Dawn
December 10, 2007
For the leader from Gujarat, Hitler is too mild a rebuke
by Jawed Naqvi
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, seeking a fresh mandate in next week’s polls, has been variously described as Hitler, Nero and a fascist. Now Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi has called him a merchant of death. This description he did not like. So he has been protesting. His party senior, the former BJP president Lal Kishan Advani, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Gujarat’s Gandhinagar constituency, said calling Modi Hitler really was not as bad as describing him as a merchant of death. His reasoning? “Hitler is a generic term used in India to describe leaders who are autocratic. It is a metaphor. It is not used literally.” Merchant of death, on the other hand, is “completely objectionable”.
Couched in this verbal sophistry is a telling reality. Modi’s, and indeed Advani’s, cultural upbringing has been shaped by the RSS, whose leader Guru Golwalkar propagated unalloyed admiration for Nazi Germany. Several writers have explored this link between the Hindu right with European fascism. Leftist activist Shamsul Islam has done extensive research on the subject. According to him, Golwalkar’s concept of Hindu nation it not only rested heavily on racial theories prevalent in the Europe of 1920s but it was also unambiguous in eulogising and idolising countries were racism was practised.
“Look at Italy,” wrote Golwalkar. “The old Roman race consciousness of conquering the whole territory round the Mediterranean Sea, so long dormant, has roused itself, and shaped the racial-national aspirations accordingly. The ancient race spirit, which prompted the Germanic tribes to overrun the whole of Europe, has … arisen again in modern Germany, with the result that the nation perforce follows the aspirations predetermined by the traditions left by its depredatory ancestors. Even so with us our race spirit has once again roused itself as evidence, by the race of spiritual giants we have produced, and who today stalk the worlds in serene majesty.”
Golwalkar’s defence of Germany which, led by racist ambitions, was overrunning one nation after the other and brought the world on the verge of a world war, was unbridled. “The other nation most in the eye of the world today is Germany. The nation affords a very striking example. Modern Germany strove, and has to a great extent achieved what she strove for, to once again bring under one sway the whole of the territory, hereditarily possessed by the Germans but which, as a result of political disputes, had been partitioned off as different countries under different states.”
Likewise, according to Golwalkar, “Hindusthan”, the land of the great Hindu race too happened to be “an ideal piece of land deserving in every respect to be called a country, fulfilling all that the world should imply in the nation idea. Living in this country since pre-historic times, is the ancient race – the Hindu race, united together by common traditions, memories of common glories and disaster, by similar historical, political, social, religious and other experience, living and evolving, under the same influences, a common culture, a common mother language, common customs, common aspirations.”
The fact that Modi took offence at being called a merchant of death but quietly accepted his analogy with Hitler is also reflected in the way that Gujarat has shaped into an apartheid zone under his watch. It was not a mere coincidence, notes Shamsul Islam, that by 1938, English translation of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, was translated into English as My Struggle, outlining the thesis of the superiority of the Aryan/Gemran race; Mussolini too had promulgated a “Charter of Race” declaring that Italians belonged to the Aryan race that was ethnically homogeneous and superior to others like Jews and Africans of Libya and Ethiopia. In 1939 Golwalkar’s “We, Our Nationhood Defined” appeared, which restricted the right to nationality in a Hindu state only to Hindus who belonged to the Aryan race. Hitler, as a great propagandist and practitioner of race theory, divided the human race into three categories – founders, maintainers and destroyers of culture, declaring that the Aryan race alone could be considered eligible for the first category. Golwalkar was not to be outdone. He declared that Hindus belonged to an immortal race with perennial youth. They had been a civilised polity “anadi” or without beginning even when the rest of the humanity were just bipeds. The Hindus, according to him were called the enlightened – the Aryas – and the rest Mlechhas.
It is curious, of course, how Maulana Maudoodi, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, later used the same word – Mlechhas – to prescribe the fate for the large number of Muslims who had stayed back in India following the partition of 1947. In his arguments before the Justice Munir Commission, which probed the anti-Ahmediya violence of the 1950s, the Maulana and several other Muslim leaders declared that Ahmediyas could only be treated as zimmis or second-class citizens under the sharia laws they demanded for the Islamic state of Pakistan. Similarly, they said, India’s Muslims ought to be treated as zimmis by that un-Islamic country. Maudoodi went on to say he wouldn’t mind if India’s Muslims were treated like Mlechhas and Shudras and if the Laws of Manu, a mythical hero credited with codifying the Hindu caste system, were applied on them. In other words Maudoodi and Golwalkar were together on at least one issue – that India’s Muslims could be treated like pariahs.
In Modi’s Gujarat, according to a host of researchers who have traversed its nook and cranny, the story of Muslims and Christian minorities was a shade worse than the fate of Maudoodi’s zimmis. Normally the term should apply to Islamic states where non-Muslims are not made members of the state apparatus, i.e. they are not allowed to join the civil services or the military or any other organ of the state.
But such people are nevertheless given the choice to live as private citizens and to carry out the business of life as a worker eking out a living, be it as a professional or a businessman. In Gujarat, an all-embracing boycott of Muslims, not unlike that of Jews in Germany, has been in force ever since the massacre of Muslims deepened the social fault lines in February and March 2002. Whoever wins the next elections in Gujarat, these fault lines are not likely to be erased easily, not the least because they have worked well for the state’s neo-con corporate agenda as Apartheid did in South Africa.
Someone like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is hardly expected to set a place on fire. But his visit to Gujarat appeared to have moved him to observe: “If you are with the (Gujarat) government, you are safe. If you are against them, God help you.”
Similarly, Sonia Gandhi’s merchant of death remark was an allusion not only to the large-scale killings that happened under Modi’s watch in 2002 but also to a spate of dubiously staged encounter killings of make believe terror suspects. It is believed the strategy was to strike fear in the hearts of ordinary Gujaratis – the fear of the Muslim community of Gujarat as well as a fear of an increasingly strident neo-fascist state.
Congress leaders joined the chorus of criticism on Modi’s public endorsement of Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s death in a fake police encounter in November 2005. This came on a day the Supreme Court decided to hear two applications filed against Modi in the wake of his controversial Dec 4 speech justifying the killing of Sohrabuddin. Rubabbuddin Sheikh has filed a contempt petition against the chief minister for glorifying the killing of his brother even while a petition was pending before the court.
Another appeal, by lyricist Javed Akhtar, seeking registration of an FIR against Modi was mentioned before the court. It is due for hearing on Monday though it may already be too late. Hitler had overcome similar legal obstructions in his march to power and what Golwalkar was to describe as the Nazi state’s glorious moment. That’s why Hitler is not such a bad thing to call a Hindutva acolyte like Modi. Advani is right.
|
