The Politics of Refusal: Boycott and the Fabric of Indian Nationalism

Soon after the last siren faded along the western border, travel agents across India began fielding a curious pattern of calls. Not from families booking summer holidays, but from those calling to cancel. Istanbul, Antalya, Cappadocia—gone. Türkiye had offered diplomatic courtesies to Pakistan during the war, and that was enough. The act of refusal—unwritten, uncoordinated, but collectively understood—moved not through governments but through dinner tables and browser histories.

In 2024, it had been the Maldives. A cabinet minister’s jibe about Prime Minister Modi’s beach-cleaning photo op in Lakshadweep had ricocheted across the Indian internet. It wasn’t just anger—it was choreography. Influencers pivoted to “desi beaches”, travel platforms scrambled to repackage island holidays, and domestic destinations, long snubbed for their more photogenic cousins, began receiving rebranded attention. A gesture of pique became a patriotic itinerary.

This instinct is not new. Long before independence, India wielded the boycott like a blade. In 1905, when Bengal was partitioned by the British, the Swadeshi movement gave the country its first taste of economic refusal. Imported textiles were burned in town squares, foreign salt rejected, British titles returned unopened. Khadi—the uneven, handspun cotton fabric—became the skin of dissent. Gandhi refined this strategy into moral economy: the spinning wheel as iconic instrument, simplicity as posture, abstention as politics. To wear khadi was not just to deny the Empire its profit. It was to deny its premise—that Indians could not rule or clothe themselves.

The Swadeshi movement didn’t stop at what it opposed; it built its own world of alternatives. Soap manufactured without animal fat by Godrej, indigenous fountain pens—all were protest products, wielded as moral correctives to imported goods. Rooh Afza, launched in 1907, became not only a summer drink but a summer declaration: India could nourish itself. To boycott was not to abstain but to replace—to unmake one dependence while rehearsing another kind of freedom.

This philosophy of refusal did not vanish with the British. It slipped into the bloodstream of independent India. When the country liberalised in 1991, economic nationalists opposed the re-entry of global brands. In 1996, the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch was formed to counter foreign capital’s influence on Indian markets. Boycott campaigns targeted Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Enron’s involvement in the Dabhol power project. Globalisation may have flung the doors open, but in the corners of the national psyche, the old suspicion remained: to consume is to capitulate.

It flared again in 2020, after the killing of Indian soldiers in the Galwan Valley clash with Chinese forces. In the days that followed, Chinese apps began vanishing from Indian phones—TikTok, CamScanner, WeChat—deleted in protest, even before the government announced an official ban. Once again, the market became memory. That was the quiet genius of the boycott: its refusal didn’t need to be announced. It spread laterally, not vertically. One’s absence became a form of presence.

The recent boycott of Türkiye and Azerbaijan underscored this enduring logic. Following their public support for Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, Indian travellers began cancelling trips en masse. MakeMyTrip reported a 60% drop in bookings and a 250% surge in cancellations for both countries. EaseMyTrip noted a 22% rise in Türkiye cancellations and 30% for Azerbaijan. The travel platform Ixigo suspended all bookings to these destinations entirely. “Blood and bookings won’t flow together,” said CEO Aloke Bajpai.

The unease extended beyond leisure travel. Çelebi Aviation, the Turkish firm that has long handled high-security ground operations at several Indian airports, is now at the centre of a national security storm. On 15 May 2025, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security revoked its security clearance with immediate effect. The move came amid growing scrutiny over Çelebi’s simultaneous presence in Pakistan, which had triggered a wave of political and public discomfort in India. For a company managing tarmac-level operations at IGI, Mumbai, and other major hubs, the optics were damning: an entity seen as straddling enemy borders was now deemed too great a risk to keep on the inside.

In 2024, more than 330,000 Indian tourists visited Türkiye, and around 243,000 travelled to Azerbaijan. Collectively, they contributed over ₹4,000 crore to local hospitality and tourism sectors. The sudden withdrawal of Indian tourists created a visible dent—not just in bookings, but in geopolitical perception. A nation had spoken through absence.

To boycott, even silently, is to speak. It tells us what a society fears, what it reveres, what wounds it carries forward. The Indian boycott has never been merely about goods. It has always been about belief—its erosion, its restoration, its redirection. One buys from those one believes in. One ceases to buy from those one no longer trusts.

But the contours of boycott have changed. Swadeshi was slow, sacrificial, rooted in locality. Today’s boycott is fast, frictionless, ambient. It does not require a hartal or a spinning wheel. A screenshot, a caption, a single trending hashtag can suffice. Where once abstention required discipline, today it requires little more than broadband. The gesture has become lighter, but also more volatile.

In a country where justice can feel procedural and sluggish, the boycott offers a form of immediacy. It is available to the homemaker and the CEO alike. It is democratic, in the most elemental way. It requires no funding, no platform, no speech. Merely a refusal. A pause.

That pause, repeated across time, is what links khadi to TikTok, Türkiye to colonial salt. The boycott is one of the few gestures that has travelled intact from colonialism to the present—adapting, shapeshifting, enduring. From cloth to app to travel, it has always revealed where the fractures lie.

And so, the boycott remains not just a protest, but a form of annotation. A marginalia scribbled beside the narrative of nationhood. It says: here, we hesitated. Here, we turned away. Here, we felt a disruption so deep that even consumption could not proceed unmarked. And in turning away, we sometimes saw ourselves more clearly.

AzerbaijanBritish colonialismnationalismswadeshiTürkiyeWeb Exclusive