Growing distance with Gandhi’s ideas

June 2022 issue know lastA magazine published by the Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti (GSDS), stood out for a reason, The issue was dominated by Vinayak Savarkar, a central figure in the Mahatma Gandhi assassination trial. Savarkar was acquitted for lack of sufficient substantiated evidence, but the Jeevanlal Kapoor Commission, established in the 1960s, concluded: “All these facts were disastrous for any theory other than a conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group”. No further inquiries were made about Savarkar’s role as he was dead by then.

in an article know last, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Vijay Goel, GSDS vice-president, tries to put Savarkar at the same place as Mahatma Gandhi – “Savarkar’s place in history and stature in the freedom struggle is no less than that of Gandhi.” GSDS is headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Prime Ministers have always presided over the GSDS since its inception in 1984.

The point is not to express outrage, but to recognize that people (beyond those who call themselves Gandhians) need to be concerned about this sordid undertaking, which clearly has top official approval. Savarkar’s singularization and Gandhi’s downfall have implications in the context of India’s future essence.

In the last four years, there has been a steady appreciation of Godse, the assassin of Gandhiji, by people’s representatives who have supported the ideology of Hindutva; At least two MPs from the ruling party are examples. Popular haters without fear of consequences abuse Gandhiji and praise Godse in the media. With Hindutva’s efforts to reshape the narrative on the 2002 Gujarat riots, this reconstruction of our past is a piece. A scrubbing as well as the recent arrests of civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Director General of Police RB Sreekumar. Textbooks are a part of this effort to eliminate references to the 2002 violence. Control over new networks of communication (social media and television channels) and older more formal ones (school textbooks, the Archaeological Survey of India and most newspapers) facilitates this tinkering with memory and knowledge.

Gandhi Shakti

Gandhi’s non-violence was a powerful idea and a weapon, not cowardice as Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) portrayed it. At a prayer meeting in September 1947, Gandhi invoked the epic, the Mahabharata, as a call for war as a call to action completely different. he said; “It is said that the Pandavas lived in this Purana fort during the Mahabharata period.” Gandhi said, like the Pandavas, Muslims “are under your protection, and under my protection”. His invocation of the Shanti Parva – a part of the Mahabharata that contains a deep rumour on the futility of the conflict after the war – was taught by Bhishma to Yudhishthira. royal righteous Nurturing people, keeping them together and practicing non-violence.

In March 1931, while presenting a resolution on Fundamental Rights at the open session of the Congress in Karachi, Gandhi emphasized the religious tolerance and religious neutrality of the state. Gandhi’s message was not about Hindu reform, but about the interpretation of higher ideals as the soul of Hinduism, holding it to a higher position – something bound by an unfavorable relation to any Abrahamic belief or hostage to hatred. not in the form.

This was in direct contrast to how MS Golwalkar, the RSS or Savarkar interpreted Hinduism. Golwalkar was clear in his appreciation of the way in the 1930s to deal with the “minority problem”: he had to “either merge himself with the national race and adopt his own culture, or until the national to be at His mercy”. Caste may allow them to do so and leave the country at the sweet will of the national caste”. Shruti Kapila in Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (2021) states that Savarkar’s ideas of the masculine and masculine and India His desire to claim the history and place of the nation saw the nation as a battlefield, making violence the only desirable means of accomplishing a supremacist goal.

A discourse that seeks to undermine Gandhi would have dire consequences on diversity among Indians and all those who share the Indian dream as it provides them with rights, emancipation and space. If the nation is now merely a faith and a permanent line between the two identities that Hindutva politics (Hindu and Muslim) draws about, then the entire larger project of India will be in jeopardy, even if it is not visible now. It was a structure that Gandhi vehemently opposed and paid for with his life. Now, to take down Gandhiji and cut out important parts of India’s plural past from his memory, so as to prepare everything to cast the Hindu as the victim and the Muslim as the oppressor, its There will be implications.

real world results

India’s education system will be immediately affected by this distorted history. The Indian education system, with all its shortcomings, enables Indian students to compete at the highest levels globally. But what will happen in the next few years if the social sciences are about leaving empires in India between the 12th century and the 17th century? Or is the teaching of ancient India without its many cultures, religions and contradictions, on the rich debate that still leaves a mark? This would be akin to the Islamization of Pakistani textbooks, in which social studies would become ‘Islamic studies’, and where vast and rich aspects of the subcontinent were left uneducated. With more than 60% of India being under the age of 26, the now-submerged thoughts will last the life span of this now-young population. In short, for a long time.

book excerpts | Gandhi’s Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of ​​India

But the more serious consequences of attempting to organize India’s reality as a nation in the Golwalkar-Savarkar framework relate to the very nature of India itself. The Golwalkar-Savarkar framework is, by self-admission, rooted in the now rejected and failed idea of ​​states in the European imagination of the 1930s. This can only increase social distancing. Communal incidents are on the rise. Even in the pandemic year, there were 857 communal incidents, a 96% jump over the 2019 incidence. India was never incident-free, but top leaders clearly called for harmony and peace. What we hear instead loudly today is the complete silence of the top leader. The distance between Hindus and non-Hindus is tried to be treated differently by those in power in place of religion in everyday acts and in public life, be it prayer, hijab or groups affiliated with ruling ideology. Be it the work done by or by the leaders of the ruling party when nationalism is equated with Hinduism.

reject solidarity

Most Indians live under and need help to bridge and bridge the inequalities and injustices that are a product of history and recent times. Even a constitution cannot remove the structural rigidity accepted by the scriptures. The attempt is to use Savarkar to push Islamophobia in such a way that there is only one understanding of the ‘majority’. The pivot of this subordinate majority in India is not an act of faith. The majority, or Bahujan, which includes Hindus, minorities, Adivasis and Dalits, consists of millions of poor, marginalized, disadvantaged and those who are assessed by a number of metrics. The attempt to bind them in a permanent box of faith in the world of Hindutva is not to allow India’s genuinely oppressed majority to build solidarity.

The data on economic inequality (on the Sachar Committee report on the socially disadvantaged and Muslims) has clearly established the extent of the backwardness and oppression of the majority of our countrymen and women. A push towards a worldview that has promoted deeply divisive ideas from the days of the two-nation theory ensures that the real issues – which modern politics deal with and respond to – do not come to the fore at all. That is, not only the Muslims but the whole of India has suffered a setback.

weakening social justice

Taking away Savarkar by snatching Gandhiji’s soul affects the future of Dalits. There can be no justice for India’s most grim victims if the misdeeds of the millennium are not acknowledged and a step is taken to “destroy” the system that fueled severe social and economic oppression. Burying the call for social justice in a systematic attempt to make it ‘Hindu vs Muslim’ is a sinister sub-project that has resulted in significant social changes, particularly in north and western India, through electoral politics.

Gandhiji’s glasses have been removed to promote the cleanliness campaign as a call for cleanliness. But without his forceful and revolutionary companion to fight untouchability in Hinduism, it is about burying the real message of Gandhiji. For some years, the work of cutting Gandhiji’s symbols to their essence is going on. But on the cover page of Savarkar know lastWe may be entering a deep phase of separation from Gandhiji’s ideas, even as ideals.

Seema Chisti is a journalist based in Delhi