The Bharatiya Janata Party needs to be admired for its consistency. Distaste for the written word and writers has been a constant part of its contemporary history and it has been consistent in its scorn for books. Their former mascot Jaswant Singh, for long, could do no wrong and was fiercely defended even when he was caught on camera dozing in Parliament or indulging in feudal and obscurantist customs like offering opium in his cupped palm to his loyalists. But an infantile desire to play Herodotus has done him in.
Being delivered a reprimand for a book on ‘history’, like Mr Singh has been, cannot really surprise anyone, considering history has been the party’s bête noire for a few decades now. Where the BJP (and all its hydra-headed offshoots) are concerned, history is the battlefield on which the agenda of ‘cultural nationalism’ is spread out and needs to be won. So there is only one way of dealing with history as far as they are concerned — the way of casuistry and circumlocution.
Jaswant Singh, in his authorial adventure, violated this basic principle. Not that the book has any refinement. Or that Mr Singh is a Romila Thapar or a K N Paniker who have earlier raised the hackles of the parivaar’s history department. Mr Singh’s ‘Jinnah’ book is as tendentious as it gets, where the author chooses to fashionably argue that Mohamed Ali Jinnah might have been less culpable in the sub-continental partition than a Nehru or a Sardar Patel.
It is pretty touching to see one senior leader after the other in the BJP’s senior echelons trooping, for the first time, into the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to refresh their memory of the partition years and their assessment of the key players involved. It is even more touching see their honest surprise at realising that, for decades, what they considered sacrosanct facts of history are, in fact, a maze of half-truths confected by a conscripted brigade in their rosters for whom history has been a tool of air-brushing the past in order to frame the present.
The ancient past has had its quota of shake ups — from the Indus Valley civilisation to the Harappan horse to the Aryan ‘invasion’. Horns have been locked over how far to pull back the dateline of the origin of Indian history, with many Hindutva historians not being satisfied with even taking it as far back as the ice age. Of course, one of the central pivots of the history debate has been the historicity of Sri Rama and the establishment of the veracity of the birth of Ram-Lalla in Ayodhya. Playing with established tenets of history and the process of historicisation has been a favourite pastime within the BJP camp and they have launched concerted efforts to conflate history with mythology, even as they mythologise history.
The Moghul period, inevitably, has come for the greatest scrutiny and revision within the BJP camp. Demonising Babur, pooh-poohing Akbar and converting Aurangzeb into an abusive epithet have been the staple of much of the pop-history whipped up by the saffron press. Add a Tipu Sultan here and a Begada Badshah there and the Islamic ‘invasion’ of India is constructed in all its stereotype of gory plunder and irredeemable brutality which, then, becomes the base on which rabid Islamophobia can be sustained with all its political ballast.
The conspiratorial story of the Babri Masjid having been deliberately erected on the site of the ‘actual’ birth site of a ‘mythological’ figure has been responsible for the spread of much of the current communal poison, whose underlying, rather unsubtle theme is the need to wreak ‘revenge’ on the defilers.
While historical credibility has thus been severely mutilated by a cadre of academics from the Hindutva flank for whom history is subservient to its political master and an instrument for re-inventing a past that can be laid across the Procrustean bed of cynical expediency, the sudden flurry of scholarship around Partition that goes against the grain of the accepted wisdom of the Sangh Parivaar seems curious and a dust-storm raised to mask other, more serious concerns.
It is indeed curious that Vallabbhai Patel too has suddenly transformed from ‘Sardar’ to ‘gaddar’ in the neo-history emanating from the BJP stock. If it is a ‘self-critique’ or a ‘course correction’, what is it leading to? Is it possible to read the softening political tendency towards Jinnah from self-proclaimed ‘right wingers’ as the preparation towards a new strategy of constituency-building. Of course, the presence of the likes of Narendra Modi, who has been quick to take the opportunity to ban the book throughout Gujarat, militates against any such ‘New Right’ initiative. However, it is now unbearable to see editorial after editorial expressing grave disquiet over the state of affairs in the ‘main Opposition Party’ and how it augurs ill for our democracy. It is time they saw it as a continuing writer’s block in the party.
