“We can’t help it,” moaned the BJP intellectual and a key member of the party think tank. He was sitting in a corner of the party office surrounded by thick volumes from which he was taking down copious notes. “Proving to be hell of a job,” he muttered. “With so much of work pending, how can I cope up with this? What will NaMo and Amitbhai think of me and my so-called ability to retain long passages in my mind?”
“You do look agitated and that is not a good sign for Hindutva mind,” I tried soothingly. “Perhaps if you can confide in me, we can work out a solution. After all, it is said two minds are better than one”
THE BJP has a long memory and cannot easily forget historical blunders of the British rule in India. It’s no wonder then that the NDA government is not in a similar ‘forget and forgive’ mood.
“That is true,” agreed the BJP intellectual, “provided our two minds are intellectually motivated.I have no problem but are you sure your mind is as intellectually motivated as a Hindutva mind? Does your mind think and act like one?”
I thought over this one and replied, “Well, I was pretty good in school, particularly in History and memory tests involving all those British kings and queens, the Henrys, Johns, Georges and Katherines and the battles they fought against the French and Europeans though sometimes the memory fails to retain all details. The Queens took to the sword at the slightest pretext. Not like our Jhansi Rani who is shown in just one pose as though she had just one horse, one sword and one trainer teaching them just one sword-wielding pose. Ha, and to think of the fact that we had a larger kingdom, more horses and a larger cavalry!”
The BJP intellectual began to sort out and rearrange the books he had been referring to into the shelves. His intellectual doubts were not cleared and he kept on looking at me. “There is at least one issue we scored over the white skinned ones,” he boasted. “My knowledge of history tells me that on the issue of names, we scored over the foreigners. You see, they were great. They even conquered the world. But for some reason or the other, the Britishers were always short of names. They may have conquered the world but they went on repeating the names for their Kings and Queens. If your history is right you will remember eight odd Henrys and half a dozen or so James and the same was the case with the Queens. There was so much variety with the names of Indian Kings and Queens. We left them far, far behind”
“The British were low on the uptake on their own history,” I reminded my BJP friend. “We do have two Shivaji Jayantis which is alright. We can call over enthusiasm, really no big deal. The British are far worse. They did not have much of a freedom struggle to boast about as compared to us. How grandly we celebrate our own August 15 and January 26 – with fireworks that create hell of a noise. The Britishers had a simple Guy Fawkes Day where they fire some mild crackers. Ha, this was all they could think of when some guy called Guy Fawkes threw bombs at their Parliament! We went miles ahead when some guy (Afzal Guru) was arrested and tried for instigating people to throw bombs at our Parliament. They missed. But the Indian Intelligence was up to this base trick. We investigated the case for years and found one rebel, Afzal Guru, guilty. He was hanged when the nation was sleeping. Had we handed him over to Pakistan, they would have made a hero of him.”
