GS-IV specific Flashcards
The lies of Nationalism?
- The points in the answer can be used in different contexts. I just liked them. They can be used as per need , in Essays or GS answers!*
- don’t look for much coherence. remeber them as separate facts*
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death,” said the novelist E M Forster.
A baby was born in the cargo bay of an US aircraft carrying out evacuations from Afghanistan. The mother, an Afghan woman, went into labour mid-flight and delivered a girl after landing at a German air base. Is the little girl a German citizen since she was born on German soil? Is she a citizen of the “land of the free”, since her mother went into labour on an American flight? But what if she is born outside US airspace? Does the fact that her mother is a refugee of a torn land catapult her into the community of the stateless?
The ideology of nationalism is about two centuries old, but its apparatus of borders and belongings continues to produce the exhausting tangles that led Manto’s character in Toba Tek Singh to lie down between India and Pakistan “on a piece of land with no name”. Worse, it continues to push humans into peril, whether it is the potential “non-citizens” cast out of Assam’s NRC or the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, fleeing from Syria, who drowned while crossing from Turkey to Greece.
The idea of “nowhere people” is a cynical fabrication. Humans belong — to each other, to expanding circles of family, community, country — unless structures of power and money decide to cast them away.
