Gandhi and the Hindutva Right
From
Nehru to Patel and Ambedkar, the saffron party has appropriated
freedom-fighters or tarnished legacies. Gandhi, however, poses a
different problem.
- subhash gatade
‘Death ends all enmity’ (Marnanti Vairani) goes a maxim in Hinduism.
The story also
goes that when Ravana was on death bed, Ram had even asked Laxman to go
to him and learn something which no other person except a great scholar
like him could teach him, declaring that though he has been forced to punish him for his terrible crime, ‘you are no more my enemy’.
It is a different matter that Hindutva supremacists
-- who are keen ‘to transform Hinduism from a variety of religious
practices into a consolidated ethnic identity’ -- are believers in the
exact opposite.
For
them, once the enemy is dead, the enmity flares up without any limits.
They have no qualms that their adversary is no more to defend himself/
herself.
It
has been more than five and half years that they are in power at the
Centre and we have been witness to complete vilification, demonisation
and obfuscation of many of their adversaries, all great leaders of the
anti-colonial struggle. Of course, few were found to be ‘lucky’ enough
that were promptly co-opted/appropriated by them, of course, in a
sanitised form.
Thus
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who spent more
than 11 years in British jail, and was a darling of the youth, and was
chosen by Mahatma Gandhi as his successor, and without whose visionary
role independence in India could never have been imagined, stands
obfuscated and demonised.
Whereas
the likes of Sardar Patel, BR Ambedkar and Gandhi are being co-opted
and attempts are on surreptitiously and not so surreptitiously to
package and present them as icons of the Hindutva movement itself. As an
aside, one needs to mention here that it has been years that Gandhi and
Ambedkar have been included in their list of ‘Pratahsmarniy’ (worth remembering in the morning).
Interestingly,
there is a dual move vis-a-vis Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘greatest Hindu of
his times’ -- where one is witness to his ongoing stigmatisation, and
simultaneous co-option/appropriation.
One
can recall how it started with reduction of the Mahatma as an icon of
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (October 2014) -- and brushing aside his legacy of
anti-colonial struggle, or the way Khadi Village Industries Commission,
without any qualms, substituted Gandhi’s photo with that of Narendra
Modi, who, according to a senior Minister in Haryana’s cabinet, had
become a greater brand of Khadi than Gandhi. Or Gandhi’s killer,
Nathuram Godse, the first terrorist of independent India, being called a
‘patriot’ on the floor of the House, or his increasing glorification in
the country and plans to establish temples to Godse in different parts
of the country. The stigmatisation even went to the extent of his
assasination being ‘re-enacted’ in Aligarh by activists of a fringe
Hindutva formation etc.
The latest in series happens to be utterings of the ‘motor mouth’ senior MP of BJP, Ananth Hegde.
Speaking
at a public event in Bengaluru, Hegde described the freedom struggle
led by Mahatma Gandhi as "drama" and said his "blood boiled" when he
read history and "such people came to be called Mahatma".
Hegde,‘an
admirer of Nathuram Godse’, even castigated the whole freedom movement
and the freedom fighters, who had “asked the British how they should
fight for freedom”. According to him the independence movement was
“adjustment, understanding, 20-20 (cricket)”. “Those who never saw a
lathi nor received a blow from a lathi are today described as freedom
fighters in the pages of history,”
As
expected, the outrageous statements made by Hegde, who was even a
cabinet minister in the last Modi cabinet, received widespread
condemnation. There were calls to take action against him. One also
learnt that formally the BJP leadership was said to be uncomfortable
with Hegde’s remarks, which has still failed to take any action against
Pragya Thakur who had glorified Gandhi’s assassin many a time, and it
has supposedly issued a notice to him to explain his remarks.
What
is worth underlining is that despite the gravity of the remarks which
can be construed as creating disaffection between communities, latest
reports mention ‘no sedition case — the preferred weapon these days — had been slapped against Hegde’
Would
it be correct to say that Hedge’s remarks were just a slip of the
tongue or were deliberately made to provoke controversy to deflect
attention from the government’s immediate troubles? Looking at his
seniority in the party and his many outrageous statements earlier, which have even led to cases being filed against him earlier, it would be difficult to believe that they were inadvertent or so.
Remember,
there is nothing surprising as far as statements by Hegde are
concerned, which not only denigrate Mahatma Gandhi but also the great
freedom struggle. They resonate with the essential concealed disdain
towards the anti-colonial struggle of the Indian people which, according
to them, brought to power ‘pseudo-seculars’ and their allies and did
great harm to the cause of a Hindu nation. Instances galore show how
its’ founders ridiculed the martyrs and made fun of people’s struggle.
This is Hedgewar, the founder member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Patriotism
is not only going to prison. It is not correct to be carried away by
such superficial patriotism.(CP Bhishikar, Sanghavariksh Ke Beej: Dr.
Keshavrao Hedgewar, Suruchi, 1994, p. 21.
Here is a quote from Golwalkar, the second supremo of RSS about martyrs:
There
is no doubt that such men who embrace martyrdom are great heroes and
their philosophy too is pre-eminently manly. They are far above the
average men who meekly submit to fate and remain in fear and inaction.
All the same, such persons are not held up as ideals in our society. We
have not looked upon their martyrdom as the highest point of greatness
to which men should aspire. For, after all, they failed in achieving
their ideal, and failure implies some fatal flaw in them. (M.S.
Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Sahitya Sindhu, Bangalore, 1996, p. 283)
Third,
any student of the independence struggle knows that it is a ‘weak
point’ as far as Hindutva formations in general, or RSS in particular,
are concerned. Much has been written on the fact that not only did RSS
not participate in that struggle and focussed itself on ‘organising
Hindus’, but that it even deterred its own activists from joining it.
Interestingly,
there is a strong commonality between Hindu communalists as well as
Muslim communalists. Neither the Hindu communalists, led by the likes of
Savarkar and Golwalkar nor the Muslim communalists, led by the likes of
Jinnah, participated in ‘Quit India’ movement. Their support to the
British rule also becomes evident when one witnesses that it was the
same period when Hindu Mahasabha was running coalition governments in Bengal and parts of today’s Pakistan with Muslim league.
Coming
back to the denigration of Gandhi, a key question arises why the Sangh
Parivar and its affiliated organisations cannot stop this double move
vis-a-vis Gandhi, where they want to appropriate him, co-opt him as well
as vilify/demonise him simultaneously.
One
can recall an interesting analysis by an educator with background in
positive psychology and psychometrics when Hindu Mahasabha activists
were arrested along with their leader, Puja Shakuni Pandey, for enacting
the scene of Gandhi’s assassination in front of cameras and sharing it
online. The video of the said incident went viral where Puja Pandey,
called ‘Lady Godse’ by her followers, was found shooting at Gandhi's effigy and celebrating his assassination.
Rohit Kumar had asked:
This
is Hindutva’s heyday. The RSS reigns supreme. Gandhi has officially
been co-opted and reduced to a pair of glasses and a broom, so why so
much hatred for a man who is dead, and for all practical purposes gone
from the body politic?
Or has he?
It looks like hate, but could it actually be fear?
Explaining
the nuances of behavioural psychology which describe hatred and fear to
be two sides of the same coin, he had further asked:
Could
it be that the spirit of the Mahatma is alive and well, walking the
streets and alleys of India? Satya and ahimsa, as we know, were the
‘weapons’ with which he waged his ‘war’. Is it possible that over the
past five years, every time the Hindutva organisations and leaders have
seen those two most powerful of all ‘weapons’ in action, they have also
seen the spectre of Gandhi?
Looking back, one can see merit in his argument.
How
does one explain the Modi-Shah regime, one which looked triumphant till
just the other day, being put on the defensive suddenly? The victory of
2019 -- with more number of seats and an increased percentage of votes
-- followed by the triumphalism associated with triple talaq move,
followed by the overnight dissolution of a state from the map of India,
throwing to the bins the agreement reached with the Kashmiri people
decades ago and the Ayodhya judgement, everything looks remote now.
Why
it is that millions of Indians -- young and old from different
sections, regions and strata of society -- suddenly rose up to defend
the Constitution, rejecting the anti-constitutional move to make
religion a criteria of citizenship. Why it is that the Preamble of the
Constitution, which was drafted when Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime
Minister of India, a man which the saffrons have demonised umpteen
times, could suddenly become a rallying point of this upsurge of the
masses? Why is that Shaheen Bagh --the historic protest by women
discriminated since centuries on the basis of religion and gender - has
emerged as a new symbol of non-violent resistance, and is inspiring
similar such protests the country over?