The forgotten ‘Beloved of the People’

Now, ask yourself whether Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak is someone that today’s Indians should know about, and whether his 150th birth anniversary (which falls today) merits a commemorative programme to spread knowledge about him and also for a grateful nation to pay its tributes to him. If your answer is in the affirmative, ask yourself what the government of the day is doing about it. If the answer disappoints you and angers you, then I entirely share your disappointment and anger.

No wonder it is said of India and of Indians that we do not take our history seriously.

150th birth anniversary of the most important and also the most popular leader of the pre-Gandhi era in India’s freedom struggle; of one who gave the electrifying slogan, in the course of a sedition trial against him, ‘‘Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it’’; and about whom, when he passed away on August 1, 1920, a grief-stricken Gandhiji wrote in Young India, ‘‘My strongest bulwark is gone. A giant among men has fallen. The voice of the lion is hushed…No man preached the gospel of Swaraj with the consistency and the insistence of Lokmanya.’’ And there is nothing happening in the country to suggest that we even know about the anniversary. Many of the young kids who belong to the West-aping metropolitan elite might even ask, with a smirk on their faces, ‘‘Lokmanya who?’’.

But they are not entirely to be blamed. When the Congress party and the Congress-led Government are themselves indifferent to the name and legacy of Tilak, it is understandable if much of the rest of the nation too has chosen not to notice the importance of July 23, 2006. Nevertheless, I wonder if the ruling party and the Government would be so somnolent if the date concerned someone belonging to the Nehru ‘‘dynasty’’.

Tilak was born a year before India’s First War of Independence. (Incidentally, the UPA Government is equally cavalier about commemorating this epoch-making event. Just look at the bickering that has begun in the committee that has been belatedly set up for the purpose.) The defeat in 1857 had thoroughly demoralised Indians—Hindus and Muslims alike. Many social, educational and spiritual initiatives, all carrying introspective impulse of varying intensity, were born out of the quest for India’s future. The birth of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was a political outcome of the same quest. However, for nearly three decades the Congress could not articulate its view on India’s independence in clear, unequivocal terms. Nor did it succeed in mobilising support of the masses for its cause.

Historians usually credit Gandhiji with transforming the Congress into a mass movement. No doubt, he did it. And he did it on a nationwide scale. But none can deny that Gandhiji followed up, and greatly expanded, on mass-oriented political work that Tilak had begun. Tilak’s two arrests by the British—first in 1897 (for 18 months) and, especially, later in 1908 (for six years of rigorous imprisonment in Mandalay, in present-day Myanmar) galvanised workers, peasants, professionals and youth in an unprecedented manner. His trisutri (three-point) programme for national awakening (Swaraj, Swadeshi and Nationalist Education) lit the fire of self-pride and activism in a nation that was despairing and directionless.

But he was not a rabble-rouser. Tilak was a man of oceanic intellect, towering character and unflinching courage, all of which were reflected in his oratory and his writings (mainly through his newspaper Kesari). A staunch internationalist, he hailed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, led by Lenin, and commended the goals of socialism. (Earlier, Lenin had condemned Tilak’s arrest in 1908.) Gita Rahasya, the scholarly treatise on the Bhagawad Gita which he wrote in Mandalay, can command the respect of the world’s best physicists and philosophers. What a pity that the Government of India has not published his collected works in English.

Much of the current indifference to Tilak can be attributed to the false and motivated propaganda, conducted mainly by Communist historians, that he was a ‘‘Hindu nationalist’’ and Brahminical opponent of social reform. Didn’t he start public celebration of Ganesh festival and Shivaji Jayanti, they will ask. Didn’t it alienate Muslims, they will argue by way of subsequent rationalisation of India’s Partition by the Muslim League. In an atmosphere where a perverted sense of secularism has held sway, and in which many Communist intellectuals malign anything Hindu as ‘‘communal’’ and ‘‘revivalist’’, it is not surprising that Tilak (and many other stalwarts of the freedom movement like him) is sought to be pushed into oblivion.

However, facts of history tell a different tale. Firstly, he was not opposed to social reform in the Hindu community. At a conference in Mumbai in 1918, he roared: ‘‘If God were to tolerate untouchability, I would not recognise Him as God at all.’’ However, he believed that Indian people’s united struggle for Swaraj should take precedence over the campaign for social reforms. Secondly, there was nothing anti-Muslim in Tilak’s call for public celebration of Ganesh festival and Shivaji Jayanti. It was meant solely as a cultural tool to mobilise Hindus of all castes and classes, and awaken them about the enslaved state of their nation. Many Muslims—including, once, Mohammed Ali Jinnah—shared the Ganeshotsav dais with Tilak. And he too participated in the Moharram processions of Muslims. Tilak wrote in Kesari: ‘‘When Hindus and Muslims jointly ask for Swarajya from a common platform, the British bureaucracy has to realise that its days are numbered.’’ When the British rulers charged him with sedition, he asked Jinnah (who was himself an ardent votary of Hindu-Muslim unity then; his metamorphosis as the communal architect of Pakistan was to happen much later) to fight his legal battle.

He was all too aware of the divide-and-rule policy of the colonial administration. Also, more perhaps than any other Congress leader of his time, Tilak had realised that post-British India needed constitutional guarantees to cement Hindu-Muslim unity. Therefore, his crowning glory as a secular nationalist leader came in 1916 when he, on behalf of the Congress, and Jinnah, on behalf of the Muslim League, sealed the historic Lucknow Pact. He defended the pact by stating, in a forthright speech at the 31st session of the Congress in Lucknow, ‘‘It has been said by some that we Hindus have yielded too much to our Mohammedan brethren. I am sure I represent the sense of the Hindu community all over India when I say that we could not have yielded too much.’’ He went to the extent of asserting that he would rather see the British hand over the governance of India to Indian Muslims (or Indians of any caste) than see the British remain as India’s paramount colonial authority. Had the spirit, if not the letter, of the Lucknow Pact held ground in subsequent decades, the history of India would have been different.

One last thought. Rather, a wish and a prayer. When Mumbai, scarred by the recent bomb blasts by jehadi terrorists, celebrates Ganesh festival next month, may it also celebrate Hindu-Muslim harmony. That would be a fitting reply to the anti-national forces. And also a fitting tribute to Lokmanya, a nationalist visionary and, deservedly, the beloved of the Indian people.