Tagore and Nationalism

Today's buzzwords are "national security" and "national interest". Any action is legitimate in the name of the nation, no matter how remote it may be from truth or justice. How many wars have been waged in the name of the nation? How much innocent blood has it claimed? Yet people are worked up into a frenzy when the idea of the nation is invoked - the same hollow hysteria that religion aroused in the medieval era and still does among some in the so-called "third-world" nations. Nation is the most desirable political institution of our time; a fictive concept, without any scientific grounding, it is still inviolable and enshrined in the modern imagination. Competing visions of the nation are now pushing the world to the brink of destruction. Metropolitan nationalism, with its
robust secular ideology, is bent upon wiping out the pan-religious nationalism that still enjoys some acceptance in parts of the "third world", considering it an anathema and anachronism. This monocular, exclusivist approach, an attempt by the forces of secularism to appropriate the centre of civilization, has resulted in a cycle of retribution and retaliation, a horrific dance of destruction, opening the doors to a new pandemonium.