MANINI CHATTERJEE - Manufacturing an icon: The Deendayal Upadhyaya blitzkrieg
For the RSS, Nehru is
a bigger hate figure than anyone else because he was not just a person but
an embodiment of ideals -secular, socialist, democratic- that it abhors… to
pit Deendayal Upadhyaya against Jawaharlal Nehru is a travesty of both history
and common sense. Upadhyaya may have been a committed RSS pracharak and
central to setting up and expanding the Jana Sangh, but his contribution to
nation building was, to put it politely, limited. Those who call him a
"visionary" cite his advocacy of antyodaya and his
doctrine of 'integral humanism' as proof. It is a testament to the RSS's skills
at fabricating myths that antyodaya - a concept championed by Mahatma Gandhi
who acknowledged the influence of John Ruskin's Unto This Last behind
it - is now being attributed to Upadhyaya.
The people of Assam
deserve our congratulations for calling out a truth that many others are too
meek to utter. A number of groups in the northeastern state vociferously protested
against the move by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government to name several
new district-level colleges after the ruling party's current favourite icon -
Deendayal Upadhyaya. With even ally Asom Gana Parishad backing the protests,
the state government was forced to rescind the decision.
As a result, Assam
stood out as an oasis of resistance to an epidemic sweeping across BJP-ruled
states in the country at the express command of the Narendra Modi government at
the Centre.
The deification of
Deendayal Upadhyaya began soon after the Modi regime came to power in 2014. But
it began to develop into a monstrous State-sponsored creed exactly a year ago,
on September 25, 2016 that marked the birth centenary of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh leader who was also the co-founder of the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh, the earlier of avatar of the BJP. To mark the occasion, the government embarked on a year-long commemoration of
Upadhyaya. Since then, BJP-run states as well as Central ministries have been
in a mad rush to transform a relatively obscure politician into a towering
ideological deity of modern India. Social welfare schemes in state after state
are being launched in his name; ports, towns, and educational institutions are
being named after him; statues are being erected, and commemorative coins of Rs
10 and Rs 5 are being issued.
There is more. State
government schools in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana are holding quiz competitions
on the man and his message, state libraries in Maharashtra and Rajasthan have
been ordered to stock his books, and all government offices in Uttarakhand must
carry his photo and logo. There has also been a
spate of articles by RSS and BJP members extolling the "simple life"
and "profound vision" of the man who the RSS chief, M.S. Golwalkar,
apparently described as "a 100 per cent swayamsevak".
And, of course,
India's new president, Ram Nath Kovind - also from the RSS stable - chose to
salute Deendayal Upadhyaya in his first speech and pointedly avoided taking the
name of Jawaharlal Nehru.
In doing so, the
president of India revealed the real intent behind the Modi regime's zeal in
manufacturing an icon out of a modest party leader. Beneath the crassness and
vulgarity of the exercise lies a canny and well thought-out project to wipe out
the legacy of the builders of modern India and replace it with a mythology that
suits the sangh parivar. The two arguments
offered to justify the new Deendayal Upadhyaya cult make this intention clear.
The first involves "correcting" the wrongs of history. BJP and RSS
leaders insist that the Congress, which was at the forefront of the freedom
struggle and then ruled the country for several decades after Independence,
chose to focus only on its leaders - the Nehru-Gandhi family in particular -
and neglected scores of other stalwarts who contributed to the making of India.
This argument has some
validity since a great number of institutions and government schemes in the
country were named after one or other member of the Congress's ruling dynasty.
This trend became particularly distasteful during the two terms of the
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance when far too many state projects were
named after Rajiv Gandhi.But Jawaharlal Nehru
is a different matter. He was not just a leading freedom fighter but as the
first and longest serving prime minister of independent India, he ensured that
the foundational ideals of the Indian Constitution and robust democratic practices
struck deep roots.
Indira Gandhi, much
more controversial than her father, also left a deep mark on the nation. That
both she and Rajiv were assassinated also gives them a special place in the
country's history. The excessive use of
their names to perpetuate the family's hegemony may be problematic but their
contribution - and particularly Nehru's - cannot be denied. For the RSS,
though, Nehru is a much bigger hate figure than anyone else because he was not
just a person but an embodiment of ideals - secular, socialist, democratic -
that it abhors.
But to pit Deendayal
Upadhyaya against Jawaharlal Nehru is a travesty of both history and common
sense. Upadhyaya may have been a committed RSS pracharak and
he may have been central to setting up and expanding the Jana Sangh, but his
contribution to nation building was, to put it politely, limited. Those who call him a
"visionary" cite his advocacy of antyodaya and his
doctrine of 'integral humanism' as proof. It is a testament to the RSS's skills
at fabricating myths that antyodaya - a concept championed by Mahatma Gandhi
who acknowledged the influence of John Ruskin's Unto This Last behind
it - is now being attributed to Upadhyaya.
As for "integral
humanism", a close reading of the four lectures that Upadhyaya gave in
1965 to explain the concept shows that it is essentially drawn from the
writings Golwalkar and other Hindutva ideologues. But while
Golwalkar and V.D. Savarkar were explicit in extolling the supremacy of a Hindu
rashtra, Upadhyaya - writing at a time when the RSS was viewed with great
suspicion - chose to be more elliptical."The ideals of
the Nation," he wrote, "constitute Chiti, which is
analogous to the soul of an individual... The laws that help manifest and
maintain Chiti of a Nation are termed Dharma of that nation.
Hence, it is this 'Dharma' that is supreme... If Dharma is
destroyed, the Nation perishes. Anyone who abandons Dharma betrays the
nation." The rest of the
doctrine is a hotchpotch of pedestrian platitudes, diatribes against
"western" ideas, and a defence of the four-fold caste system as the
epitome of social harmony.
Upadhyaya became
president of the Jana Sangh in December 1967 but could not play a bigger role
in the turbulent politics of the late 1960s and 1970s since he died under
mysterious circumstances soon after his elevation. He was found dead on
February 11, 1968 on a railway track near Mughalsarai station - a rather odd
reason for now renaming the famous railway junction after him. His death has never
been explained. The Jana Sangh leader, Balraj Madhok, who preceded Upadhyaya as
president, accused his colleagues in the RSS-Jana Sangh of conspiring to kill
Upadhyaya and even put this down in writing in the third part of his
autobiography.
We will never know the
truth. But what we do know is that Upadhyaya led no progressive movement for
social change, fought no battles for social justice. The list of non-Congress
leaders who enhanced the idea and reality of India is long. It includes
Babasaheb Ambedkar and Ram Manohar Lohia, E.V.R. Periyar and E.M.S.
Namboodiripad, Jayaprakash Narayan and Charan Singh, V.P. Singh and Karpoori
Thakur, and many others. Deendayal Upadhyaya, by any objective criterion, does
not make the cut.
That brings us to the
second argument advanced by those who support the obsessive efforts to make
Upadhyaya a supreme national hero. It is summed up in a much used quote:
history is written by the victors. This is certainly true when it comes to
medieval conquests or 20th century revolutions. The conquering invader or the
victors in a bloody revolution obliterate all signs of the past, erect new
statues, rewrite old texts - entirely unmindful of facts or the achievements of
the vanquished.
But India is a
functioning electoral democracy where parties win and lose power every five
years. Every government tries to push its agenda but within the ambit of
certain collective assumptions. The Modi regime has sought to break that
tradition. And the RSS to which it belongs has viewed the 2014 result more as a
conquest than an election victory. The assault on the values of the republic,
the rewriting of history, the fabrication of new icons and the decimation of
the old stem from this conqueror mindset. Upadhyaya displacing
Nehru is only a curtain-raiser. Golwalkar, the Manusmriti and
the Bhagwa Dhwaj wait in the wings - to replace Mahatma Gandhi, the
Constitution and the tricolour, unless the new conquerors are forced to beat a
retreat...
see also
The emperor's masks: 'apolitical' RSS calls the shots in Modi sarkar
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
What is to be Undone
The law of killing - a brief history of Indian fascism
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
The law of killing - a brief history of Indian fascism
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
India's ruling party is sponsoring an assault on the Indian state // Tavleen Singh - Is this Hindutva
State protected hooliganism in Ramjas College
State protected hooliganism in Ramjas College
