Understanding Nationalism and Patriotism

A lot of forces has worked together to shape the world. Some forces shaped the landforms while others shaped the political structure. Nationalism and patriotism are two such political forces that has played important role in shaping the modern world. In this essay we will try to understand Nationalism and patriotism with reference to the views of Mahatma Gandhi about both these political theories.

Let us start by first defining Nationalism. Nationalism can be defined as political aspiration of most of the population of a nation achieved through common action and loyalty towards the nation state. Now let us understand this definition using the pre independence scenario. India has been the land of invaders, every invader brought with them their own culture and practices and this invading tribe used to be adjusted with native population as a different caste and this process created a lot of castes. Now because of lot of adjustments throughout history Indian population always remained divided and felt it easy to adjust then to oppose. Mahatma Gandhi, our father of nation realized this situation very well and decided to find a common factor to unite the people of India. Gandhiji first made efforts to establish Britishers as the common enemy for the entire population and then urged people to make sacrifice for the nation to establish Swaraj.  Gandhi ji once said ‘An individual must make sacrifice for family, a family must make sacrifice for village, a village for district, a district for province and a province for nation and if required a nation can be sacrificed for world’. Gandhi Ji first gave political aspiration to large section of population and then asked people to fight collectively to establish Swaraj. One thing we must understand here is Gandhi ji’s nationalism was to unite people, similarly nationalism can also be used to divide people, this negative aspect of nationalism was used by Hitler to establish Nazi Germany.

Lets now discuss the second term i.e patriotism. Patriotism is simply the feeling of love for one’s country for whatever it is. Let us understand patriotism as well with the scenario we discussed above. Pre independence society was divided on the basis of caste and religion and this was the biggest concern of Gandhi ji, as a divided society cannot fight collectively for common good, hence he promoted the idea of patriotism as  loving one’s nation through self correction and  fight against social evils like caste system. The basic difference that we can understand between nationalism and patriotism through above scenario is while nationalism is related to common interest of all the people in a nation and is politically motivated on the other hand patriotism is related to individual’s love for his country and is not politically motivated. An individual can express love for his country through any means, even a simple activity like throwing garbage in dustbin to keep country clean can be said an act of love for your country. So as a citizen keep loving your country and be ready to make sacrifices for your country, your society and for humanity.