Make India Meme Again

Sri City: There is a particular unease that comes with living in today’s India, a democracy that proudly calls itself the “world’s largest,” yet increasingly defines itself by identifying and excluding its supposed enemies within. I recently read Anand Teltumbde’s essay in The Wire, “India, a Country of Anti-Nationals,” and was struck by the clarity with which it exposes the new architecture of this exclusion. In a nation that once built upon pluralism and argumentation, to be critical is now to be suspect. We have arrived at a point where dissent is not just discouraged, it is criminalised, packaged in the language of “anti-nationalism,” and circulated as common sense. Words like freedom, security, citizen, and nation are being recoded in ways that privilege conformity over conscience. But what does it really mean to be “anti-national”? Is it to question authority, or to refuse conformity? Is it to speak truth to power, or to simply demand that power answer for itself? The label is so elastic that it can stretch to fit anyone who resists, journalists, students, activists, or even farmers. 

In contemporary India, the “anti-national” is not an enemy of the nation but of the narrative. And this, perhaps, is the defining feature of our moment. The state no longer fears opposition, it happens to fear interpretation. To interpret reality outside the sanctioned script is now an act of defiance. The tragedy is that this transformation has unfolded not through overt repression, but through the slow normalisation of suspicion, where citizens are trained to police one another’s patriotism. 

Populism thrives on this precise polarisation. It feeds on division and depends on the invention of a moral binary, “us” versus “them.” In Narendra Modi’s India, the “them” has been recast over and over: from “urban Naxals” to Muslims, from intellectuals to comedians, from student protestors to retired generals. It is no coincidence that the term “anti-national” rose to prominence precisely when populism became the governing logic, when the legitimacy of power began to depend not on accountability, but on the performance of loyalty. 

The populist leader’s greatest trick is to convince the people that he is the people. Once that conflation takes root, disagreement with the leader becomes treason against the nation. And so the machinery of patriotism turns into a spectacle with flags, slogans, televised oaths of allegiance, while the real substance of democracy starts to erode. But how does one resist in a democracy that has learned to punish resistance in the name of protection? When dissent is rendered illegitimate, the very foundation of citizenship changes. The citizen no longer participates in shaping the state, they can only affirm it. It is in this climate that the label of “anti-national” becomes most potent as a political weapon to silence difference and cultivate fear.

Take, for instance, the recent episode when Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of electoral manipulation surfaced just days before Independence Day. It should have ignited a national reckoning, a collective inquiry into the transparency and legitimacy of our democratic machinery. Yet, almost over

night, that moment was buried beneath headlines about Delhi’s “stray dog ban” following a Supreme Court ruling. The timing was uncanny, and the effect unmistakable. The media frenzy over canine control eclipsed the more pressing issue of political control. What does this say about our democracy when the public discourse is redirected from governance to gossip, from constitutional integrity to sensational distraction? 

Recently, a case of “official trolling” also came about, with the Indian Air Force marking its 93rd anniversary, turning wartime memory into lunchtime mockery, a satirical feast dubbed as “Operation Kitchen.” With dishes named after Pakistani terror targets, this was statecraft seasoned with schadenfreude. Here was the state flexing its tongue as much as its muscle, performing victory through metaphor. It was addressed online as “official trolling” done tastefully. Yet, one must wonder, what does it mean when a government trolls another government, and why do we call it patriotism instead of propaganda? 

Maybe this is the new grammar of statehood, where the troll replaces the diplomat and the meme becomes the message. Politics is no longer just the art of governance, it is also the management of emotion. To make the citizen feel vindicated, even in vengeance. But when trolling becomes institutionalised, empathy really does become treason. The same citizens who applaud a bureaucratic pun at Pakistan’s expense recoil back when artists joke about unemployment, inflation, or inequality. It is not humour that offends us, it is direction. Satire aimed upward feels like an assault, satire aimed outward feels like nationalism. The state’s trolling is nothing close to comedy. It is probably more about the theatrics of it, keeping rage safely aimed across the border. And yet there’s something fascinating, almost postmodern, about this self-aware nationalism. It knows it’s performing but insists that the performance is real. It memes its enemies into submission, narrates its wars through hashtags, and weaponises wit as soft power. But this high-definition patriotism also reveals fragility. A democracy confident in itself wouldn’t need to troll. It would reflect, debate, and even self-deprecate. Our current model, however, thrives on spectacle because spectacle distracts, and distraction is governance by other means. 

Perhaps, then, to be “national” today is to endorse laughter from above and censor laughter from below. It is believed that irony is a privilege of the powerful, a controlled resource to be distributed by the state. In this sense, humour is really a tool of hierarchy. This reveals that the moral economy of modern nationalism, where the right to speak, mock, or question depends on proximity to power. A truly national spirit, however, would be one that can survive mockery. To endure satire is to acknowledge one’s own fallibility, and that is the first act of democratic maturity.