by A. G. NOORANI
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the release of the full volume of works of Deendayal Upadhyaya, in New Delhi on October 9 PHOTO/PTI
Deendayal Upadhyaya is to the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was to Congress” opined R. Balashankar, former editor of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s (RSS) organ Organiser and now a member of the BJP’s central committee, on Prasikhshan Maha Abhiyan (The Indian Express,; September 24). This very revealing remark occurs in his well-timed article. As he explains: “September 25 will mark the launch of a new icon on India’s political horizon. A year-long centenary celebration of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birth is being planned by the Narendra Modi government .… Narendra Modi will formally inaugurate the event at the National Council meet of the BJP at Kozhikode on 24 September.” On September 23, the Modi government announced the constitution of two committees for the commemoration. Modi will chair a 149-member national committee, while Home Minister Rajnath Singh will chair a 23-member executive committee (The Hindu, September 24; emphasis added, throughout).
Such brazen abuse of the government’s machinery and funds to commemorate the birth of a politician who belonged to the present ruling party is patently unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has strongly disapproved of the practice of Chief Ministers projecting their own image while advertising the “achievements” of their governments. It can be struck down by the Supreme Court on a writ petition filed by concerned secularists, intellectuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
What is more revealing is the BJP’s explicit rejection of Gandhi in preference for Upadhyaya; the Modi government’s endorsement of his rabidly communal ideology; the projection of that ideology by the state for the next whole year to influence voters in crucial Assembly elections in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, and most menacingly of all, to recast the nation’s ethos on the lines of Upadhyaya’s thinking and reject decisively the secular Gandhi-Nehru ethos on which the country’s Constitution is based and which it has always known all these years.
Narendra Modi lost no time in revealing his plans in Kozhikode itself on the very next day, September 25. Addressing the BJP’s National Council, he said: “Fifty years ago Pandit Upadhyaya said ‘do not reward/appease [puraskrit] Muslims; do not shun [tiraskrit] them but purify [parishkar]” (The Telegraph, September 26). “Senior RSS ideologue” Rakesh Sinha did not improve matters by saying that by “parishkar” Modi meant that Muslims “have to critically examine and accept pre-Islamic cultural and intellectual legacy of India” (The Indian Express, September 27). The cat of Hindutva is out of the BJP’s soiled bag. Modi kept his homage to Upadhyaya securely locked inside his 56” chest. His belated homage has a purpose. He waits to use Upadhyaya’s ideology to recast the polity anew.
Viciously communal agenda
Upadhyaya was viciously communal. He hated and distrusted Muslims and demanded a 10-mile wide corridor along the border with Pakistan from which they would be expelled. He wanted to annul the Partition; believed in the caste system; opposed the proposal for a Punjabi Suba and denounced Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress with frenzied abandon.
The French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, author of the definitive work The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (1996), ripped apart the pretences in an article entitled “Hindutva’s ‘purification’ drive” (The Indian Express, October 13). He wrote: “The notion of ‘purification’ is clearly associated with Hinduism’s caste system, evident from the shuddhi rituals that Swami Dayanand, who founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 and was the architect of Hindu revivalism, adapted to initiate the reconversion of Dalits who had become Muslims or Christians in Punjab. The Arya Samaj played on the craze for Sanskritisation that prevailed among some known as ‘untouchables’ in the late 19th century. By passing them the sacred thread, the Arya Samajists tried to defuse centrifugal social forces and invited them to pay allegiance to savarnas’ values. For Dayananda, the varna vyavastha was a model of social cohesion to which each caste could adhere, including the ‘untouchables’, after they underwent shuddhi.
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