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We Indians are very insecure about our
heroes. A scholar who retold, without endorsing them, some old stories
about Shivaji’s parentage found his book banned and burnt. A writer who
made some disparaging remarks about Rabindranath Tagore was censured by
the West Bengal Assembly. Another writer was roughed up after he wrote a
(admittedly nasty) book about B. R. Ambedkar. And I am myself still
coping with a barrage of hate mail that followed a piece I wrote six
months ago on the R. S. S. leader M. S. Golwalkar, which merely
reproduced his own (admittedly nasty) remarks about Muslims and other
minorities.
In 2007, we imagine our heroes to be flawless. I wonder if this was
always so. Yudhishtra and Rama were both capable of deceit and deviant
behaviour—and our ancestors were happy to be told so. Now, a Dalit will
not abide the mildest criticism of Ambedkar, a Maharashtrian will demand
total reverence for Shivaji, a Bengali ask that you share his wide-eyed
worship for Subhas Chandra Bose and, more recently, Saurav Ganguly.
These prejudices are usually manifest at local or sectarian levels, but
sometimes they inform the policies of the mighty Government of India
too.
Thus, when the BJP was in power, a historian who had written critically
about Savarkar would be blacklisted from academic appointments in the
gift of the state. The pattern is reproduced under the present Congress
regime—except that to be blacklisted now you need to have written
critically about Indira Gandhi.
Speaking as a writer, I find that there are only two Indians one can
write honestly about without fear of retribution—Mohandas K. Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru. God knows there is plenty to criticize in both cases.
Gandhi was a bad father—as recent biographies of his sons Harilal and
Manilal testify. Some would say that he was a worse husband. And he was a
stern mentor, forcing his disciples to follow his own quirky ideas with
regard to clothing, diet, and sexuality.
The list could go on—and it must. Gandhi was manipulative in his
dealings with the Congress, disregarding democratic procedure, most
famously in his unseating of Subhas Chandra Bose from the party’s
presidency in 1939. He made major political mistakes—as in the Khilafat
movement, which gave a boost to the mullahs, and in the Quit India
movement, which quite possibly made Partition inevitable.
Nehru’s flaws were also substantial as well as consequential. He
treated his wife even worse than Gandhi. He was a mostly absent father.
To his colleagues in the national movement he could appear distant and
aristocratic. But this snobbishness had political costs too. As a
Brahmin and an anglicized Socialist, Nehru distrusted businessmen as a
class and the United States of America as a country. These personal
prejudices led, on the one hand, to a stifling of the Indian economy,
and, on the other, to an unfortunate cooling of relations between the
two great multi-ethnic democracies on earth.
Turn, next, to his political errors and misjudgements. Had Nehru not so
arrogantly rejected the Muslim League’s proposal to enter into a
coalition government with the Congress in the United Provinces after the
1937 elections, the two parties might have found a way to keep India
united when the British left. After Independence, the country was made
to pay dearly for Nehru’s under-estimation of the military strength of
the Chinese and his corresponding overestimation of the administrative
abilities of V. K. Krishna Menon.
I have couched these criticisms in neutral, academic, language, but one
more usually hears them expressed in more colourful terms. For example,
Ambedkarites see Gandhi as an ‘enemy’ of the Dalits, whereas for a
Hindutva ideologue he should be considered the ‘father of Pakistan’. The
abuse heaped on Nehru by free-marketeers on the one hand and by
Lohia-ite leftists on the other is also very pungent, and in the
conventional sense of the term (a sense now rendered redundant) wholly
un-Parliamentary.
Indians, whether lay or academic, left-wing or right-wing, men, women
or children, feel free to criticize Gandhi and Nehru wherever they wish
to and in whatever words that come naturally to them. Why do we not then
have the license to say what we want about other major figures in our
modern history? Why this taboo on criticizing, on the basis of solid
historical evidence, Bose in Bengal, Savarkar in front of radical
Hindus, Ambedkar in a Dalit meeting, or Indira Gandhi in the vicinity of
10, Janpath?
One reason we are free to dump on Gandhi and Nehru is that neither is,
was, or ever will be a sectarian leader. Despite the best efforts of the
Muslim League, many Muslims, among them such devout ones as Maulana
Abul Kalam Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, stayed with Gandhi. Despite
the criticisms of Ambedkar and company, many Dalits saw Gandhi as being
on their side. The portrayal of Gandhi as either a ‘Hindu’ leader or an
‘upper caste’ leader was made with great determination, but with
limited success. No one even tried to represent him as a ‘Gujarati’,
since his identification with the other parts and provinces of India was
as deep and sincere as with his own.
Likewise with Jawaharlal Nehru. As Rajmohan Gandhi has pointed out, the
main reason the Mahatma chose Nehru as his heir—above Patel,
Rajagopalachari, Azad, Kripalani, or Prasad—was that his personality and
political beliefs transcended the divides of religion, region, gender,
and language. No one thought of Nehru as a man of the Doab, or as a
Hindu, or as a male chauvinist. He was greatly admired by South Indians,
by Muslims and Christians, and by women, large sections of whom saw him
as working for and on behalf of their own best interests.
Ironically, and tragically, it is the fact that they so effectively
transcended sectarian boundaries while they lived, that makes Gandhi and
Nehru so vulnerable to criticism and abuse now. For Indian politics is
increasingly defined by interest groups based on the identities of
religion, region and caste. Each group has a vested interest in
protecting and promoting their own leaders, leaders who may be living or
long-dead. Thus Dalits in Uttar Pradesh will not abide any attacks on
Mayawati or Ambedkar, and Shiv Sainiks in Maharashtra feel compelled to
respond, violently if necessary, to public criticisms of Bal Thackeray
or Shivaji.
Notably, each group is unwilling to share his or her leader with
others. Sometimes this is to be welcomed—who but a bigot would want to
follow bigot a anyway? At other times this possessiveness has led to a
serious diminution of the stature of the leader concerned. It is
something of a pity that Vallabhbhai Patel has now been reduced or
redefined to being a Gujarati, Tagore to a Bengali, and Ambedkar to a
Dalit.
And so, of all our icons and heroes dead or alive, the two whom we can
most fearlessly criticize are the two who did most to build a free and
democratic India. This, to be sure, is a land of paradox and
contradiction, but of all the paradoxes and contradictions abroad this
one must surely count as the most bizarre. That we can treat Gandhi and
Nehru as we do testifies to their greatness, and perhaps also to our own
meanness. |
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