Religious and ethnic nationalists display a recurring pattern: Inventing a fictitious past to create a halo around their predecessors, glorifying their cause, and making themselves feel good through affirmations that have nothing to do with the truth. Worse, they steal national icons.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent assertions in Parliament of his commitment to the Constitution, as though he is a recipient of the legacy of the country’s founding fathers and framers of the document, is worthy of scrutiny. This is an attempt at reinventing the past, and, of course, in a vulgarised fashion. Let’s look at what the early leaders of his movement had to say about the Constitution.
On November 30, 1949, RSS mouthpiece Organiser came out with an editorial that said, “The worst [thing] about the new Constitution of Bharat is that there is nothing Bhartiya about it…There is no trace of ancient Bhartiya constitutional laws, institutions, nomenclatures, and phraseology in it… Manu’s Laws were written long before Lycurgus of Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits, that means nothing.”
The founders of political Hindutva had placed Manusmriti above the Constitution. In his Bunch of Thoughts, RSS’s second chief M S Golwalkar elaborated on what they thought of the Constitution: “Our Constitution too is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing, which can be called our own. Is there a single word of reference in its guiding principles as to what our national mission is and what our keynote in life is? No! Some lame principles from the United Nations Charter or the Charter of the now-defunct League of Nations and some features from the American and British Constitutions have been brought together in a mere hotchpotch…. In other words, there is no reflection of Indian precepts or political philosophy in the Indian Constitution.”
Modi and his team are therefore at a game of appropriating a legacy they have no claim to. He said in his recent speech in Parliament that he was in his position thanks to the Constitution of which B R Ambedkar was a key architect. Interestingly, Ambedkar’s values are vastly different from those of the RSS which celebrates Manusmriti. As early as 1927, when Ambedkar made his political foray he did so by burning a copy of the Manusmriti.
There is no rationale to this exercise by majoritarian forces of inventing a favourable past other than to emphasise that they are wielders of the values of our national icons. However, knowledge of history is a huge obstacle to accomplishing this, and that explains why history will have to be rewritten or omitted from textbooks right from school. The exclusion of various periods of Indian history from NCERT textbooks has to be viewed in that context. Babri Masjid has already been erased and three dome structures brought in.
Appropriating the likes of Ambedkar and Swami Vivekananda is a part of this plot. As masters of spin, with glib phrases rolling off their tongues, Modi and colleagues have begun to valorise Ambedkar.
The RSS was vehemently opposed to the Hindu Code Bill piloted by Ambedkar as law minister in the first Nehru cabinet. While Nehru favoured the bill and said that it was a matter of his own prestige that it be passed, a large section of hardline Hindutva proponents within the Congress and the RSS campaigned vehemently to ensure that it lapsed.
A peeved Ambedkar quit the ministry. Ironically enough, at the height of the anti-Hindu Code Bill agitation, which was against Ambedkar’s move to usher in gender equality in India, RSS workers burned effigies of Ambedkar.
Let’s take a close look at Vivekananda, who is zealously quoted by the saffron brigade. What did Vivekananda dislike the most? His Chicago speech of 1893 lays any doubts about that to rest. He said, “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilisation, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.”
It is no secret that the flag bearers of Hindutva politics had routinely attacked the Constitution from within the Constituent Assembly. Anti-Hindu Code Bill protesters had even said that Ambedkar, being a former “Untouchable”, had no business whatsoever in interpreting Hindu texts and laws.
These efforts by the Sangh Parivar have been on for a while. It started with fake claims that Sardar Patel had sympathies for the RSS. It was Patel who authorised the ban on the RSS after the assassination of Gandhi. On February 2, 1948, when the Government of India issued the ban, the resolution said that it was determined to “root out the forces of hate and violence”. He wrote to Golwalkar saying, “Even an iota of the sympathy of the Government, or of the people, no more remained for the RSS…. Opposition turned more severe when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”
In his speech in reply to the motion of thanks on the President’s Address, the Prime Minister claimed as his own certain tall men of our history who had professed opinions antithetical to his own. This is a toxic project that needs to be called out and fought tooth and nail.
The writer is a CPM Member of the Rajya Sabha
