While Tharoor can indulge in suppressio veri and suggestio falsi in bashing the non-existent while covering up the real source of danger in the contemporary world, he might remember that Scott’s paper was very much against this kind of subjective and blatant propagandist writing. The piece should have been published in the Daily Mail and the Morning Post, both of which are rabidly conservative and unsympathetic to Indian sensibilities.

Tharoor, a potential minister in the Government of India, has every right to be a Nehruvian. But as for the origins of “modern Indian nationalism”, one may have to go back to the days of Surendranath Banerjee and Dadabhai Naoroji, Bankim Chatterjee, Swami Dayanand and Swami Vivekananda. One feels even Jawaharlal Nehru himself never visualised himself as the “prime exponent of modern Indian nationalism”.

Long before India’s Constitution was conceived, long before India was pulverised by invaders, an overwhelmingly Hindu India had given shelter to Zoroastrians, the Jews and the likes of St Thomas — and that without being subjected to sermons from outside India.

The writer teaches history at Hansraj College, University of Delhi