Opinion In Karnataka, a battle to rescue Gandhi’s image
As Gandhi’s image is travestied, over and over again, I fear the most for the young, especially the very young, who will now know no other Gandhi than the one that has been chosen as the cheap currency of the party in power
People pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi on his birth anniversary, in Chikkamagaluru, Karnataka(File Photo: PTI) On February 4, the Karnataka assembly passed a resolution in both houses against the Union Government’s Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission-(Gramin) (VB-G-RAM-G) Act of 2025, which replaced the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Although the BJP-led opposition was invited to participate in the debate, it chose to walk out, raising slogans against an unrelated charge of corruption. Although the Congress-led Karnataka government was asserting its federal right to oppose a decision that had been thrust on it by the Centre, BJP legislators claimed that the resolution itself is illegal. And no doubt, the Governor, if he has to play a role, will do his bit to defend Delhi’s ramparts.
Much has been written and discussed about the fatal blows inflicted by the new legislation on the innovative employment guarantee scheme, especially on state governments and the rural poor. The discussion has been equally about the fading and diminished value of Gandhi as an icon, whose name has been replaced in the new act by a predictable and artless use of the acronym RAM. Karnataka’s feisty assertion of its federal privilege attempted a recovery of the image of Gandhi.
On January 29, full-page ads, put out by the state government, in all newspapers showed a cartoon strip of Gandhi engaging in gentle conversation with a man called Sangappa – subtly portrayed as a votary of the Union government, since he wears a white shirt and khaki pants – enquiring about the reasons for the changes to the MGNREGA. And Sangappa politely provides, not a rational defence of the new act, but a cynical suggestion that “the times they are a-changing.” We have moved away from the “right to work” to “work as a government charity.” When centralised decisions have completely undermined state and panchayat rights, why associate Gandhi’s name with employment guarantee at all? In the second of the ads that were put out, Sangappa finally tells a very perplexed Gandhi that all these are necessary sacrifices to build a Viksit Bharat.
The opposition BJP has responded using the only “language” that it knows. We know that since 2014, Gandhi has been thoroughly mined by the ruling dispensation – or put in his place. No government would dare dislodge Gandhi’s gap-toothed endorsement of all Indian currency notes, no matter what colour or denomination they come in, even though we know that this would have been the most distasteful of associations for someone like him. But the government in power managed to distil no more than a pair of spectacles for its Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. The spectacles have assumed a menacing ubiquity, looming large on bus stops and calendars, even as sewer deaths, manual scavenging and a deep-seated aversion to public hygiene (linked no doubt to caste) continue to remind us of what really needs to be fixed for a cleaner, healthier and sustainable India.
But the Karnataka BJP has taken to a new level the grotesque distortions to which Gandhi has been subjected over the last 11 years. In its own full-page ads that appeared on February 6, it shows a Mahatma raising his cane to strike CM Siddaramaiah, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and Congress Party President Mallikarjun Kharge, accusing them of having looted the country for the past 60 years. In just one image, the BJP has shown its contempt for argument, discussion, or persuasion, and its preference for the use of violence.
We know that the cane (lathi)-as-weapon, rather than as the essential third limb of Gandhi, has attained unprecedented importance in our national life. We also know against whom – both symbolically and actually – the lathi has been used. It is this crossover of symbols – from benign to malevolent — that artist BV Suresh brought to his installation at the Kochi-
Muziris Biennale in December 2018. And a new sense of urgency, indeed despair, brought Gandhi back to the Sixth Biennale of 2025-26, in an exhibit entitled “You I could not save, walk with me”. Four artists/curators/photographers have engaged in an act of re-memorialising – through photographs, poetry, clips, and artefacts – reminding viewers that Gandhi lived only 169 days in an independent India, shot dead by a fellow Hindu, after 33 years of anti-colonial nationalist struggle.
Neither a passionate adherence to truth nor an ardent desire for nonviolence mark our public life today. As Gandhi’s image is travestied, over and over again, I fear the most for the young, especially the very young, who will now know no other Gandhi than the one that has been chosen as the cheap currency of the party in power.
The writer is a Bengaluru-based historian and was professor of History at JNU, Delhi
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