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Journalism of Courage
Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the former Prime Minister whose death got reduced to a TV ticker when the Mumbai terror attack of 2008 was being covered round the clock, made a posthumous appearance days ago, when he was memorialised by the DMK government in Tamil Nadu via a statue unveiled at Presidency College in Chennai.
V P Singh thus became the latest figure from the past to be resurrected for purposes of the present.
The DMK’s gesture — rare, coming from a government subscribing to the Dravidian ideology that stands against ‘Hindi imposition’ in any form — was an attempt to find pan-Indian Opposition linkages, with social justice as the defining theme. Ironically, the object of its reverence originated from Prayagraj — the hub of modern Hindi over the last century.
Apart from V P Singh’s family, former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was also present with Tamil Nadu CM M K Stalin during the unveiling of the statue.
If the INDIA bloc has to do anything meaningful against the BJP in 2024, it needs pan-Indian linkages, as, apart from the Congress, it comprises regional parties which have traditionally identified regional diversity and distinctiveness as the core theme of their politics.
Large parts of the Opposition — the Congress included — have latched on to the demand for a caste census to undercut the BJP’s deep inroads among the OBCs of north, central and western India. This is something that the DMK, which is wary of north-centrism, also resonates with, given the fact that middle castes once constituted the core of Dravidian ideology against Brahminical dominance in government jobs in the British Madras province even a century ago, when the DMK didn’t exist.
In this context, V P Singh — a Thakur who began his political life as a Gandhian by donating 200 bighas of land to the Bhoodan movement at age 26, became an anti-corruption icon in the days of the Bofors scam that targeted former PM Rajiv Gandhi, and became an unlikely social justice icon when he announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations as PM, purportedly to contain his rival and Deputy PM Devi Lal’s plan for a huge farmers’ rally — fits the bill perfectly.
This isn’t exactly an opportunistic appropriation by the SP and DMK — it is an attempt to resurrect the legacy of a leader who decided to usher in OBC reservations, much to the chagrin of the large class falling under the general category in north India. Ram Manohar Lohia, the original icon of north Indian Socialists, wouldn’t work in Tamil Nadu, as he was a strong backer of Hindi apart from being the most influential ideologue for OBC reservations.
The attempt to resurrect historical figures to provide a concrete base to a new political pitch isn’t new, particularly so in the last decade.
The Congress celebrated Kanshi Ram on his birth anniversary this year, to make a pitch not just to UP Dalits staring at what seems like a terminal BSP decline, but also to sharpen its caste census demand. It matters little that Kanshi Ram was instrumental in the decline of the Congress in UP.
However, there is a tenuous link: the Congress was the prime claimant of Dalit votes in UP before Kanshi Ram carried them away from it. The Congress, in short, was appealing to its vote bank of several decades ago.
Appropriation, however, presupposes a minimal meeting ground. An early mover in this game, Narendra Modi appropriated the legacy of Sardar Patel, for example during his rise in national politics. Once he became the PM, he built the imposing Patel statue in Gujarat with much fanfare. In this, he was not only eager to celebrate icons of the freedom struggle, accusing the Congress of focusing only on Jawaharlal Nehru, but also on highlighting the crucial differences between Nehru and Patel on issues close to the RSS and Hindutva.
Despite Patel and Nehru converging on the decision to ban the RSS in 1948 after the assassination of their mentor Mahatma Gandhi, it is a documented though little known historical fact that Patel wanted RSS swayamsevaks to join the Congress, and was opposed by Nehru.
As documented by B D Graham in his authoritative book on the Jana Sangh published by Cambridge University Press, in October 1949, while Nehru was abroad, the CWC under Pattabhi Sitaramayya had passed a resolution that RSS volunteers be allowed to join the Congress. This was in keeping with Sardar Patel’s line that these volunteers were ‘disciplined and patriotic’, but given to some extremism, and that they could be mellowed under the guidance of the Congress leadership.
In November 1949, the CWC reversed its own resolution purportedly under Nehru’s influence on the technical ground that while all Congressmen could join the Congress Volunteer Corps, the latter did not allow members of another volunteer organisation to join it — something that would cause an anomaly if RSS volunteers were to join the Congress.
The BJP also portrays Patel as the great unifier of India, bringing princely states under the Indian government, contrasting this with Nehru allowing Jammu and Kashmir special status. Nehru’s brand of secularism also doesn’t fit well with the Sangh’s Hindutva world view.
While the Modi government has successfully appropriated Patel, with the Prime Minister also modelling himself on ‘The Iron Man of India’, who incidentally was a fellow Gujarati, the BJP has had lesser success when it comes to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Documents pertaining to his life were placed in public domain in 2015-16, soon after Modi came to power for the first time, and the NDA government also installed his statue at India Gate in 2022. However, the gains have not been much for the BJP as unlike in the case of Patel, the claims of the party to Bose’s legacy were far fewer.
There is little commonality between the BJP and the late leader who was a key figure among socialists within the Congress, except the fact that he rejected the ways of Gandhi and, later, even fell out with former friend and fellow socialist Nehru. However, Bose remains quintessentially a hero of Bengal, a state where the BJP is struggling to make further inroads.
Similarly, the BJP has been ineffectual in targeting the Congress’s soft underbelly when it comes to K Kamaraj, a stalwart sidelined by Indira Gandhi. In 2018, Congress and BJP workers had come to blows in Tamil Nadu’s Salem, after Congress workers had found BJP flags around a statue of Kamaraj on his 116th birth anniversary. However, in a state where the one uniting factor is a strong anti-Centre sentiment, the bid to co-opt Kamaraj was roundly rejected.
More recently, Congress PM P V Narasimha Rao has found a home in the politics of the Telangana ruling party the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). Rao, who ushered in liberalisation, never got his due in the Congress due to his strained relations with the Gandhi family, and this is very attractive for both the BRS and BJP. Given that the state of the economy is one of its main weapons against the BJP, the Congress has belatedly tried to lay claim to Rao.
In case of some leaders, the appeal is too widespread to be limited by ideological motives. For example, Gandhi, B R Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh, whom no party can ignore or not revere. From the Swachh Bharat campaign of the Modi government with Gandhi as the symbol, to Modi taking foreign dignitaries to visit Rajghat during the recent G20 Summit, there is little to choose between the BJP and the Congress in case of the Mahatma. Similarly, Ambedkar is now universally acknowledged from the Right to the Left.
And Bhagat Singh, a Socialist in his life, is at once an icon of the Left as the Right, with its muscular nationalism, today.
