He was not Maulana Nehru, but he was Pandit Nehru. Of course, he did not belong to that breed of pandits whom you seek while performing the Hindu rituals in your family. He was the real pandit, in the sense of being a man of knowledge. The association with knowledge is so intertwined now that even the word punditry is an accepted word in the Collins English dictionary and signifies the expressing of expert opinions. So shouldn’t the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh that claims to be a Hindu sanghatan be happy that there is a Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi that celebrates his ideas. After all, Nehru was a Hindu Brahmin much like most of the RSS top bosses. Both past and present.
But no, one of the top priorities of the Modi-led government that has acknowledged that the RSS is indeed its parent is to imprint the stamp of saffronisation that passes off a shorthand for its ideology. However, the beauty of this drive to change the ideological colour of such institutions is that it is limited to making personnel changes, that come with hardly any sound ideational component. So, instead of Nehru’s free thinking approach that promoted all kind of scholarships at the NMML, the objective is to make the lively place as an exhibition ground for smart cities or a debating forum for mutual admiration of the followers of the Sangh.
Come to think of it, the RSS has never been short of resources or organisational manpower. Yet there is no comparable institution dominated by its thinking even at any of the state capitals like Gandhinagar, Bhopal, Raipur or Jaipur that have been ruled by the swayamsewaks for decades. Its attempts to saffronise another multi-disciplinary arts centre – Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal have only resulted in complete decadence, and not the emergence of any parallel narrative.
This attempt to destroy and damage is in sync with the core RSS ideology that sees itself as a mere negation of the liberal values that are espoused by the ancient civilisation heritage of Hinduism. Its essence has been distilled in that that one line from Iqbal – kuch baat hai ki hasti mitti nahin hamari, sadiyon raaha ha dushman dauren jahan hamara (there is something in us which ensures that our persona is not obliterated, or else the world has been our enemy for centuries). His observation came as an analysis of the onslaughts of the invaders. Now we can trust the same spirit of endurance and survival to bear this fresh attack on this entity that comes from the RSS in the form of bans and statements like ‘he was a nationalist despite being a Muslim.”
Without doubt, given the official powers that it enjoys now, the RSS would be able to alter the face of the NMML and all the organisations that it chooses. Certainly, one hopes that its efforts would not be as juvenile now after the experience of running into difficulties like the ones it is now facing in the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the chairman of the FTII. It got Mahesh Rangarajan of NMML as director out of the way in what should be called a bloodless coup. Besides, the emergency experience would come in handy for them to stiffly crush any discontent or protest. We see evidence of this in the way the NGOs are attacked, or even the mobile based internet series are throttled in Gujarat when that young lad Hardik Patel gives a call for agitation in Surat or Ahmedabad.
The difficulty for the RSS actually lies in producing a logical counter alternative for Nehru’s thinking that can persuade the bulk of the Hindus. The fact that in a country where more than 80 percent of the population is Hindus, the RSS finds it difficult to market ideology and took nearly 50 years after Nehru’s death to establish its rule should make it realise the severe intrinsic limitations of its approach. It has to realise that after Gandhi’s assassination the most aggressive proponent for a ban on the RSS was Sardar Patel, who is now their most favoured icon from the Congress family.
However, as they often say about lost causes – there is no harm in trying. Having come to power after nearly 90 years of hard work, and got the chance to create a Hindustan of their dream the RSS must flex its muscles. So, what if the Hindustan of their dream is a mirror image of failed Pakistan? But the struggle is not limited to institutions like the NMML. It has be won in the minds and hearts of people who are really Hindus. They are not like Lal Krishna Advani, Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Murli Manohar Joshi – all people with Krishna in their names but who claim to be Ram bhakts for a political cause. For generations the Hindus of this land, the RSS prefers to call Hindustan – have lived with all the people of other religions, without enforcing the Golwalkar driven thought that Muslims should be deprived of their citizen’s rights and treated like second class citizens.
They are the people who have had no problem with meat-eating neighbours for generations, and who have all celebrated the different festivals together. Nehru was a proponent of this faith, and he had no problems with Muslims. There is a lot of validity in the RSS argument that historical figures cannot be reared simply through government actions. Not many people use postage stamps these days, and even the ones who have to do so, do not go to post offices and ask for stamps with images of particular leaders. But yes when the government of the day makes an argument that it is discontinuing with certain stamps because it wants to honour others, the natural question arises – why do you have to insult someone, in the process of honouring your favourites? Isn’t this a question of common courtesy? The fact is that the most offensive of the acts can be performed in the least offensive of ways, with finesse.
