We are a nation of pantheons – religious, political, artistic. We also have, rather uniquely, pantheons of caste heroes, community icons, regional celebrities. We love surrounding ourselves with the images of those we worship as gods and those we consider to be god-like.
The Union of India assiduously mirrors Indian psychology. Needless to say, our State governments do too, if anything, with re-doubled fervour. Our calendars, as a result, are commemorative files first and tables of months and days only thereafter. Anniversaries, especially the dates of the personages’ birth and death, are marked on them, as our festivals are, in indelible red.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi All this is not new or even recent.
The Congress pantheon October 31 was known for decades to the nationalist-minded as Sardar Patel’s birthday. He was “wished”, as they say, quite meticulously by his colleagues from the Mahatma downwards. In post-Independence Delhi, where the present moment salutes the present ruler, the Sardar’s birthday was celebrated in the years between 1946 and 1949 with zest. The Deputy-Prime Minister was there to receive the marigolds and the pranam s from old friends, new admirers and a queue of bureaucrats, the latest to discover his greatness. But post 1950, when he died, October 31 fell from the almanac of anniversaries. It became a date of no importance.
And the next month, November, became increasingly important with its 14th, >Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary , blossoming into a roseate day.
This was, however, not a November 14 matter alone. In the years immediately following India’s independence, Gandhi and Nehru statues and busts came up across the country in a rash, first out of adoration and then after a vogue, at street corners, roundabouts, under chhatri s sometimes, or under the sun, mostly, collecting dust, obstructing traffic.
Residential colonies, roads and institutions bearing their names came up all over the country. And unwilled by those two, Gandhi and Nehru became cults, icons, political deities. Everywhere Figures, they became the unwitting founders of a new iconic proscenium.
No one really protested this overdrive but a corrective had to come, and it came, sure enough, through an important counter-narrative. The nation had begun to see by the mid-1970s something very limited and limiting about one pantheon, a Congress pantheon, dominating the political and geopolitical landscape of India.
Birth of a counter-trend There is no precise date or year that can be cited for the birth of this counter-trend but one might say that a sense of unease with the Congress’s pantheon turned into a sense of surfeit, of a glut, with the mascot-ing of Indira Gandhi during the national Emergency promulgated in 1975. That year was also the centenary of >Sardar Patel’s birth , a landmark anniversary which was drowned out in the orchestrated “India is Indira/Indira is India” chorus.
And the consequence? A new cycle of counter-commemorations gathered momentum. Bhagat Singh, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, B.R. Ambedkar, E.V. Ramaswamy ‘Periyar’, among others, came to be given a parallel and retributive pedestalling by their natural and wide constituencies. There was a certain historical verity to that process. A wrong was being righted, a lack was being supplied.
However, what we have been witnessing in more recent times belongs to another order, an exclusive order, that of commemorative vengefulness. This is not about setting a wrong right but about lobotomising the past to create a new and entirely artificial organism. Patel is being morphed into unnatural shapes, not to give him his proper scale but only to make Nehru look puny in contrast. Outsizing Patel is done to midget-size Nehru. This is as cheap as it is gross, as perverse as it is low.
Alongside Patel, there is also to be seen a kind of opportunistic “restoration” being attempted by Hindutva of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, of Dr. Ambedkar, of Lal Bahadur Shastri, P.V. Narasimha Rao. And, most brazenly, in Bihar, of Jayaprakash Narayan.
Hindutva’s theatrical embracing of leaders that the post-Nehru Congress had left out in the cold has to be exposed for what it is — a shameless appropriation of charismas to botox its own sallow image. But the plain truth, for the Congress a bitter truth, must also be recognised. It is the Congress’s abandonment of Patel that has led to Hindutva’s adoption of Patel. It is the Congress’s disuse of Patel that has led to Hindutva’s misuse of Patel. And likewise with the others.
As November 14, Nehru’s birthday approaches, the Union government will not fail to do its formal duties by the nation’s first Prime Minister. It is unlikely to do more. But what of the Congress?
Narcissistic un-graciousness If on or around November 14, the Congress president and the Congress vice-president were to say the Congress is older and greater than the family that has been privileged to serve it for more than a century, that it has erred in conveying the impression that one family, the >Nehru-Gandhi family , has been central to its destiny, that leaders outside that family and, in fact, outside the Congress fold need to be celebrated, it will do itself and the nation a service. But going beyond even that, if it were to say that not just the Nehru-Gandhi one but all cults and cultisms are wrong, it will do the history great service. And the BJP will then stop foraging in the debris of the Grand Old Party’s narcissistic un-graciousnesses.
It is rumoured that the Modi government plans to take out of circulation postage stamps bearing the images of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. If putting them on the stamps was egregious, taking those stamps off will be crass. And who can deny that removing one “series” seems like the preparation of a new one in the same ink, the images alone being different?
The placing of the Mahatma’s likeness on currency notes of different denominations may have started with veneration but it was joined also, without a trace of doubt, by another intent: with the Mahatma there, no one else will dare stake a claim on that place. Opportunism of a very convoluted kind has used the Mahatma’s shining veracity on rupee notes as a filler, a totem. We can spare him this exploitation. Let new issues of our currency notes have scenes from Indian flora, fauna, architecture, from its life. Let it not profile personalities that can become cults to be promoted or – more pertinently – to be pushed out.
The state uses currency, stamps, seals and other insignia as signets of its power, which at any time is co-eval with the power of the incumbents in office. Erasures of old embossings as much as the incising of new ones has been part of the immemorial practice.
And one does not have to be a numismatist, philatelist or archaeologist to see the connection between the ego of the state and the signage on its signets. But we are a Republic, not a monarchy or even a democracy with majoritarian impulses. In a Republic, the profiling of persons, howsoever great or inspirational, is out of joint.
Dr. Ambedkar said memorably in the Constituent Assembly on the 29th of November 1949: “In India, Bhakti , or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
Prescient words.
( Gopalkrishna Gandhi is distinguished professor of history and politics, Ashoka University .)
