Anil
Nauriya
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In
December 1995, a Supreme Court Bench delivered a judgment taking a
mild view of Hindutva. Some aspects of the record of this judgment,
involving BJP and Shiv Sena candidates, make one shudder. It was
delivered a few months before the general elections and the BJP came
to power at the center for thirteen days. The
Hindutva ideological assault was directed at Gandhi rather than at
anyone else because he and his influence had reduced the Hindutva
forces to desperation. When Gandhi fostered feelings of respect for
all religions, he did so even at the cost of his life. Gandhi
sought to create and promote the conditions in which a secular state
could exist. Some scholars try to pit Gandhi against Nehru. There was
a creative tension between the two. Yet there could hardly have been a
politically effective Nehru without a politically potent Gandhi. Those
who make the separation between Gandhi and Nehru often see themselves
as part of certain pre-independence traditions, which happened to be
at variance with the freedom movement. This is a position that comes
easily, for instance, to the Muslim League tradition and also to some
sections of the Left.. Embracing Nehru while professing to turn their
back on Gandhi is their way of coming to terms with the past. Here
they shoot at their own feet. Nehru, separated from Gandhi, is almost
like a tree without roots. The
BJP too, in its formulations since 1990-91, has tried to isolate Nehru
from Gandhi. With Nehru thus isolated, “the Nehru model” made,
from its point of view, an easier target The
project of the secular state had Gandhi’s backing. On the eve of the
national day in January 1942, Gandhi delivered an important message:
“What conflict of interest can there be between Hindus and Muslims
in the matter of revenue, sanitation, police, justice or the use of
public conveniences? The can only be in religious usage and
observances with which a secular state has no concern” Till
the Seventies, the Jan Sangh and its associate groups openly targeted
Gandhi. Since the BJP was created in 1980, it has followed a two-fold
strategy towards Gandhi. First, it tries intermittently and
selectively to appropriate him. It recalls that he spoke of Ram; but
it prefers to forget that he spoke also of Allah and that at least as
early as as 1909 he spoke of Khuda-Ishwar. It recalls that he spoke of
a Ram Rajya. But it chooses to overlook the fact that he spoke of it
as a non-sectarian ideal state, as opposed to the British rule, which
he described as “satanic”. Nor is the BJP anxious to recall that
Gandhi spoke similarly of Khudai Sultanat and the Kingdom of
God. In
accordance with this attempt to appropriate Indian nationalism, the
BJP leader, Mr. LK Advani, launched his rath yatra from the August
Kranti Maidan in Bombay, where Gandhi had signaled the start of the
1942 struggle. The
second element in the BJP’s strategy has been that, even as it
attempts to appropriate a distorted Gandhi, it seeks also to “put
him in his place” In this effort, the rival imaging of Vivekananda
and of Subhas Chandra Bose is convenient to the BJP and the RSS.
Vivekananda died before the organised birth of the Hindu Mahasabha and
the RSS. There was no occasion for him to comment on these
organisations. Bose was no longer around for two years before freedom.
Therefore, there was no occasion for conflict between him and the most
feverish years of Hindutva. But appropriation has its limits. The
negative historical record of Hindutva apart, the most insurmountable
difficulty in its attempt to appropriate Gandhi is the matter of his
assassination. Why,
then, has virtually no political party woken up to commemorate this
martyrdom? This may be a case of an opportunity missed. It is a
reminder also of a multiple allegorical assassination of Gandhi at a
time when an Advani is able to merrily appropriate even the August
Kranti. The
Congress (I) evidently does not quite know Gandhi. Nor does the party
represent the tradition of the Indian National Congress of the freedom
struggle. That party more or less disappeared in 1969 and thereafter.
A remnant of it, perhaps imbued to a greater extent with the old
spirit, was appropriately known as the Old Congress. This group merged
with the Janata Party in 1997 and, like the Socialist party, is now
known only to history. Thus it is only by default that the Congress
(I) is associated in the minds of the people with the pre-freedom
Indian National Congress. When
the leaders of the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1993 accused Gandhi of
having supported Varna Vyavastha, that is the four-fold Varna
order, the Congress (I) leadership had neither the will nor the
wherewithal to challenge it. Gandhi’s repeated statements that caste
“must go” and, especially from 1945 onwards, that there was
“only one varna today” were perhaps not even known to the
Congress (I) members. It was left to Madhu Limaye, to comprehensively
answer the BSP. Since
the Congress (I) posed willy-nilly as the inheritor of Gandhi’s
legacy, it was tempting for the BSP to seek to attack Gandhi in a bid
to attack the Congress (I). In this it attacked not the historical
Gandhi to whom the Dalits were the “nearest and dearest”, as
Ambedkar had acknowledged in a warm tribute in the Rajya Sabha on
September 6, 1954. In essence the BSP attacked the Gandhi appropriated
by the Congress (I). A false Gandhi was pitted against a fake Ambedkar.
The real Gandhi and the real Ambedkar had shown some consideration for
each other. The Congress (I) and the Janata Dal have still not
understood this. They fear a partly misinformed vote bank and are
hesitant to point to the real Gandhi and the real Ambedkar. It
is also possible that some sections of the Janata Dal (and the RJD
that has emerged from it) feel that they have no electoral reason to
raise the issues concerning Gandhi’s assassination. The Dal is
created primarily for winning elections. Gandhi is not sectarian
enough to help win votes. A
section of the Muslim middle class has its own peculiar dilemma.. It
is too close still to the intensive propaganda conducted against
Gandhi by the Muslim League prior to Partition. But this propaganda
was directed at creating two nations and it was, therefore, directed
at a leader, who had stood for one nation with the protection of
minority rights. The task now is to weld that one nation together on
the principle of non-discrimination. The earlier propaganda has been
kept alive by some academic centres belonging especially to the former
colonial power. These centres are not anxious to encourage to
encourage studies of, say, Muslim groups and leaders who took a
positive view of Gandhi and stood for a more constructive involvement
with the freedom movement. This scholarship seeks justification of the
colonial policy. For it only one nationalist historiography must be
attacked and that is the Indian, which it undiscerningly brackets with
the Hindutva. For this scholarship, British supra nationalist and some
other sectarian nationalist historiographies are almost sacrosanct.
This scholarship requires that Gandhi be painted saffron rather than
as representative of the Indian nation. For this it is necessary for
this scholarship to seek to erase the distinction between Gandhi and
his assassin. The
erasing of this distinction is precisely the politics of the BJP. To
colonial historiography this distinction is seemingly of minor
importance. To rationalize the colonial policy it is necessary for the
colonial scholarship to present the entire freedom movement in
exaggerated sectarian colours, while minimizing the extent to which
the movement in fact resisted Hindutva and sectarianism generally.
Here there is a triple convergence. The colonial agenda converges with
the Hindu communal effort at appropriating the freedom movement as
well as with the pre-Partition Muslim communal agenda. This trinity of
forces has often acted to hold aloft the same tripod. Savarkar
declared on August 15, 1943 at Nagpur: “I have no quarrel with Mr.
Jinnah’s two-nation theory. We, Hindus, are a nation by ourselves
and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two
nations.” Savarkar
himself was acquitted in the Gandhi murder case. But Gandhi’s
assassin never made any secret of the source of his ideological
inspiration. The
distinction between Gandhi and his assassin may be sought to be
minimized by the colonial scholarship, but the distinction is critical
to the survival of Indian society. |
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