HISTORY, LEGACY AND TWO JUNE 22S PAST | Confrontation among political parties to claim a slice of historical legacy has often stooped to ridiculous levels. Whom did BR Ambedkar, Netaji Bose or Sardar Patel belong to? What of the Chapekar brothers? Whom does history belong to? Who can claim and who cannot claim a slice of historical legacy? These are abstract, abstruse questions that seem to have acquired a life of their own in recent days on the issue of Narendra Modi’s and the BJP’s claim on the memory of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Was Patel a Congress leader the BJP and Modi are attempting to appropriate? Is every historical character to be judged only in terms of contemporary political lines? At which point does partisan politics become a common history? Is there a cut-off date? The trigger for this debate is, of course, the announcement in Gujarat of the plan to build a 600-foot statue of Sardar Patel, the world’s tallest statue when it is completed. This is a project driven by Mr Modi and many of his opponents have criticised it as a waste of money. Ironically, on June 20, the UPA Government said it had given clearance for the construction of a 300-foot statue of Shivaji, just off Mumbai and in the Arabian Sea. On the urging of Maharashtra’s Congress-led Government, environmental regulations had been relaxed. This writer is consistent that gargantuan statues, reminiscent of one-party states from the Cold War age, are hardly necessary to commemorate past figures. There has to be a tasteful and more utilitarian mechanism. Even the abundance of Babasaheb Ambedkar status across the north Indian countryside, of uneven quality and almost always painted in a loud blue, needs to be revisited at some stage. This is a personal, aesthetic view. It does not take away from the fact that Ambedkar, Patel and Shivaji are all authentic Indian heroes. Indeed, so is Jawaharlal Nehru, and someday the great man and his legacy need to be rescued from the idea that they are the intellectual property of a single party, the leadership of which is related to him. It is true Patel belonged to the Congress, but does this make him a Congress partisan in a contemporary political setting? Consider an analogy. In the late 1930s, the Congress turfed out Subhas Bose from the organisation’s presidency and sought to isolate him in the leadership. Bose left, beginning a remarkable political journey. He founded the Forward Bloc on, as it happens, this day in 1939. Today, the Forward Bloc is a small Left-wing party in primarily West Bengal. Does Bose’s legacy belong only to it? Can no modern Congress politician claim part of Bose’s legacy, just because of 1939? Irrespective of one’s voting preferences, it has to be acknowledged the Congress is a great Indian institution. Its 127-year history can be broken into roughly three phases. The first lasted from its founding in 1885 to about 1920. In this period it was a collective of emerging elites of urban India, lobbying for greater political autonomy. The second phase began when Mahatma Gandhi made it a genuine mass movement, committing it to a broader nation-building project — not just political independence but profound social reform. This phase lasted for 40 years. It ended with Nehru’s death in 1964 or perhaps with the fourth general election in 1967. Whatever date one settles on, it marks the arrival of a post-national movement Congress, one without the towering leaders of the past and evoking strong reactions, from adherents and adversaries alike, due to immediate political factors and policy choices. The Congress from the 1920s to the 1960s has a near monopolistic claim on Patel, or Nehru for that matter. The Congress from the 1960s onward no longer has that exclusive claim. There is the argument that the BJP is hijacking Patel because it has no pre-1947 stalwarts of its own, foundational figures who suffered in the cause of India’s independence. This is a decidedly problematic contention. At the simplest level, the BJP has no freedom fighter in its ranks because the BJP did not exist before 1947. An earlier incarnation of the Congress did. More substantially, is it correct to say there was no Hindu nationalist or Hindu political quotient to the freedom struggle? To do so would be to disown an entire strain of the pre-1947 era. This strain was most evident in Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab. It can be traced back to at least the assassination of Walter Rand, the Plague Commissioner of Poona, by the Chapekar brothers on this day (another coincidence) in 1897. It is worth noting that Bal Gangadhar Tilak, part of what was then considered the Congress right or its ‘Extremist’ faction, met Damodar Chapekar at Yeravada prison shortly before the latter was hanged. While he had no role in the murder, Tilak was moved by Damodar’s love for his country and in fact organised his cremation. Does Chapekar belong to India or to the BJP? If one goes by the contention that history must be current-day politics by other means, and that only the Congress has a claim on Patel, then there would the inevitable and ridiculous conclusion that only a party of the Hindu right can extol the Chapekar brothers. The past is too complex for such neat boundaries. It is not without reason that both the Akalis and the Indian Left can invoke the Ghadar Movement that electrified Punjab a hundred years ago. What draws Mr Modi to Patel? It is common to stress that the Gujarat Chief Minister, like Mr LK Advani before him, covets an ‘Iron Man’ image. Even if true, this is a facile argument. A deeper analysis is necessary. There is a robust sub-culture in Gujarat that believes Patel has not been given his due by the establishment in Delhi and its school of historiography. This is no different from a similar belief among significant sections of Bengal that feel Bose has been treated unfairly. Neither is it an electoral issue. The 2014 poll is certainly not going to be a referendum on how the Congress may or may not have treated Bose or Patel. Nevertheless both are social issues. It is possible, even probable, that Mr Modi is one of the innumerable Gujaratis who hold a grudge on behalf of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. On its treatment of Patel, the Congress (today’s political party, not the historical entity) is on the defensive. Take Patel’s Bharat Ratna. It was awarded posthumously in 1991, 41 years after the man had died. In contrast, Nehru was given the Bharat Ratna in 1955 and Indira Gandhi in 1971 (both by Governments they headed). Rajiv Gandhi got it posthumously in 1991, just before the conferment on Patel. This represented a strange oversight. In the interim period, even K Kamaraj (posthumously in 1976) and MG Ramachandran (posthumously in 1988) had been awarded the Bharat Ratna — but not Patel. It took PV Narasimha Rao’s Government to redress that wrong and name Patel for the Bharat Ratna. Rao, of course, headed a Congress Government, and the party would want to claim that Government’s act as its own.Yet, the Congress is wary of claiming Rao himself as its own. These twists an turns of legacy…
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 02:37:50 +0000
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