I'm a millennial and I'm disgusted with nationalism
Disclaimer: I have never read Savarkar or Marx. I like fiction and pray at the altar of Kundera. I hated what the UPA did to India's image and was disgusted by what happened in Godhra. I am Hindu by birth and proud of it. I don't want to kill all Muslims.
I like to watch football.
I supported Modi in 2014 because he seemed like the lesser of two evils. At least he never made a mockery of himself in random speeches and had done well in Gujarat.
Now I am disgusted by the idea of Modi and what he has done to my fairly chilled out India.
I don't know what the Modi wave has done for the economy (check oil prices and GDP numbers from Manmohan Singh's last year and compare them with Modi's), but I do know that this regime has people getting into squabbles everywhere, sometimes escalating into beating of female journalists, sometimes lynching of innocent people who might have stored beef in their fridge.
I travel in the Metro everyday and now I am scared to say what I feel sometimes. Would I get beaten up if I tell a fellow passenger that I like eating beef sometimes? Would I be lynched if I say that one of the coolest persons I've ever met is a Muslim?
I am not going to get into how "all religions are equal" because in India they aren't, at least that's what I've noticed ever since my formative years. But I haven't noticed so much of anger and fear in people before.
The JNU row or #PatriotWar or whatever Times Now presenter Arnab Goswami had trending on Twitter doesn't interest me. What does, is the lack of objectivity and perspective among India's decision makers.
Vikram Chauhan beat up journalists outside a courthouse and he's cruising around giving interviews in prime-time TV. Moreover, BJP MLA OP Sharma, after beating up professors and students, is saying he would've shot them outside Patiala House Court the other day.
Isn't beating up people, saying you would shoot them outside a court more offensive to the Constitution than a student raising slogans in his college? (the video of which may be doctored.)
JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar got lawyers, pleaded his case in a court, thereby doing everything by the book, not because he's a nationalist or anti-nationalist, but because he respects the "rule of law" which is far more patriotic than what the Chauhans and OP Sharmas of the world are doing.
I don't know if what is happening is intolerance or pseudo-patriotism, but it is not really making anyone's life better. Well, except that of Union HRD minister Smriti Irani who now is more of an Indian than me because she has now made it a point that we raise the tricolour over certain buildings.
I wonder if we would be allowed to speak our mind in those buildings.
*Going back to watching football.*
P.S. I hope watching football over cricket doesn't make me anti-nationalist.