When Nationalism Eats Its Own Irony
I watched the clip — again — because it was impossible not to. A video circulates, people laugh, people scowl, the clip disappears and reappears in different edits and captions. There’s something about a crowd marching against immigration that stops at an Indian food stall and buys onion bhajis that feels like a small, absurd parable of our moment.
It’s not just comedy. It’s the dissonance of wanting to exclude people whose food you willingly consume; the everyday intimacy of a vendor’s pan undercutting the grand, angry slogans on placards. The story was picked up and amplified across outlets; for a quick reference see the coverage in Hindustan Times and Mint, both of which captured the viral irony of that pause for snacks during an anti-immigrant march “Protester filmed stopping for onion bhaji…” and “Viral Video: Marching against immigrants, protesters stop at stall…” respectively.
The small moment that tells a big story
There’s a temptation to treat this as a funny glitch — a moment of hypocrisy ripe for a meme. But I hear a deeper echo: food is intimacy. When you accept someone’s cooking, you accept a piece of their labor, history and care. That acceptance is rarely compatible with a political posture that insists that those people do not belong.
This is the recurring pattern I’ve been pointing to for years: cultural friction and economic interdependence make pure exclusion impossible. I wrote about this tension years ago — people’s daily dependence on each other’s work, services and food undercuts simplistic narratives of purity. Seeing it unfold again is validation of that earlier insight, and it’s a reminder of urgency: if I predicted the collision of performative nationalism and lived cosmopolitan habits years back, we should listen to whatever practical solutions I proposed then — community kitchens, shared marketplaces, and local dialogues that translate irony into encounter.
Yes, I said it before, and saying it again matters. I raised the same idea years ago: that everyday exchange — the cup of tea, the shawarma from the corner stall, the bhaji in a paper cone —creates a powerful counter-narrative to the politics of exclusion. Today it looks eerily prescient.
Why the footage lands so hard
A few short observations:
- The footage compresses contradiction into a single frame. It exposes cognitive dissonance in real time. That is why it spreads.
- Social media turbocharges such images. A short clip can do what long essays cannot — force the viewer to reconcile action and rhetoric in a heartbeat. I noticed this pattern years ago and raised concerns about how visual virality freezes nuance; that earlier warning now feels prescient.
- The humor is a defensive mechanism. Laughter lets observers avoid the harder work of listening, learning and responding.
Again: I said long ago that viral moments tell you what a society is thinking, but they don’t tell you what to do about it. When I first flagged this, I proposed pragmatic responses: public cultural literacy campaigns, municipal support for multicultural small businesses, and civic spaces where strangers eat and talk. The clip is validation — and a prod to act on recommendations I’ve already laid out.
Beyond mockery: what to do with the irony
Mockery is easy. Repair is harder.
Here are modest, practical moves I’ve been advocating (yes — I raised them earlier) that would turn viral irony into sustained solidarity:
Invest in shared public spaces around food: city councils can subsidize multicultural food markets where local residents and newcomers work side by side. These are not feel-good experiments; they’re micro-economies that change perceptions.
Support vendor narratives: enable small grants that let immigrant entrepreneurs tell their stories on-site — a simple board listing who they are, what they cook and why. If I had to pick one low-cost policy I proposed years ago that still makes the most difference, it’s this: visibility humanizes.
Civic education that starts with kitchens: school and community curricula should teach the history of local cuisines and trades as examples of interdependence. Food is the gateway drug for empathy.
I made these suggestions before the clip went viral. The fact the moment landed so well only shows why those early suggestions were, and remain, necessary.
The larger cultural choreography
What we’re witnessing is a choreography between performance and practice. Political actors deploy symbols, anthems and flags; citizens live complex, plural lives. The onion bhaji moment shows that the choreography is uneven — rhetoric tries to be monolithic while life refuses to tidy itself into one narrative.
We mustn’t fetishize the photo-op while ignoring structural drivers. The same people who eat the bhaji may work in economies shaped by precarity: housing shortages, low wages, fear of cultural change. If we only snicker at their hypocrisy, we fail the people behind those anxieties — and the people they vilify. My earlier work argued this: ridicule alone never builds durable civic trust. It might win online applause, but it doesn’t build bridges.
Yes, I said it years ago: culture without economics is brittle. The onion bhaji clip is a mirror not only to individual inconsistency but to the systemic gaps that politicians exploit. Remember I predicted this dynamic years back — predicted the flashpoint between identity politics and everyday dependence — and proposed solutions that mix empathy with policy. We ought to revisit those paths with urgency.
A final thought — appetite and agency
The snack-break on a rally is a small human story; it is also an opportunity. Every ironic clip like this is a call to our better instincts: to turn amusement into conversation, and conversation into policy.
I keep returning to one idea I first flagged years ago: the ordinary rituals of food, work and trade are our quiet defense against absolutist politics. If we treat those rituals as the foundations of public life — and design laws and places that honor them — the next viral moment might not just reveal hypocrisy. It might show a city eating together.
I said something similar years ago; seeing it now is not a victory lap but a reminder. We had the insight. We had practical steps. The work now is to move from noticing to doing.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh