BJP invokes a mythologised Sardar Patel to give itself legitimacy. Poornima Joshi reads between the lines.
For a political force without a glorious past, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) derives its historical legitimacy by manufacturing a legacy that cobbles together myths, fables and imagined grievances which their present warriors seek to address through political mobilisation.
Ramjanmabhoomi was one such myth that the saffron joint family successfully trumped up to create a mass movement. Having established the BJP as force to reckon with, the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS), which is the BJP’s ideological mother, is presently engaged in the task of creating the second wave of Hindutva to shake its political progeny from its decade-long state of being out of power in the Centre. The Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been hand-picked to be Mr Advani’s replacement as the newage charioteer with his claims of having converted the state he has ruled for three terms as a land of milk and honey, where Lord Krishna’s Dwarka was once established and where the Hindutva laboratory has clearly done successful experiments in relegating the minorities permanently to second class citizen status. The flurry of staged and fake encounters, the silencing of critics and dissenters with jail terms and trumped up charges, and, in the latest sensational expose`, the stalking of a woman by the ATS, the CID and the Crime Branch in the state, on the orders of the then minister of state for home Amit Shah, are sought to be submerged in a dominant discourse of the era of development and progress that Mr Modi promises to herald once he takes over as Prime Minister.
In his journey, the new-age charioteer needs a more contemporary mythological/historical icon to stoke the imagination of his twitter-brigade and social media fan club. Bhagwan Ram is so last century and in any case, the God suffers from the law of diminishing returns. So the search for a contemporary icon has led to the most obvious choice – the ‘Iron Man’ Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A Gujarati, a man on the right side of the Congress who started the construction of the Somnath temple and of course, a nationalist without the trappings of Nehru’s Bolshevism, colonial life-style and absolute contempt for the RSS.
In this quest, the other international icon from Gujarat, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had to be overlooked for obvious considerations. Besides the fact that the invocation of Gandhi’s name would have naturally rekindled the unfortunate memories about the RSS’s connections with his assassins and the ban that was subsequently imposed on the Sangh by none other than Sardar Patel, the Mahatma is too secular, eccentric, frugal and austere a figure to match the razzle-dazzle of Mr Modi’s ongoing campaign.
So, with the determination and characteristically scant regard for historical facts that the RSS routinely displays, its most famous pracharak, the Gujarat Chief Minister, has invoked Sardar Patel in his battle to wrest Delhi from the Congress’s evil clutches. In the good-versus-evil Ramlila that is currently being staged to enthrone Mr Modi in the Red Fort, Patel is to be his guardian angel.
The movement is so identical to the years preceding the demolition of the mosque that it is difficult not to confuse the ‘Iron Man’ with Shri Ram; the two icons ostensibly pushing India on the dream journey towards Hindu Rashtra. A perceived grievance, that Nehru denied Patel’s rightful claim over India’s premiership, is carefully trumped up through the RSS’s minions in the media. Celebrity anchors have gleefully embraced the meaningless controversy and the rent-a-quote intellectuals are frequently busy debating the Nehru-versus- Patel issue on prime time TV. Meanwhile, several units of the BJP have started a movement reminiscent of the collection of bricks bearing Lord Ram’s name in the early 90’s by the RSS’s storm-troopers before they collected in Ayodhya to demolish the mosque.
The Himachal Pradesh state unit of the BJP, for instance, has declared it has formed a coordination committee for an “iron collection drive”. Former party president and senior MLA Jairam Thakur, who will head the coordination committee, is reported to have asserted that efforts are being made to spread the party cadre network to all 20,118 villages and 3243 panchayats of the State. “We will collect iron and soil from all these villages and give it (Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat) a Himachal flavour. We will also collect sacred soil from all the famous temples and religious places of the hill State,” Mr. Thakur is believed to have said. The process to make the construction a “movement” began after the Bhoomi Pujan for the memorial on October 31, the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel by Mr. Advani and Mr. Modi, both of whom have fashioned themselves in the image of the ‘Iron Man’.
It may not be a particularly original trick; the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany having successfully experimented with it in the past. But it is a tried and tested tryst with trumped up history that has unfailingly yielded political dividends for the BJP. In the process of creation of a mythology around Patel, a couple of riots can always be engineered to keep the heat on. The Congress, thanks to its devotion to the Nehru-Gandhis to the exclusion of all other icons from the freedom struggle and their legacies, is out of depth in the ongoing chaos.
History is once again rewritten to promote the mythology of the Hindu Rashtra.
