When will India realize that hypernationalism is a disease of the mind, most lethal and vicious? Its fall out can be clearly seen in the fact that no factor other than the hype created by the spectators, media, and every institution in the country around cricket had the singular and unmistaken role in the defeat of the Indian cricket team in the World Cup 2023. It was a mindless pressure to perform that took the undoubted toll on the team just as it does in students who commit suicide, employees who lose their minds, and people who sink into depression. Courts, doctors, school administrators have created a punitive framework against parents who pressurize their children to perform where putting an excess burden on children to excel in examinations is punishable by law. Yet, how could the same Indians mindlessly instigate a team to win a match of cricket?

The use of the term Bharat Army, a “sanatanized” version of a right wing ultra nationalism arouses the metaphor of war as if winning a match is not only a matter of honour but also a matter of life and death. The phenomenon of hyper nationalism has been much studied in the past century and it has been more or less agreed that it is a projection of victory onto the fetish of a nation The high decibel sound, the blue tops of the spectator, all of the hundred thousand of those who were seated as if India was in uniform shows that beneath the rosy picture, India is a defeated country filled with sad men and women, cast into inauthentic existences who find their moment of living in screaming and shouting to use the sound to manifest the Cup just as music of Tansen was believed to light a fire or to bring rain.

While the spectators screamed victory as if they were baying for blood, the leading singers of the generation were singing to the lyrics, Jeetega India. This shows the perversity of the Indian spirit. We are using cricket for glorying our lives that, must have in our minds turned into a sham and music to lend sublimity to that sham. At the commentary box, even the veteran cricketers of international standing invested their minds in speculating about the win as if they were talking about the stock exchange. No insight was provided on the game.

What was purportedly done to cheer, somewhere down the line transformed into a veritable hooting. What started off as motivation transformed into its opposite, a challenge that seemed to say, come on you will have to climb to the peak because in your natural state you cannot. The Indian team’s morale shrivelled up while the Australians’ irritation turned into aggression. That is the outcome of hypernationalism.

If Kapil Dev was not invited then it was because we were not celebrating cricket, we were also considering his achievements as a shame on the present generation. In the relentless pursuit of victory, anyone else’s victory becomes equal in every measure to our own defeat. The success of our predecessors seems to taunt us, we need to obliterate history, rewrite it many times to make it illegible. Inviting Ranvir Singh who played Kapil Dev and not Kapil Dev is an act that must be read in the same way as manipulating the history syllabus.

That hypernationalism is a perversity was best evident in the dancers; badly choreographed, poorly coordinated, messy formations, and garish unrelatable colours of costumes. A victim of right-wing politics is aesthetics, the obscene overshadows the aesthetic, beauty is hooted as lewd. Just as hypernationalism cannot tolerate victory, it cannot tolerate art. Art is a victor’s discourse, simply because it attains unity, and hence an achiever. Hypernationalism belongs to the realm of the victim, one who cannot attain authenticity.

However, the long tunic in purple and pink of two thirds of the dancers and the golden banians and knickers of a third had the only good thing about it, it indicated that in Gujarat’s subconscious lies its deep connection to Nubian Africa.