the balance, authentic Swaraj requires the courage to choose universal empathy over mutual annihilation – ensuring the child in the meadow finally finishes her count.Empathetic and syncretic nationalismAs S. Irfan Habib highlights in Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings (2017), while contemporary loud voices would have us believe that Indian nationalism is – and has always been – narrow, parochial, and xenophobic, the subcontinent’s finest political leaders, thinkers, scientists, and writers have debated the concept since the early 19th century and arrived at a vastly different conclusion.Figures of the Indian National Movement – including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, C. Rajagopalachari, Sarojini Naidu, Bhagat Singh, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, M.N. Roy, Maulana Azad, and Jayaprakash Narayan – articulated an inclusive, emancipatory, and humanistic nationalism. This outlook stood in stark contrast to modern hyper-nationalism anchored in aggressive cultural homogenization. While rigid forms of nationalism existed during the freedom struggle, they remained peripheral.Speaking in Allahabad, Sarojini Naidu invoked the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb as the syncretic cornerstone of Indian nationalism. She observed that the confluence (Sangam) of the Ganga and Jamuna, where two distinct rivers meet without either losing its intrinsic character, symbolises enduring Hindu-Muslim unity.The pioneering Indian scientist Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray further reinforced the syncretic foundations of the nation. Delivering the convocation address at Jamia Millia Islamia in 1923, he observed: “India, as she has come to be, is a composite nationality- outsiders would say that it is only a heterogenous mass- but that mass, that composite structure is informed and unified with the golden thread of a common loyalty to the motherland.”Ray noted that while Muslims arrived in India for various reasons at different points in history, centuries of shared life made India their undeniable home and the sole object of their allegiance. Employing an incisive analogy, he added: “with equal reason may the descendants of William the Conqueror in present day England transfer their allegiance to France, and I say with equal reason may the Hindus , as descendants of the Aryans, make Hijrat to Central Asia. The very idea is ridiculous”.Mahatma Gandhi anchored this ethos in an empathetic nationalism. In his 1909 germinal work Hind Swaraj, he formulated a struggle against the British Raj that remains exceptionally rare in world history: a manifesto that sought not the annihilation of the oppressor, but his moral refinement and salvation. Addressing a gathering in Calcutta in 1925, Gandhi explained that the national struggle against British rule did not require animus toward individual Britons; the battle was waged against the systemic machinery of imperialism and subjugation they administered: “in my humble opinion, it is derogatory to the dignity of mankind, it is derogatory of India to entertain for one single moment hatred towards Englishman”.For Gandhi, genuine nationalism served as an essential prerequisite for true internationalism—two positions he viewed as entirely complementary. Reflecting on European nationalism, he wrote: “it is not nationalism that is evil, it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil”.In this framework, nationalism is merely an evolutionary milestone preparing humanity for an imminent internationalism. As Yuval Noah Harari observes in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), confronting unprecedented nuclear, ecological, and technological disruptions necessitates global cooperation over insular posturing; retreating into parochialism risks inviting civilizational apocalypse.India’s foreign freedom fightersThe moral depth of India’s anti-colonial movement is powerfully evidenced by its capacity to inspire solidarity far beyond geographic and cultural borders, as chronicled in Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (2022). Seven remarkable Western figures – Annie Besant, B.G. Horniman, Philip Spratt, Samuel Evans Stokes Jr. (Satyanand Stokes), Ralph Richard Keithahn, Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), and Catherine Mary Heilemann (Sarala Behn) – renounced imperial privilege to champion Indian liberation.Unlike foreign volunteers in conflicts like the Spanish Civil War who returned to their homelands, these rebels made India their permanent home, crossing profound racial, religious, and colonial divides. Through fearless journalism, political mobilisation, rural reform, and grassroots ecological activism, they endured surveillance, imprisonment, and social ostracism, rejecting the imperialist dogma of racial hierarchy in pursuit of the universal cause of colonised peoples.Their enduring legacy demonstrates that India’s foundational conception of nationalism was never an insular, exclusionary, or xenophobic creed, but a humanistic struggle against systemic oppression. By dedicating their lives to a land not originally their own, these foreign freedom fighters embodied the classical ethos of Swaraj as a project of moral universalism and inner liberation. Authentic self-rule cannot simply mean exchanging external domination for domestic chauvinism; it requires dismantling the xenophobic reflexes that divide humanity. Ultimately, remembering those who crossed empires to struggle alongside strangers reminds us that patriotism finds its highest expression not in hostility toward the “Other,” but in an unwavering commitment to human dignity, syncretism, and global coexistence.Reflecting on the wider significance of their lives in the prologue to his book, Ramachandra Guha writes: “The lives and doings of these individuals constitute a morality tale for the world we currently live in. This is a world governed by paranoia and nationalist xenophobia, with rise of jingoism in country after country, and corresponding contempt for ideas and individuals that emanates from outside the boarders of one’s nation. Narendra Modi, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India, Donald Trump and the white supremacists in America, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in England, Xi Jinping and his Confucian Communist Party in China- all see themselves as uniquely blessed by history and by God. No foreigner, they believe, can teach them anything. This book tells us that they can” As India marks its 80th Independence Day, reclaiming the founding spirit of its freedom struggle is an urgent imperative: an empathetic and syncretic nationalism rooted in universal humanism, mutual respect, and ethical self-restraint. True freedom demands dismantling the parochial and xenophobic impulses that threaten both domestic harmony and global peace, reaffirming Swaraj as an enduring promise of collective liberation.Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal.