When India commemorates 50 years of its "Independence, it will be useful to remember that 1997- 98 also marks the 50th anniversary year of Gandhi's martyrdom. It is not just another anniversary and provides an occasion for educating a new generation.
The ideologies tainted with Gandhi's murder have remained relatively dormant for several years Subsequent events - including Lohia's indiscriminate anti-Congressism of the Sixties, Jayaprakash Narayan's indulgence towards the Jan Sangh in the Seventies and Mr. V.P. Singh's tacit alliance with the BJP in 1989 general elections - along with the ideological bankruptcy of the Congress(I), brought the ideologies associated with the assassination to the centre stage of politics.
In December 1995, a Supreme Court Bench delivered a judgment taking a mild view of Hindutva. Some aspects of the record of this judgment, involving BJP and Shiv Sena candidates, make one shudder. It was delivered a few months before the general elections ..
The Hindutva ideological assault was directed at Gandhi rather than at anybody else because he and his influence had reduced the Hindutva forces to desperation, when Gandhi fostered feelings of respect for all religions ... even at the cost of his life.
Gandhi sought to create and promote the conditions in which a secular state could exist. Some scholars try to pit Gandhi against Nehru. There was a creative tension between the two. Yet there could hardly have been a politically effective Nehru without a politically potent Gandhi ... Nehru separated from Gandhi, is almost like a tree without roots. The BJP, too, in its formulations since 1990-91, has tried to isolate Nehru from Gandhi. With Nehru thus isolated, the "Nehru Model", made, from its point of view, an easier target.
Till the Seventies, the Jan Sangh and it associate groups openly targeted Gandhi. Since the BJP was created in.1980, it has followed a two-fold strategy towards Gandhi. First, it tries intermittently and selectively to appropriate him. It recalls that he spoke of Ram; but it is prefers to forget that he spoke also of Allah and that at least as early as 1909 he spoke of Khuda- Ishwar. It recalls that he spoke of Ram Rajya. But it chooses to overlook the fact that he spoke of it as a non- sectarian ideal state ... Nor is the BJP anxious to recall that Gandhi spoke similarly of Khudai Sultanat and the Kingdom of God
The second element in the BJP's strategy has been that, even as it attempts to appropriate a distorted Gandhi, it seeks also to "put him in his place." In this effort, the rival imaging of Swami Vivekananda and of Subhas Chandra Bose is convenient to the BJP and the RSS. Vivekananda died before the birth of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. There was no occasion for him to comment on these organisations. Bose was no longer around for two years before freedom. Therefor, there was no occasion for a conflict between him and the most feverish years of Hindutva. But appropriation has its limits. The negative historical record of Hindutva apart,the most insurmountable difficulty in its attempt to appropriate Gandhi is the matter of his assassination.
Why, then has virtually no political party woken up to the 50th years of Gandhi's martyrdom? This may be a case of an opportunity almost missed. It is a reminder also of a multiple allegorical assassination of Gandhi ..
The Congress(I) evidently does not quite know Gandhi. Nor does the party re-present the tradition of the Indian National Congress of the freedom struggle. That party more or less disappeared in 1969 ... It is only by default that the Congress(I) is associated in the minds of the people with the pre-freedom Indian National Congress
When the leaders of the BSP in 1993 accused Gandhi of having supported Varna Vyavastha ... the Congress(I) leadership had neither the will nor the wherewithal to challenge it. Gandhi's repeated statements that caste "must go" and, especially from 1945 onwards, that there was "only one varna today" were perhaps not even known to the Congress(I) members ... Since the Congress(I) posed… as the inheritor of Gandhi's legacy, it was tempting for the BSP to seek to attack Gandhi in a bid to attack the Congress(I). In this, it attacked not the historical Gandhi to whom the Dalits were the "nearest and dearest," as Ambedkar had acknowledged in a warm tribute in the Rajya Sabha on September 6, 1954. In essence, the BSP attacked the Gandhi appropriated by the Congress(I). A false Gandhi was pitted against a fake Ambedkar. The real Gandhi and the real Ambedkar had shown some consideration for each other.
It is also possible that some sections of the Janata Dal (and the RJD that has emerged from it) feel that they have on electoral reason to raise the issues concerning Gandhi's assassination. The Dal is created primarily for winning elections. Gandhi is not sectarian enough to help win votes.
A section of the Muslim middle class has its own peculiar dilemma. It is too close still to the intensive propaganda conducted against Gandhi by the Muslim League prior to Partition ... This propaganda has been kept alive by some academic centres belonging especially to the former colonial power ... This scholarship seeks justification of the colonial policy. For it, only one nationalist historiography must be attacked and that is the Indian, which it undiscerningly brackets with the Hindutva ... This scholarship requires that Gandhi be painted saffron rather than as a representative of the Indian nation. For this, it is necessary for this scholarship to seek to erase the distinction between Gandhi and his assassin. The erasing of this, distinction is precisely the politics of the BJP ... To rationalise the colonial policy the colonial scholarship presents the entire freedom movement in exaggerated sectarian colours, while minimising the extent to which the movement in fact resisted Hindutva and sectarianism generally. Here there is a triple convergence. The colonial agenda converges with the Hindu communal effort at appropriating the freedom movement as well as with the pre-Partition Muslim communal agenda ..
Savarkar ... was acquitted in the Gandhi murder case. But Gandhi's assassin never made any secret of the source of his ideological inspiration.
The distinction between Gandhi and his assassin ... is critical to the survival of Indian society
