Some years ago, I was briefly in the Netherlands. The taxi from the airport was a faded green Mercedes. The driver, in a suit and skull cap, was a burly man with a white, flowing beard. He turned out to be a Pakistani and hummed a Dilip Kumar-Vyjayanthimala song: “Teri husn ki kya tareef karun.” He said he was happy—happier than he had ever been in Pakistan. He had been in his adopted country for 22 years and had no intention of going back to the land he once loved enough to flee. He was content to prefer the Netherlands because, as he put it, his two children’s education was free, he had community housing, the state covered his medical bills, and, when he retired, he would be the state’s responsibility. “Why would I not love this country?” he asked.
In his latest work, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us, Manu Joseph fixes in his crosshairs the latent psychological contract that sustains inequality—an unspoken pact in which the marginalised refrain from revolt, thereby protecting the privileged. He examines how the fragile order of the privileged is not built on justice but on tacit understandings and carefully staged illusions. The poor, he argues, abide by this unwritten contract, suppressing anger and rebellion—at great moral cost. The question he poses is not ‘why they don’t rise up’, but ‘what keeps the oppressive structure intact?’
To my mind, it’s the idea of life’s insignificance—a very Indian instinct. From birth, we are told this life is secondary to the one after. The here-and-now cannot be helped. You could call it tolerance, or a resignation so deep it borders on a quiet despair. We call it ‘fate’. And who can fight fate?
To get the perspective right on the fate of being an Indian, we must invert the patriotic cliché. The question should not be what you have done for your country, but what your country has done for you. One lives for oneself first, then for one’s family. The country is only a means to safeguard these two objectives.
Migration is India’s truest referendum. According to UN data, over 18 million Indians live abroad—the largest diaspora in the world. Every year, nearly 750,000 Indians give up their citizenship to become Americans, Canadians, Australians, or Europeans. What does this really mean? Surely, it points to the State’s failure to care for its people. If India were a corporation, its shareholders would have long sold their stock.
Even for the well-to-do, ‘loving’ the country becomes problematic the moment they step outdoors. Delhi’s Air Quality Index last winter crossed 500— the scale’s upper limit; anything above 300 is hazardous. Mumbai’s AQI hovers around 200 on most days. Compare this with London, where the average AQI is 35, or New York, at around 45. Breathing here is a form of dying. Why on Earth should anyone love such killing cities? It is a kind of abuse of the self.
Every political party, Right or Left, scrambles to establish its love for India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the chorus on the Right. On the Left, Rahul Gandhi never misses a chance to wave the Constitution like an exorcist brandishing the Bible at the devil. Night after night, TV channels go into spasms of patriotic fervour. One recurring chorus is that India is “poised to become” the world’s third-largest economy. But this is a paradoxical achievement, because the pervasiveness of poverty is everywhere. The Netherlands is the 17th largest economy in the world, yet its happiness ranking is fifth. The size of the economy represents little to the poor. A few billionaires getting richer means little to the countless Indians who live scrounging about on the fringe. Which is why there should be room to be neutral about one’s country—unless there is an emergency, say, a war.
It is not for India that we must fight, but for Indians. What is a land without its people? The true question is not whether we are the second, third, or fourth largest economy, but how secure and anxiety-free the citizen is. As of 2025, India’s nominal GDP per capita is approximately $2,878, ranking 136th globally out of 189 countries. And the Indian citizen is among the least prized of nationalities. India ranks 77th globally in the Henley Passport Index 2025. Surely you would want to ‘love’ a passport that guarantees no long clearance lines at international airports?
As jingoism becomes fashionable, freedom to dissent from the manufactured mainstream grows dangerous. At no point in post-independence history—except perhaps during the Emergency—have more Indians been charged with sedition. Between 2014 and 2020, there were 399 cases under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita). The rechristening itself might be read as another ritualistic display of patriotism. But the arbitrariness of its use is clear from the conviction rate, less than 10 convicted.
Citizenship is an accident. You did not choose to be born in a particular country, or into a religion, or under a god. Yet it is on behalf of these accidents that people fight, kill, and die. More people live and die for fiction than for fact. Perhaps these fictions, these narratives, are necessary because they give us identity. But why must one ‘love’ an accident—the accident of the country of birth. If one must relate to it, warts and all, why not ‘like’ it without being forced to love it?
C P Surendran | Poet, novelist and screenplay writer whose latest novel is One Love and the many lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)