I want my Savarkar, my Gandhi, my Patel, my Bhagat Singh, my Subash Bose…. how many can you count?

Mani Shankar Aiyar, an ardent Sonia-pleaser Congress sycophant seems to love to invite trouble at his doorstep. Given his record of sycophancy, we shouldn’t be surprised if he goes on a record-breaking spree in stooping to lower and lower levels. From proclaiming that Rajiv Gandhi was “innocent” in the Bofors case to hollering all kinds of vacuities, Aiyar has always been in the eye of the storm, to utter a cliché. His stunt of making a controversial statement about Savarkar is the latest offering.

He quotes from the Indian Annual Register to bolster his claim of equating Savarkar to Jinnah. And if you think that I’m planning to refute his statement, you’re mistaken. Heh heh! Far from it. But before I get to the main issue of this entry, I’d like to point out a tiny (?) fact about Aiyar.

Aiyar happened to support (or garner funds for?) the Chinese invasion of Indian territory in 1962. This fact was brought out by some distinguished gentleman in the late 70s (early 80s? you must excuse my unforgivable lack of familiarity with dates). The other fact is that Aiyar never challenged this statement by filing a suit against the said gentleman, which to put it mildly, amounted to doubting Aiyar’s integrity (!)to India.

Aiyar’s “crime” in the present case is that he has ordered the plaques–which contain some sayings of Savarkar–removed from the cellular jail in the Andamans. This move of installing the plaque was initiated during the NDA regime, and the UPA, in a bid to undo all that the NDA had done, seems comical, to put it mildly.

It is beyond dispute that Savarkar–whatever his ideology (read: always Saffron/Hindutva/Militant)–was a patriot who sacrificed his everything for liberating India from the British. And where patriots are concerned, there is no question of degree: a person who feels passionate about his/her motherland enough to sacrifice his/her youth, energy, time, career… deserves veneration. And there’s nothing like, “X is a greater patriot than Y.” This ascribing of ulterior motives to patriots gets my guts.

Anybody who has followed post-independence history can see a not-so-peculiar trend, which has taken a turn for the worse with the passing years. The trend of appropriating national heroes, patriots, leaders, saints, and men of tall standing in any area. This is the consequence of caste-based politics. Kanakadasa is revered all over Karnataka as a great saint, a poet and devotee par excellence; his moving lyrics devoted to Lord Vishnu (and all his avatars) continue to captivate laymen and devotees alike. It is also well known that he is from a lower caste, the Kurubas or the shepherd caste. What today has happened is that he is being appropriated as the “property” of the Kurubas alone, something which was unheard of prior to the curse of caste-based, divisive politics. In the same vein, the hunter-caste has appropriated Valmiki, and have pasted the label of Valmiki Brahmins to represent themselves. While one can argue that having an identity for the purposes of representation in a democracy is crucial, this trend seeks to divide in the name of claiming identity. We can apply this logic even to Gods: Krishna is uppermost in the list–he too, hails from a “lower” caste, the Yadvas or cowherds! More on this later.

The BJP has been in the forefront of condemning Aiyar, among others including (surprise!) Karunanidhi! In this, I detect the same traces, which I’ve described earlier: of trying to appropriate Savarkar. Whether the BJP likes it or no, it has no go because of pressure from the RSS. So, the same logic of appropriating can be applied to the RSS, too. The Congress played this appropriation game with great aplomb. Post-independence and through my formative years, thousands of school children were brought up to believe that India won independence only because of Gandhi, and that Gandhi was sacrosanct–he could do no mistake, he was above criticism. Yet, it was this same Congress, first under Nehru, that destroyed everything Gandhi had stood for. Gandhi professed a great reverence towards Sanatana Dharma and looked to the Gita when he was troubled. Nehru and his coterie of Leftists harped that the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas are a fraud committed upon mankind. The ideals of the paragon of non-violence were quickly discarded, and so brutally that there have been more “communal” riots in independent India that ever before. Some questions trouble me: how relevant is Gandhi (and his ideals) today? Why were they so widely followed during the freedom struggle? Why is Gandhi an object of such virulent hate today? (what else explains the act of Kanshi Ram and his followers desecrating the Raj Ghat a few years ago, or the fact that Ashok Kavi Row called him a bastard bania on TV?)

Savarkar and other patriots deserve a place of honour, irrespective of their caste/ideology/community etc. In doing what he has done, Aiyar has again exposed his copyright crassness. Is Mani Shankar Aiyar prepared to do what Savarkar did for the country? Can he suffer virtual hell in jail, be subjected to inhuman torture for fourteen long years, all for the sake of the motherland? Doesn’t he see that whatever ideology Savarkar professed had nothing to do with his genuine passion to see a free India?

However, there is something sinister about this affair of appropriating people as if they are property to be owned. Going by Lord Krishna’s example above, what if a certain caste calls for prohibiting worship of the God because he belongs to their caste, and that people of other castes cannot (should not?) worship Krishna? The same way that the Congress did by trying to “own” Gandhi: the rules were clear–if you held Gandhi in some esteem, you were a Congressman, if you didn’t you were on the side of Godse/the fascists.

This is the point I want to underscore: amidst this mess, the daily shouting matches, we forget to remember the essence of the whole thing–that all these men and women fought for India, and that no matter what they said or did, they are humans like all of us, they were subject to the same idiosyncrasies as all of us are, but the crucial difference lay in the fact that they transcended common weaknesses and had the courage to continue their struggle because they never lost sight of the goal of a free India. The common thread that passed through all of them was India.

That sadly, is lacking now.