Our Speaker needs to take it easy. He might have meant it casually but his statement that nobody should say ‘Viva Portugal’ was not taken too lightly by social media users, who vented their ire on Facebook and other platforms. Nobody likes to be morally policed. Our elected representatives need to stay away from needless polarising controversies and focus on development instead. With the dawn of cable TV channels, internet and social media platforms, the world is now a much smaller place. Moreover, India and Portugal share extremely cordial relations. Nationalism is much more than singing slogans or not singing them. We should not bring down its meaning in such a narrow way. There is no instrument to measure patriotism so what is the basis for one person to feel he is more patriotic than the other or one community to believe it is more nationalist than the other? We cannot define who is a nationalist and who is not based on such parameters. Swami Vivekananda had said, “All truth is eternal. Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls”. India belongs to all those who live in it. It is in our country’s interests that a liberal plural form of nationalism is propagated.
