GODSE IS BACK
The raising of Nathuram Godse’s
statue is not an isolated act by fringe elements. It isa political manoeuvre,
aimed at rewriting the history of the Indian polity
Days after
Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament Sakshi Maharaj called Mahatma
Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse, a “patriot,” the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu
Mahasabha, an ideological affiliate of the Sangh Parivar petitioned the
government to provide space for installing busts of Godse at public places
across India. Describing him as ‘an irreplaceable asset to the intellectual
discourse of Hinduism’, the Mahasabha’s national president, Chandra Prakash
Kaushik, stated that, “There needs to be a thorough investigation of the events
that led to the assassination, so that vilification of Nathuram Godse ends and
the people of this country know that he was not an assassin by choice but was
forced to make the decision to kill Gandhi.”
Godse’s
narrative, as told by the Hindu Mahasabha, functions in important ways to posit
Hindus and Hinduism as being under siege and asserts the idea of India as a
Hindu nation. To retell the story of the Mahatma’s murderer, as a patriot, goes
to the heart of politics seeking to manipulate, manufacture and mobilise public
support to consolidate the power of the majority. Revisionist history
strategically demands for revenge as a form of justice to right historical
wrongs committed under non-Hindu rulers. They do this by spreading anti-Muslim
and anti-minority sentiments by rewriting history and often replacing it with
myths that are clearly at odds with reasoned historical works for public
consumption.
This stratagem of
rewriting history dates back to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the ideologue, who
articulated the ideological foundations of Hindutva. In his 1922 essay
“Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?” he speaks of the Hindu nation as being grounded “in
land, blood and culture.” He defines the Hindu identity based on inclusion and
exclusion. He includes Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs as inheritors and partakers
in the legacy of Hinduism. But he clearly excludes Islam and Christianity as
foreign ideologies brought from outside.
In 1925, he
writes, “Hindu Pad Padshahi” where he propagates Hindu-self rule, and writes
about the 17th century Maratha ruler Shivaji, who led the Marathas in a series
of battles against Muslim rulers.
For Savarkar, his
Hindu nationhood is an inclusive “territorial, racial and cultural entity”, and
in his later writings he specifically identifies Muslims as the “paradigmatic
other, and the most persistent threat to Hindutva”.
Mobilising
the Gods
Mobilising the Gods for political ends has a long chequered
history in the subcontinent. As the political movement for Indian independence
took shape, mobilising the masses through use of religion and religious
symbols, became an important political strategy employed by various factions.
This included Gandhi, who understood the value of powerful political symbols
that can be used to mobilise the country’s disparate population. He actively
employed Hindu symbols, phrases and icons towards nationalist ends – bonfires;
the image of India as a Hindu goddess; and invoking Ram Rajya as the ideal form
of governance. In India where poverty and illiteracy are rampant, these symbols
had profound political implications. While it galvanised the Hindu majority,
this political practice severely alienated Indian Muslims who were unable to
find themselves reflected in a nation defined by Hindu history, gods, symbols,
and the Gandhian ideals of Ram Rajya. It also contributed to the
communalisation process that would eventually lead to the partition of India.
Almost fifty years later, the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi campaign employed similar
strategies to mobilise popular support for its vision of Hindu nationhood. It
reintroduced and promoted Lord Ram and Ram Rajya as the symbolic centre of
Hindu India.
The most consistent and principled critique of the use of religion in
the name of nationalism is found in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. His
novel, The Home and the World (‘Ghare Baire’) dramatises how
violence and killing become requisite rituals when the individuals place blind,
uncritical nationalism on a pedestal. Tagore analysed symbols, phrases, chants
and icons employed towards nationalist ends, and the harm they could do.
Throughout his life, he consistently critiqued the use of religious symbolism
as exclusivist and sectarian in nature, warning as early as 1915 that violence
would be an inevitable and a natural consequence of the strategy of
mobilisation that uses “symbols embedded in an exclusivist cultural-religious idiom”.
His prophetic words came to be played out not once, but many times since.
H.M. Seervai, formerly the Advocate General of Bombay, jurist and
author, writing in Partition of
India: Legend and Reality ,
opines that M.A. Jinnah’s object was not partition but ‘parity’. He presented
his authoritative arguments after painstakingly sifting through 12 volumes of The Transfer
of Power 1942-7 documents and
historical records. It was also Seervai’s argument that Jinnah greatest fear
was Hinduisation of India and its effects on its Muslim population.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the ‘parity theory’ advanced by
H.M. Seervai is secondary. However, it remains relevant today that we recognise
that growing “religious nationalism” is a genuine fear among the country’s
minorities. The imperative for a secular polity, where the country’s minorities
have real political choice and constitutional safeguards are crucial today, as
it was in 1947. In a secular democracy, citizenship is the civic religion.
Religious nationalism is the antithesis of this principle and excludes the
notion of a secular state, and denies equal participation of those who do not
identify with the dominant religion. Without equal citizenship, Article 15 of
our Constitution that prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race or
caste becomes meaningless.
Violence manufactured through riots, destruction of religious sites such
as churches, organising religious conversion camps, beef bans, rewriting
textbooks, censoring works of history, literature and fiction that challenge
the ‘Hindu’ version of history, appropriating political icons, and raising
monuments are all carefully enacted acts of mobilisation aimed at constructing
the Hindu nation. This disastrous marriage between religion and nationalism
will ultimately subvert the values that have held this nation together, because
it substitutes with murderers and symbols the place meant for substantive
values of secular statehood, equality, and justice. India’s future lies in
pluralism, parity, reasonable and principled cosmopolitanism and not with
settling scores in history.
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