In the weeks since the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 and India’s military strikes on Pakistan on May 7, something unsettling has been unfolding – on our television screens.
The prospect of war became indistinguishable from viral marketing slogans: “strike back”, “teach a lesson” and “avenge” became punchlines in a social media meme battle that trivialised suffering and glorified violence.
On both sides of the border, ordinary citizens – many far removed from the realities of frontline life – engaged in a virtual battle that obscured the human cost of conflict.
The jarring contrast between virtual rage and lived reality begs a question: what have we made of nationalism? Perhaps, more importantly, what has it made of us?
Over a century ago, a quiet voice from Bengal had sensed where unchecked nationalism could lead. Writing in 1917, during the First World War and at the height of imperial ambition, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore warned of nationalism becoming a mechanical and dehumanising force.
He saw how it could hollow out compassion, reduce individuals to instruments of the state and transform the nation from a space of shared meaning into a machinery of power. His concern wasn’t love for one’s homeland – it was about what happens when that love is stripped of conscience.
Tagore’s 164th birth anniversary was on May 7. His ideals offer a moment of sobering reflection today. As he wrote in Nationalism in India, “Freedom which is not moral freedom is only a form of bondage.”
When collective pride replaces inner reflection, when nationalism silences rather than awakens, it ceases to liberate and begins to control.
Meme wars and Tagore’s nationalism
In Nationalism in India, Tagore drew a vital distinction: society, he said, was a living, ethical community, a space of emotional growth and mutual care. The “nation”, by contrast, was a political abstraction, a structure driven by power and efficiency.
“The Nation,” Tagore wrote, “is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose.” This shift, from community to machinery, he feared, would strip away the inner life of people. His critique was especially courageous because it came at a time when nationalism was gaining ground in India’s anti-colonial struggle.
Tagore supported India’s freedom but was uneasy about copying Western models of statehood rooted in militarism and exclusion. He warned that without rethinking our political consciousness, we might reproduce the very patterns of domination we were fighting against.
Much of today’s militant nationalism mirrors what he foresaw: where dissent is branded betrayal and conformity is mistaken for commitment. It replaces moral imagination with ideological obedience. Tagore believed in a form of belonging that was expansive and deepened humanity.
At the heart of Tagore’s vision was what he called universal humanism: a belief in the essential unity of all beings. This vision was rooted in Indian traditions: the non-duality of the Advaita school philosophy, the inclusive ethos of the Bhakti movement and the wisdom of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – the world is one family.
A nationalism that forgets this interconnectedness, Tagore believed, is not power but spiritual decay.
Tagore’s humanism offers a quieter, deeper resistance. One that does not demand uniformity but respects the individual soul. One that doesn’t glorify war but grieves its necessity.
Tagore was not blind to injustice. He stood firmly against colonial domination. But he also asked: What kind of people are we becoming in our fight for freedom? Are we losing our inner compass? “India is no beggar of the West,” he wrote, “but she should never try to dominate by imitating her.”
Nationalism in India today is less about community and more about compliance. It no longer inspires, it interrogates. A shared cultural ethos has been reduced to a tool of exclusion. Even silence can seem suspect.
The aftermath of the Pahalgam attack made this clear.
Social media, as the primary arena for shaping public sentiment, encouraged a form of digital nationalism aimed at virality – AI-generated war simulations and “clap-back” memes to dehumanise the other side rather than encourage dialogue. The meme, and other social media content, became tools to signal loyalty, to perform outrage, flattening human complexity into consumable content.
It became a contest of slogans, the very danger Tagore warned of: a nationalism loud in pride but hollow in ethics.
“Whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics,” Tagore wrote. Memes, slogans and outrage do not emerge from vacuum but are shaped by the emotional habits of a society: the tendency to idolise outdated forms, to look away from injustice, to silence grief.
If one does not confront those habits, the same walls that provide safety today will quietly become prisons tomorrow.
The performative nationalism encouraged by social media distracts us from deeper questions: why do these conflicts keep recurring? Who benefits from these cycles of outrage? What do the families of soldiers need: viral edits or empathy?
Grief, mourning and mirrors
In moments of crisis, there is a tendency to dismiss philosophy as idealism. But it is in those very moments when rage overtakes reason that philosophy matters most.
War can feel abstract for many: a news item, a reel, a statistic. But for a soldier’s family, war is absence, a knock on the door, a silence that never lifts. Grief, real grief, has no borders. It looks the same in every home, on either side of any line.
Reclaiming nationalism with Tagore’s does not mean rejecting it but re-rooting it in conscience. Tagore asked us to reimagine the nation as a sanctuary of responsibility rather than a fortress of pride; where patriotism is not loud, but honest. Where empathy is not weakness, but wisdom.
Aggressive nationalism erases the shared nature of human pain. A nationalism that only celebrates sacrifice but cannot sit with suffering is not patriotism but emotional outsourcing.
If we are to restore meaning to our national life, we must restore our capacity to mourn. Mourn without spectacle, without expectation. Mourn not just the dead, but the violence we carry inside us.
In a noisy world, Tagore’s voice is quiet but insistent: feel, pause, reflect. See the other not as an enemy, but as a mirror. Tagore has no easy answers but only a hard, essential question: what kind of people are we becoming?
Minal Patil is a philosophy educator and researcher exploring the intersections of socio-political thought, ethics and contemporary public discourse.
