The origin of the United States' ongoing tariff war against India is not merely an economic phenomenon; it is deeply rooted in the cultural ethos, too. This is a civilisational conflict between Hindu nationalism and Western Nationalism.
In this backdrop, it becomes essential to initiate a discussion on the subject. Author Arun Anand explores this civilisational conflict at length in his recent book, The Soul of a Nation: Understanding Hindu Nationalism. Released at a time when the tariff war is at its height, the book offers valuable insights into the deeper causes of tension between Indian civilisation and the Western world. Anand writes, “Unlike Hindu nationalism, whose core is spirituality and the dictum of ‘Vasudheiv Kutumbakam' (the whole world is one family), the core of Western nationalism is competition for supremacy.”
He draws upon western scholars like John Hutchinson, who underlined this tendency of Western nationalism in ‘Nationalism and War', “States and nations are often in tension, and a heightened sense of nationhood typically arises at times of state crises in war. In triggering a reconsideration of national values, this often throws up ensembles of competing repertoires that can shape both the (re-)formation of states and the international system. In short, nationalism is a dynamic force for political change…. Nations are moral communities, in whose identity formation and reproduction a key role is played by the ‘memories' and myths of war that sacralise them. Commemoration of the war dead becomes central to this cult in the modern period because of secularization and changes in the character of wars which increasingly threaten whole populations.”
Hutchinson observes that such myths often emerge organically from different sections of society as people seek meaning and direction in times of existential crisis. These narratives, he notes, can carry powerful oppositional energy. When memories of war become part of everyday life, they continue to shape collective identity, offering metaphors through which broader challenges are interpreted. Anand draws on this insight in The Soul of a Nation to underline how Western nationalism has historically relied on war memory and conflict-driven myths, in contrast to the spiritual and inclusive foundation of Hindu nationalism.
“Whereas most scholarship on warfare and nation-state formation has focused on the early modern period and the nineteenth century, …most nation-states and the current international system came into being recently through geopolitical changes arising from nationalist military revolutions that culminated in waves of sudden imperial dissolution,” writes Anand.
However, generally held assumptions, such as that the age of empires is gone, are false. Most of these new states are fragile or have emerged in contested borderlands between great states. The resultant security problems have encouraged recurring projects of re-imperialisation, in which we see a variety of symbioses between national and imperial principles.
According to Anand, “Unlike other areas of the world, dominated by empires, the European subcontinent was a permanently divided multi-actor civilization, culturally united by its Roman and Christian heritage but with polities engaged in incessant military struggles to become a successor imperial hegemon. It was the site of a military revolution in late medieval/early modern Western and Central Europe that privileged the formation of centralized territorial units with strong commercial economies that became templates of the later nation states.”
The ideology of nationalism, powerfully articulated in the French Revolution, emerged in late eighteenth-century Europe, out of the wars between European states. This generated new forms of war that welded peoples to states and an intensification of state-making that sought to cage populations in national societies. European warfare was responsible for the gradual development of an interstate system, first on the continent, and then worldwide as European nation-states engaged in global imperial expansion.
"Post-war settlements such as the Treaty of Westphalia, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations, and finally the United Nations established the nation state as the planetary norm (according to the Western concept of nationalism).”
The emergence of what Anand terms “White man's nationalism” in Europe unleashed a wave of colonisation across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It also fuelled civil wars within Europe, numerous inter-state conflicts, two world wars, and even the ethnic cleansing of minorities by dominant powers that rose on the tide of nationalism. This turbulent legacy, Anand argues in The Soul of a Nation, explains why large sections of Western society - including academia, media, and the intelligentsia -continue to view nationalism with deep suspicion.
He further argues, “In the West, utterance of the word ‘nationalism' brings back memories of loot, plunder, bloody wars and a quest for material wealth and military superiority.”
Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had pointed out this fallacy of Western Nationalism in the early decades of the 20th century when he said, “The political civilisation which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies; it feeds upon the resources of other people and tries to swallow their whole future.
It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness. Before this political civilization came to its power and opened its hungry jaws wide enough to gulp down great continents of the earth, we had wars, pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent miseries, but never such a sight of fearful and hopeless voracity, such wholesale feeding of nation upon nation, such huge machines for turning great portions of the earth into mince-meat, never such terrible jealousies with all their ugly teeth and claws ready for tearing open each other's vitals.
This political civilisation is scientific, not human. It is powerful because it concentrates all its forces upon one purpose, like a millionaire acquiring money at the cost of his soul. It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes of lies without shame, it enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking great pride in the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling this patriotism.
And it can be safely prophesied that this cannot go on, for there is a moral law in this world which has its application both to individuals and to organised bodies of men. You cannot go on violating these laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. This public sapping of ethical ideals slowly reacts upon each member of society, gradually breeding weakness, where it is not seen, and causing that cynical distrust of all things sacred in human nature, which is the true symptom of senility.
Anand's book puts the origin of the conflict between the West and the Indian civilisation aptly, “ You must keep in mind that this political civilisation, this creed of national patriotism, has not been given a long trial. The lamp of ancient Greece is extinct in the land where it was first lighted, the power of Rome lies dead and buried under the ruins of its vast empire. But civilisation, whose basis is society and the spiritual ideal of man, is still a living thing in.. India.”
(The writer is a columnist and independent commentator)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
