About two weeks ago, the world’s most morally deformed politician anointed a new “father of the nation”. This was the grossest of insults to India – a real-estate-mogul-turned-president of the United States daring to rearrange our national icons. Yet our political establishment and its aggressively noisy cheerleaders, who wear their nationalistic sensitivities on both sleeves, quietly gulped down this disparagement of the Mahatma, the greatest moral voice of the 20th century.
And, horror of horrors, this grotesque man who momentarily occupies the White House was very much visible in the backdrop in Ahmedabad when the prime minister kicked off the 150th birth centenary of the actual ‘father of the nation’.
It would appear that Donald Trump’s rhetorical besmirching was not all that unsynchronised, and this “father of the nation” business is seen, in some quarters, as a licence to explore the possibility of a different kind of canonisation.
If there has to be a new “father of the nation” then the question arises: what are we to do with the old ‘Sabarmati sant’? A strong case will have to be made for banishing Bapu from our national pantheon, to make place for someone else to become our nation’s father. The original ‘father’ will need to be stripped of his high spiritual status.
The Mahatma was the original eyesore for the old Hindu Mahasabha crowd. And the January 30, 1948 assassination has to be seen beyond Nathuram Godse, the man who fired those shots. As we begin a year-long celebration of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, we need to remind ourselves why certain voices and forces were so desperate to physically liquidate this fragile old man. Why did this act of public execution have to be enacted?
There is not much of mystery as to who constituted the dramatis personae. According to M.J. Akbar, a highly respected and valued member of the current ruling establishment: “The RSS kept away from the independence struggle because it had only contempt and hatred for the man leading it: Gandhi.” The quote is from his 1985 book, India: The Siege Within. And, Akbar further tells us, that the “RSS suffered a set-back in 1948: even Sardar Patel could not overlook a crime it had inspired—the assassination of the Mahatma. Home Minister Patel banned the RSS.”
Notwithstanding the current attempts from the very top in the Nagpur establishment to depict the Mahatma as happily at home with the swayamsevaks, contemporary accounts tell a different story. To quote Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul – Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India:
“His session that day with the RSS—which has taken in recent decades to mentioning his name in its daily roll call of Hindu heroes—was supposed to be followed by a prayer meeting. But rowdy Hindu hecklers made prayers impossible. “Gandhi murdabad!”—“death to Gandhi” – they cried, after an attempt was made to read verses from the Koran, a standard part of his ecumenical ritual.”
A Gandhi could be killed but the Mahatma survived. Not only did the Mahatma survive but he continues to remind us of the very indispensability of a moral voice in our public affairs. It is this stubborn insistence on kneading ethical considerations into our political thinking and behaviour that our new rulers find so irksome.