Muting history
By Amulya Ganguli
Hindustan Times
28 April, 2003
One of Murli Manohar Joshi’s kar sevaks in the academic field has given a laboured explanation as to why he failed to comment on Gandhi’s assassination in his piece on the Mahatma in one of the new saffron textbooks.
Hari Om, a ‘Professor of History’ and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research (no less!) has said: “I committed a very serious mistake by not reflecting on the murder of a world leader such as Gandhi...
“At the same time, I would like to point out that this omission was not deliberate. My major problem was the time and space constraint. It was impossible for me to include each and every development in the limited span available to me as one of the authors of Contemporary India. Another problem was the font size.”
So, ‘time and space constraint’ and ‘font size’ (!) can persuade a ‘professor’ to, say, write about the life of Jesus without mentioning crucifixion. Or, if that is too alien an example for the saffron crowd, write about the Ramayan without Sita’s ‘return’ to Mother Earth. No ‘professor’ worthy of the title will do so unless he has an insidious objective in mind.
When Mountbatten was asked about the killer’s identity immediately after Gandhi’s assassination, he said, ‘a Hindu’ even though the governor-general did not know this for a fact at the time. But he knew that if he said anything else, it would have set off a fresh round of communal carnage. It may also be fair to assume that if a Muslim had really been the assassin, no font size or time and space constraint would have prevented a writer from the Hindutva camp from commenting at length on the incident.
The reason for the omission is something else. It is that Nathuram Godse killed the Mahatma for reasons which reflect the saffron ideology. Therefore, any mention of these would have displeased the purported professor’s political masters who had entrusted him with the task of distorting history. The killer, however, was more forthright. “I might mention here,” said Godse in his submission to the court, “that it was not so much the Gandhian Ahimsa teachings that were opposed by me and my group but Gandhiji while advocating his views always showed or evinced a bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu community and its interests.”
Here we have in a nutshell the theory of appeasement of Muslims which forms the cornerstone of the Hindutva doctrine. “On 13th January 1948,” continued Godse, “I learnt that Gandhiji had decided to go on fast unto death. The reason for such fast (sic) was that he wanted an assurance for Hindu-Muslim unity in Indian Dominion. But I and many others could easily see that the real motive behind the fast was not merely the so-called Hindu-Muslim unity, but to compel the Dominion Government to pay the sum of Rs 55 crore to Pakistan, the payment which was emphatically refused by the Government.”
So, Gandhi was not only an appeaser of Muslims, but also of Pakistan! Godse later called him the Father of Pakistan. Little wonder that Narendra Modi used to tell his listeners in Gujarat that the Congress’s success in the election would be celebrated in Pakistan. One can see the identity of views between Godse and the Sangh parivar, an uncomfortable fact which our ‘professor’ would have found difficult to hide if he tried to explain Gandhi’s assassination. After all, the Mahatma’s death couldn’t be just a throw-away line. It would have needed an elaborate explanation. But that is exactly what is impossible for a saffron sycophant to provide.
The issues of Vande Mataram and cow-slaughter are two of the many explanations given by Godse for his act. “It is notorious,” said Godse, “that some Muslims disliked the celebrated song of Vande Mataram and the Mahatma forthwith stopped its singing or recital wherever he could... It continued to be sung at all Congress and other national gatherings but as soon as one Muslim objected to it, Gandhiji utterly disregarded the national sentiment behind it and persuaded the Congress also not to insist upon the singing as the national song. We are now asked to adopt Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana as a substitute of Vande Mataram. Could anything be more demoralising or pitiful...?”
On cow-slaughter, Godse quoted one of Gandhi’s speeches in which the Mahatma said that “no law prohibiting cow-slaughter in India can be enacted. (Digvijay Singh, please note) How can I impose my will upon a person who does not wish voluntarily to abandon cow-slaughter? India does not belong exclusively to the Hindus. Muslims, Parsees, Christians all live here. The claim of the Hindus that India has become the land of the Hindus is totally incorrect. This land belongs to all who live here”.
Clearly, Gandhi had no time for Savarkar’s fascistic pitribhu-punyabhu concept which said that only those who are born in India and whose holy sites are in India are true Indians. Instead, the Mahatma articulated the modern ideal of statehood, as enshrined in the Indian Constitution, in which no distinctions are made between citizens on the basis of caste or creed. How different the Mahatma’s views are from the Hindu Rashtra of Golwalkar, Savarkar and Godse.
In the days before his death, Gandhi had expressed a desire to go and live in Pakistan. He wouldn’t have gone by train, of course, let alone fly. He would have walked. Slowly, as during the Salt March which shook the British empire, the Mahatma would have wended his way across the dusty plains of north India with his band of followers — and the international press — in tow.
It is unlikely that the Pakistanis would have stopped him — or insisted on a visa. They would have looked ridiculous before the world. But whether the Mahatma did enter Pakistan or not, the Long March would have served its purpose. Once again, at a time of trauma, it would have united hearts and minds as nothing else — and put the fanatics on both sides of the border on the defensive. They wouldn’t have known how to refute this extraordinary affirmation of the unity of the subcontinent, of the absurd nature of the two-nation theory (which was to become a three-nation theory only 24 years later).
In his textbook on modern India, historian Sumit Sarkar described the period before Gandhi’s assassination as the Mahatma’s finest hour. It showed his total disdain for the trappings of power and unswerving loyalty to the cause of communal peace. Had he lived and gone to Pakistan, who knows what curious turn the history of the subcontinent would have taken. But perhaps it was the fear of peace which motivated Godse.
As his ‘Father of Pakistan’ jibe showed, he had no time for communal amity. So Gandhi had to die. And the saffron ‘historians’ of today have to play dumb when it comes to explaining why.