Every nation lives with two parallel realities: the private world of individuals - their personal joys and grievances - and a collective world – say, the “National Mindset.”
The National Mindset is the belief that a country’s culture and purpose are greater than any single citizen. It gives individuals meaning in relation to a larger whole. Built from shared beliefs and a common aspiration for the future, it offers refuge under a unifying idea of the nation.
That mindset is a powerful uniting force. When people see themselves as part of something bigger, they volunteer, contribute, and prioritise duty over entitlement. A nation that shares such a mindset becomes resilient and hard to fracture.
Because it is so powerful, adversaries try to do the opposite: they increase economic strain and exploit fault lines to erode unity. In open democracies this is easier, because openness can be weaponised.
Three common methods stand out.
1) Psychological operations (PsyOps): This shapes emotions, motives, reasoning, and behaviour without physical force. They work through selective focus, redacted historical referencing, regular leaks, targeted narratives, biased ratings, subjective rankings, influencers, paid media, and social-media manipulation. The objective is perception control: weaken resolve, create confusion, and make resistance costly or unattractive.
2) The Cloward–Piven approach: This tactic deliberately overloads local welfare systems with eligible applicants demanding freebies to trigger fiscal crisis and force centralised, large-scale entitlements. Applied as ideological pressure, it can demoralise industry, disincentivise enterprise, raise the tax burden on wealth creators, suffer from imposed tarrifs, retard financial progress, and ultimately destabilise governments.
3) Repetition and narrative capture (Goebbels’ law): “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Operators look for “useful idiots” - the perpetually disgruntled, the uninitiated, the idealistic youth and amplify simple, emotionally charged messages until they stick. Youthful belief in equality and fairness is admirable; experience teaches that societies must prioritise the greatest good for the greatest number. Rewarding unequal outcomes equally can be unfair and counterproductive. However, some just age but never really grow up.
Foreign manipulators exploit such tensions.
A contemporary example is how the demand for diversity has sometimes been turned into a moral absolutism, as if it has timeless universal application.
“Unity in diversity” is an ideal, not an automatic mechanism. Morality and social policy must be tested against workability: what actually sustains social cooperation and produces results. Workability grows from natural interdependence. Despite differences, communities must find common ground in basic values and a shared vision.
Bonding forces must outweigh divisive forces. Ideas should be debated and the best adopted voluntarily; purpose must remain the anchor. Where differences persist, the least common denominator and progressiveness should guide policies that pursue the common good. Widely held ideas stay; the rest must be willingly set aside.
Bharat should never be reduced to binaries. Our strength is cultural pluralism.
We can agree to disagree on some issues while cooperating on all others. We must respect one another’s legacies and traditions insofar as those legacies produce constructive outcomes. Realism and mutual respect should guide cooperation to build a future we share.
This requires clarity on non-negotiables: what we call virtue and vice, who our friends and foes are, and which ideals we are willing to defend, volunteer for, and sacrifice for.
Reciprocation should be the operative code. When elders teach these by example, identity-centric communities learn that cooperation and assimilation enhance their own futures. They integrate better and, in doing so, strengthen the nation’s integrity - a pattern visible in the success of many Non-Resident Indians who became model migrants abroad.
Absent such integration, “Unity in Diversity” can decay into “Adversity in Diversity.”
We constantly see attempts to divide and manipulate our perception. Below are a few examples:
During COVID-19, headlines implied India was losing the greatest number of lives, obscuring the fact that India had one of the lowest deaths per million.
Recently, when we turned out to be the fastest-growing large economy nation in the world, analysts discounted it by claiming “India missed the AI bus” to spook our markets; while critics simultaneously called ours “jobless growth.” How exactly is jobless growth possible in a place where the AI bus had left India?
Perhaps they were ignoring the rapid expansion of gig work. But then, they portrayed gig workers as numerous yet unprotected, a narrative that invites regulatory overload, making that sector uncompetitive.
If GDP rises, commentators start to focus on low per capita GDP. Well, they conveniently ignore high per capita debt in shrinking economies elsewhere.
At every turn, positively evolving stories are bypassed and facts are reframed in ways that hurt our national psyche. We must learn to ignore undue contempt and compliments alike.
Because interpretations follow power rather than truth, powerful Indian stories must be told powerfully. Policy alone does not build nations. Stories do. Nations cohere around the narratives people choose to believe about themselves.
Our task is to shape and tell those stories that strengthen the National Mindset!
Bolo Bharat Mata Ki …. Jai Okay Please! 🇮🇳
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