Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi, the two prime-ministerial candidates believe in Hegel’s famous quote: “We learn from history that we never learn anything from history.” Or perhaps both believe history is unimportant, for it can be so easily distorted and made to fit their campaign imperatives.
It is a toss-up between who is the worse of the two. Some would say Rahul, given his special lineage and how shameful that he has not taken the trouble to read his own great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru’s magnum opus — The Discovery of India — or even if he has, his understanding is based on Cliff notes he used at the university. Modi, on the other hand, was a one-time tea vendor and was never cocooned from birth and had to lift himself by his boot straps. There simply was no time to read. At another level, though, Modi’s lack of historical knowledge could be more devastating because his ascendancy now is a forgone conclusion and India is likely to pay a heavy price for his ignorance. Pity that the public and the electorate are willing to put him in the spotlight. Or is the populace suffering from a self-induced amnesia, lest hard questions result in bringing the corrupt Congress party back to power?
The other contender for high office, the Aam Adami Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, has asked Modi some 16 tough questions, which had to be asked but he himself seems to have a poor grasp of history or at least of contemporary history for if he had, he would have asked searching questions — foundational in nature that revolve around what constitutes being an Indian — rather than on Modi’s alleged links to billionaire Mukesh Ambani. What then are these issues on which we need limpid clarity from Modi rather than obfuscation and opacity? While his exhortations on dynasty, corruption, lack of a muscular foreign policy, crying need for an economic policy that creates wealth and jobs need to be heeded, what is missing is his definition of what it means to be an Indian.
When he says “India first” what exactly does he mean? When he cleverly usurps Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel and loudly proclaims great historical figures are not a property of any one political party, but of the nation as a whole, he is right and also wrong. To get to the bottom of these obfuscations we need to go back to the very beginning.
Unfortunately, Rahul, by his unwanted reductionisms, has only played into Modi’s hands. For it too has to be said most unequivocally that the RSS was not responsible for the assassination of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. Nathuram Godse and his co-conspirators who murdered Gandhi were members of the Hindu Mahasabha; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) links were very exhaustively examined and Veer Savarkar, another grandee of the Hindu right, was jailed and then set free for lack of evidence. Neither the RSS nor Savarkar were ‘directly’ responsible for the dastardly crime. How then does Rahul make these wild accusations?
Monochromatic identity
However, in this phraseology — “India first” or “nation first” — we see a deliberate attempt to hide and mask the underlying philosophy of Modi and the RSS. It is no accident that Modi wishes to talk of Patel and not of people like M. S. Golwalkar, Ashutosh Mukherjee, K.B. Hedgewar or Savarkar who were the guiding lights of the RSS and the Jan Sangh, which was the precursor to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If we read the speeches of these great men of the Hindu right, we will see what exactly is meant by “India first”. It was this mind-set, philosophy, idea of a nation that set Godse on that fateful path to kill Gandhi. Godse acknowledges that in the last speech he rendered in court, when he said he accepted Gandhi as the father of the nation, but had to do what he had to because he did not believe in the India that Gandhi was setting out to create.
Historian Ramachandra Guha in his book Makers of Modern India quotes Golwalkar in full and it is there in black and white to read and understand what the founding fathers of the RSS believed in — an identity that is overwhelmingly Hindu and monochromatic: The very antithesis of all that Gandhi stood for. Technically, the RSS and the Hindu right did not pull that trigger on the Mahatma, but it is open to debate whether ‘indirectly’ this ideology of giving preponderance to Hindu majoritarianism spawned the poison that has divided India since independence. It needs to be stressed also that RSS and all the big names, starting from Savarkar, played a very peripheral role when India was fighting for her independence. Modi needs to be asked all these questions and the country needs answers.
Rahul made a very poor show in a recent television interview. Ironically, Modi found the experience of being interviewed so unsettling that he walked out midstream. Does India want such a prime minister?
Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.
