I feel sorry for poor Rishi Sunak. He may have become Britain’s youngest and first non-white Prime Minister by walkover, in the shitstorm that is current British politics, but he’s also India’s first British-Indian Hindu-Elite Prime Minister of another country. Not only is every Indian who knows someone who knows someone who knows Narayana Murthy’s dog walker’s cousin going to want a piece of Sunak, for a possible invite/contract/visa/citizenship, but his public life will also be dogged by a chorus of embarrassing triumphalism from India.
Because there is one way in which Indian pseudo-nationalists really are freer than the rest of us, and that is in their courageous rejection of a) logic and b) self-respect. Imagine the liberation of not having to make sense, and being completely immune to cringe—in the realm of political imagination, those are superpowers. You are free to make a jackass of yourself without ever caring that you’re pathetic.
And that’s the only way it is possible to claim national credit for any successful brown person who may once have walked past a samosa shop—if they’re successful enough, the samosa shop is optional. They are India’s, particularly Hindu India’s. We produced them, ours is their glory and glamour; ours their political clout and social capital. They owe their success to us. That’s right, their American citizenship, or British premiership, or storied corporate salary, is all because of us social media monkeys sitting in India, banging on about 12,000 years of Hindu pride for Rs 2 per tweet. And that, kids, is how to get by without self-esteem: Borrow other people’s.
Indian pseudo-nationalism has thus creepily groped many startled figures, including world leaders and CEOs. This rental self-esteem is entirely opportunistic: the same Hindu warrior now uncharacteristically defending Rishi Sunak’s friendly relations with beef on the grounds that “he’s not eating Indian cows, is he?” — will turn on Sunak like an angry cobra the minute he demonstrates allegiance to his actual country which, I feel it’s important to repeat, is the UK. The man got where he is without you, okay? Stop debasing yourself by pretending that you had anything to do with it. It’s not even allegiance to country that matters, but allegiance to the pseudo-nationalist’s particular self-interest. Those who once celebrated Parag Agrawal becoming head of Twitter are now celebrating his sacking, because Twitter banned a load of right-wing accounts for all the right reasons.
Nothing turns a pseudo-nationalist on like success in the West. They certainly don’t seem to care about the Indian heritage of Guyanese President Mohammad Irfaan Ali. But it’s gotta be a powerful Western nation, because nobody pays the blindest bit of attention to half-Indian Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa. Of course, neither of them is Hindu.
Since logic is no constraint, when the West platforms and showers applause on non-right-wing Indians from India—writers, say, or journalists—well, that’s proof that those Indians are colonised minions, slaves, and traitors. Nobody on the Right seemed to take much pleasure in Geetanjali Shree’s Booker Prize win; on the contrary, an FIR was filed against her book. This mind-boggling psychological agility, which demonstrates all the emotional control of a Diwali rocket ricocheting around a room, but with none of the attendant laws of physics, is a hallmark of the pseudo-nationalist psyche. It must be exhausting to live in a head like that, and in a heart so hungry for validation.
I wish them well, I do.
No, I don’t.
But I wish them a strong leader who fills them with self-worth. Sometime soon.
(Mitali Saran thinks a good asteroid could solve all our problems.)