Gandhi, Golwalkar, Germany
“The
man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or
eyes.”
-
German Führer
Adolf
Hitler
Media
In
1938, Communism's victims were in millions compared to Nazis's
hundreds yet nobody questioned the legitimacy of the Bolshevik
regime. Young impressionable Nehru came back completely captivated
from a Russian trip in 1927 like numerous Western and westernized
intellectuals who applauded Communism and called for its implementation
in their homelands. Narrative theorists invoked construction of
identities, developed plots, characters and events to convey
authenticity to the socialist utopia because a foundational legend or
so-called golden age (past or future) helps in the consolidation of
the social category being mobilised. This process of accentuating
intergroup differences simultaneously also involves accentuation of
intragroup similarities, groups traditionally viewed as different
become viewed as more similar when the comparative context is widened
or dissimilar when narrowed.
New
York Times correspondent
Walter Duranty privately estimated the death toll of the Ukrainian
famine-genocide of 1932-33 at ten million, but in his journalistic
despatches, he denied the genocide completely. Gandhi first surfaced
in American awareness in 1920. While Americans relied on British news
agencies in the 1920s, by 1930s, American journalists had gained
indepepence from British influences. He was revered or reviled when
his first non-cooperation campaign struck a first mortal blow to the
myth of the benevolent white British raj. Gandhi’s iconic Dandi
March in 1930 was the second. It trained the western media spotlight
on India since it was designed so. Gandhi had been in touch with the
Director of Indian Independence League in New York, directing him to
publicise the protest. And so the New
York Times published
Gandhi’s appeal under the headline - Gandhi
Asks Backing Here: Urges Expression of Public Opinion for India’s
Right to Freedom.
The cover feature titled 'A Pinch of Salt' argued that had an English
politician in a loin cloth walked 80 miles to London barefoot, the
Englishmen would have thought him mad1.
The
following year, in 1931, Gandhi became Time Magazine’s Man of the
Year. Eight years later in 1939, Time chose Adolf as the Man of the
Year. Media made Gandhi and Hitler who they are today. Underneath the
stark, black-and-white illustration was the caption, “From the
unholy organist, a hymn of hate.” The dramatisation of Indian
nationalism in 1930 in the form of Salt Satyagraha prompted the Time
magazine to feature Gandhi on his cover, under the title, 'Saint
Gandhi'. Time defended the choices by " Man of the Year, now
Person of the Year, was not an honour but instead should be a
distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events
for better or
worse."
The British raj was helpless beyond a point to censor or repress
American journalists, whose nationality served as an immunity of
sorts.
“We,
the undersigned, demand that Ambassador resign or, failing that, be
recalled.”
- Indian
outragers
“I
went to educate myself about the organization.”
-
German
Ambassador Walter Lindner after
his visit to RSS office in Nagpur (July 2019)
Robert
Paxton, an American political scientist and historian, listed seven
features of fascism.
(i.)
The certainty in the supremacy of the group
(ii.)
The belief in the victimisation led justifications.
(iii.)
The fear of harm from liberal or foreign influences.
(iv.)
The need for integration of a 'purer' national community.
(v.)
The insistence on the group’s right to rule others.
(vi.)
The sense of the existence of a severe crisis.
(vii.)
The belief in the need for an authoritative leader.
An
All India Trinamool Congress parliamentarian used this list to point
out fascism in India while accusing the ruling right-wing BJP
government of fomenting the trend. Funnily, she forgot to mention how
TMC fits squarely within the definition with its penchant for
political violence, victimisation led justifications, intolerance led
non-engagement, frequent crises harking, fierce anti-left sentiment
in the indulgence of a supreme leader. Such double standards are not
limited to politics. Many cultist denominations display these
features.
Linear
patterns of casuality such as the Burkean pentad method are
popular
methods of analyzing social movements, but they are less suited
to study the Hindutva movement because the Hindutva movement does not
speak for a monolithic audience. Unimaginative
academics
are unable to comprehend the unique success of Hindutva in
consolidation of the Hindus for a developmental cause, so they
utilise run-of-the-mill models like guilt-redemption-purification
cycles2.
There
are people in Bharat who are
ignorant of Hitler
and his history, but
defend him by using
many false equivalences and superficial rationales. Conversely, there
are people who know all about Hitler,
being especially fond of his management style, his oratorical skills
and his gifts as a strategist. Researchers keep citing the increase
in sale of copies of Mein Kampf, adorned with Hitler’s image and
all. A man in Meghalaya named Adolf Lu Hitler-Marak is currently
running for his fourth consecutive term in the state assembly. There
is a popular Indian soap opera called Hitler Didi. Mein
Kampf
has a legitimate fan base just like The Communist Manifesto, written
by fellow Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and
responsible for
manifold
more deaths
than Mein Kampf.
Nazi-Soviet
enamoured Indians are ardent Hitler-Stalin fans. The southernmost
states of India have both
Stalins
and Communists.
Like all
other communist governments, the Communist Party of India (CPI) in
Kerala understands that sometimes action has to be taken, law has to
be broken, and then it has to be evaded. Conservatives are often
called fascists by the Left. Here is a typical case of a CPI
committed political murders in Kerala -
“The
district court trial of 7 CPI (M) workers for the murder of the
BJP-Yuva Morcha leader, Jaykrishnan Master in December 1999, was
about to commence. The defense team’s work was cut out and the area
secretary was supposed to assist the lawyers; witnesses had to be
gathered and evidence for the defense had to be mobilised. The
secretary had to make sure that once the law had been broken it could
also be evaded. At the time of the murder, the first accused,
Acharaparambath Pradeepan, was a CPI (M) branch secretary. At the end
of their trial, prosecution lawyers sought capital punishment for
Pradeepan and the other men accused of Jaykrishnan Master’s murder.
As per section Section 235(2) of the CrPC, the judge gave Pradeepan
and his co-accused the opportunity to speak before he pronounced his
judgment. It is notable that in the court Pradeepan did not evoke his
membership in the party. Instead he described himself as a ‘social
worker’ who
dealt with
“social problems” and
helped to
“improve things3.”
"From
this standpoint, sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations,
the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture
and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu
religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of
the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation, and must lose
their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race; or may stay in
the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming
nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment
not even citizen's rights."
-
MS Golwalkar's first book, We
and Our Nationhood Defined (1939) P.47-48/p.55-56
"To
keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the
world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews.
Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also
shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having
differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united
whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."
-
We
and Our Nationhood Defined P.35/p.43
Madhav
Sadashiv Golwalkar was the second Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh. He was born in 1906, the year after the partition
of Bengal. He was 33 and non-secular
when
he got his first book ‘We
and Our Nationhood Defined’
published. When Gandhi
was 37 and racist, he was commanding the corps of 21 in support of
the British colony, against the native Zulus of Africa. Golwalkar's
book
went
to print the same year as World War II began, in 1939.
Golwalkar's
oftest-quoted line from We
and Our Nationhood Defined is
that the minority people must "not claim even citizen's rights".
This is not enough to brand all Right-leaning people Nazis when
Golkwalkar's senior Lokmanya Bapuji M S Aney confirmed in the
foreword of the book itself that Golwalkar was applying to Islam an
arrangement developed by Islam itself. M S Aney chided Golwalkar for
coming to an understanding that Indian muslims were uncivilised,
undemocratic and incapable of transcending religion. Young
Golwalkar's views most certainly do not live up to modern
democratic-republican standards but those who say that it amounts to
fascism often forget that Golkwalkar was not living in modern
democratic-republican times.
In
judging Golwalkar's position, the fair mind must keep the political
atmosphere of 1938 at the centre of the controversy for the simple
reason that Golwalkar was not living in a vacuum. Muslim League had
not yet officially adopted the Pakistan resolution but the stench of
a separate state was dense. The league showed hands only in 1940,
despite the card conclusively known to all ever since it's
enunciation as far back as in 1888 by Syed Ahmed Khan’s Meerut
Speech. The basis for this demand was the two-nation theory. Congress
coterie accepted this slightly pyrrhic victory because the principle
was internationally accepted. It was applied in Austro-Hungarian,
Czarist and Ottoman cases. It was supported by Lenin too and
theoretically applied in USSR.
The
founding of the Indian National Congress (1885) was preceded by the
establishment of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (1875) at
Aligarh by Syed Ahmed Khan who espoused the two-nation theory in his
1888 speech at Meerut. In this speech, Syed announced that he
believed Muslims had lorded over India hence reserved the customary
right to rule once the British left. He spoke how his Muslim nation
had hitherto stayed silent on the question of the Indian National
Movement and to say that the Mohammedans have joined the Indian
National Movement because a few did, was quite wrong and a false
accusation against the Muslim nation. He feared that the Hindu
majority INC would suppress Mohammedan religious rites. The fear was
so belligerent that Syed went on to frankly advise his Hindu
'friends' that if they wished to cherish their religious rites, they
can never be successful by supporting Congress, that if they are to
be successful, it can only be by friendship and agreement with the
Muslims. He talked of Bengal, NWFP and Assam. He asserted many times
that the rulers and ruled must belong to one nation.
Syed
Ahmed asked if "in the times of the Mohammedan empire, would it
have been consistent with the principles of the rule that when
Emperor was about to make war on a province of India, he should have
asked his subject-peoples whether he should conquer that country or
not?" He asserted that the Muslim nation itself wielded empire,
and people of his nation were even then ruling. He asked if "it
was consistent with any principle of the empire? If there is any
principle of empire by which rule over foreign races may be
maintained in this manner?"
Syed
Ahmed spoke of the Hindu majority Indian National Congress whom he
lovingly called Bengalis, "Bengalis have never at any period of
time held sway over a particle of land. They are altogether ignorant
of the method by which a foreign race can maintain its rule over
races. You can appreciate these matters, but they cannot who have
never held a country in their hands nor won a victory. Oh, my brother
Musalmans! For seven hundred years in India, you have had imperial
sway. You know what it is to rule.” He quoted Chapter V of the Holy
Koran to lend support to the British government, “Thou shalt surely
find the most violent of all men in enmity against the true believers
to be the Jews and the idolators: and thou shalt surely find those
among them to be the most inclinable to entertain friendship for the
true believers, who say we are Christians.”
The
reasons Syed gave for this support was - "We can mix with the
English in a social way. We can eat with them, they can eat with us.
Whatever hope we have of progress is from them. The Bengalis can in
no way assist our progress.” Syed Ahmed exhorted, “Is it possible
that under the circumstances two nations – the Mohammedans and the
Hindus, could sit on the same throne and remain
equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them
should conquer the other and thrust it down.”
He
also warned Hindus of the might of the pan-Islamic Ummah, “Probably
Mohammedans would be by themselves enough to maintain their own
position. But suppose they were not. Then our Musalman brother, the
Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain
valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier on the
north to the extreme end of Bengal. This thing – who after the
departure of English would be conquerors – would rest on the will
of God. But until one nation had conquered the other and made it
obedient, peace cannot reign in the land.”
The
Khilafat movement (1919-1924) became an agitation by Indian Muslims
allied with Indian National Movement in the years following WWI with
express purposes of pressurising the British government to preserve
the authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam because
integral to this was the Indian Muslims’ desire to influence the
treaty-making process following the war in such a way as to restore
the 1914 boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, even though the Turks,
allies of the Central Powers, had been defeated in the war.
Indian
supporters of the Khilafat cause sent a delegation to London in 1920
to plead their case, but the British government correctly treated the
delegates as quixotic pan-Islamists and did not change its policy
toward Turkey. The Indian Muslims’ attempt to influence the
provisions of the Treaty of Sevres failed and the victors went ahead
with territorial adjustments, including the institution of mandates
over formerly Ottoman Arab territories. Gandhi espoused the Khilafat
cause, as he saw in it the opportunity to rally Muslim support for
his Non-Cooperation movement. It was none other than the Turkish
nationalists, the ones Khilafatis had sought to help in the first
place, who hammered the final nail in the coffin for the movement by
abolishing the Ottoman sultanate in 1922, Gandhi called off
Non-Cooperation movement same year after Chauri Chara incident citing
growing violence. He had earlier let Moplah riots happen with no
issues.
Golwalkar
was a realist who was wary of the leadership of the Khilafat movement
which included the Ali brothers (newspaper editors from Delhi), their
spiritual guides Maulana Abdul Bari of Lucknow, Maulana Abu’l Kalam
Azad of Calcutta and Maulana Mahmud ul-Hasan of Deoband. These Ulemas
used an oft-repeated strategy to consolidate forces, they declared
the European attacks upon the authority of the Caliph as an attack
upon Islam and thus as a threat to the religious freedom of Muslims
under British rule. This is what Syed Ahmed Khan had attempted in
1888.
Dr
BR Ambedkar wrote about pre-partition Hindu-Muslim Unity in his book,
Pakistan or The Partition of India. Dr Ambedkar wrote about Muslim
Moplahs in Malabar were progenies of the Muslim sea-faring traders
who married Hindu women and settled in Malabar over a long time. The
invasions of Hyder Ali (1766) and Tipu Sultan (1789) who gave strict
orders to his army to “surround
and extricate the whole race of Nairs from Kottayam to Palghat”
had emboldened the Moplah Muslims, so they began rioting which was
painted as revolting in what is now known as the Moplah Rebellion.
The
women of Malabar pleaded to Lady Reading: “It
is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the
horros and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels, of the many
wells and tanks filled up with mutilated, but often only half-dead
bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the
faith of our fathers, of pregant women cut to pieces and left on the
roasides, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse, of
our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to
death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured,
skinned and burnt alive, of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away
form the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and
outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these hell-hounds,
of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images
of deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered
cows where flowers garlands use to lie, or else smashed to pieces, we
remember how driven out of native hamlets, we wandered, starving and
naked, in the jungles and forests4.”
Dr
Ambedkar wrote, “The
agitations were carried out by two Muslim organizations, the
Khuddam-i-Kaba (Servants of the Mecca) and the Central Khilafat
Committee. Agitators actually preached the doctrine that India under
the British Government was Dar-ul-Harab and that the Muslims must
fight against it and if they could not, they must carry out the
alternative principle of Hijrat. As soon as the administration had
been paralysed, the Moplahs declared that Swaraj had been
established. A certain Ali Musaliyar was proclaimed Raja, Khilafat
flags were flown, and Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat
Kingdoms. The Hindus were visited by a dire fate at the hands of the
Moplahs. Massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples,
foul outrages upon women such as ripping open pregnant women,
pillage, arson and destruction – in short, all the accompaniments
of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the
Moplahs upon the Hindus until such time as troops could be hurried to
the task of restoring order through a difficult and extensive tract
of the country. This was not a Hindu-Muslim riot. This was just a
Bartholomew. The number of Hindus, who were killed, wounded or
converted, is not known. But the number must have been enormous5.”
Bose
wrote in his memoir, The Indian Struggle 1920-34 (published in 1935),
that "the
Moplah rising was directed against the local Hindus, nevertheless, it
was also an attack on the Government. It has significance also
because it was the first incident to loosen Hindu-Moslem unity. The
Muslims had the All-India Moslem League as the most important
organisation, having been started as early as 1906. During 1920 and
1924, the Moslem League was eclipsed by the All-India Khilafat
Committee. But after the abolition of the Khalifate in 1924, the
Khilafat movement in India collapsed, and the Moslem League regained
its former.” Bose listed prominent communal Muslim leaders - Aga
Khan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Mohammed Ikbal of Lahore, Mohammed Yakub
of UP, Shafi Daudi of Patna, Moulana Shaukat Ali. As a counterblast
to the All-India Moslem League, the Hindu Mahasabha came into
existence for the avowed object of protecting the rights of the
Hindus."
Bose listed the leaders Ramananda Chatterji of Calcutta, BS Moonje of
Nagpur, Bhai Parmanand of Lahore and N. C. Kelkar of Poona. Bose
mentioned the non-Brahmin and pro-government Justice Party of Madras
and the Sikhs of Punjab who were on the whole strongly nationalist.
Bose had long complained that the “false
unity of interests that are inherently opposed is not a source of
strength but a source of weakness in political warfare.”
Gandhi
tried burying the issue because it squarely hit his alliance with the
Khilafat Committee. He spoke of “brave
God-fearing Moplahs”
whom he described as “patriots
who were fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner
which they considered as religious6.”
He went on to add: “Hindus
must find the causes of Moplah fanaticism. They will find that they
are not to blame. They have hitherto not cared for the Moplah. It is
no use now becoming angry with the Moplahs or Mussalmans in general”,
while the Khilafists passed resolutions congratulating the Moplahs.
This became
a standard Gandhian appeasement pattern, often at severe costs.
Gandhi wrote
two
letters to Hitler. One started with “Dear
Friend. That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no
foes7.”
Truth remains Hitler and Gandhi were both delusional, they
both died by bullets shots. The other letter began
with
Gandhi massaging Hitler’s ego before buttresing his own, "We
have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor
do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents,
but your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends
and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are
monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the
estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness."
Hitler obviously did not read either because between the two letters
he
attacked and defeated
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Denmark.
Gandhi
wrote in a 1938 article in Harijan,"My sympathies are all with
the Jews. If there ever could be a justifiable war, in the name of
and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton
persecution of a whole race would be completely justified. But I do
not believe in any war8."
Gandhi was equally coy about supporting Jewish aspirations for
independence in the Holy Land, saying the Jews should engage only in
non-violence against the Arabs and “offer themselves to be shot or
thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against
them.”
The
Manchester Guardian highlighted: “One
certain element is the desperate religious fanaticism.. India broods
the horror of the cold blooded massacres by the Moplahs, still daily
showing how Hindus fare in the hand of fanatical Mohammedans. The
public, obscurely but rightly, connects the holocaust of Hindu lives
and property with Khilafat preachers and realise that the rule even
of the arrogant British is better than no rule9.”
Gandhi
appeased Khilafists for two reasons –
(i.)
He wanted to keep Hindu-Muslim unity alive
(ii.)
The saint had mastered the man.
Gandhi’s
personality frequently ranged from saint to Caesar. His practices of
asceticism, simple life, vegetarianism and adherence to truth gave
him a halo of saintliness. Bose observed that the Mahatma fully
exploited the weak traits of his countrymen –
(i.)
inordinate belief in fate and the supernatural
(ii.)
Indifference to scientific temper.
Bose
lamented the deaths of men like CR Das, Motilal Nehru and Lajpat Rai,
who could reason with Gandhi. The Mahatma has understood the
character of his people, he did not understand the character of his
opponents. The
Mahatma has understood the character of his people, he did not
understand the character of his opponents10,11.
To
the neutral eyes of the foreign British rulers, the two-nation theory
seemed eminently reasonable. Jinnah had pointed out, the Muslims were
distinct from the Hindus by religion, language, dress, food habits,
marriage customs, inheritance laws, holy days, arts, and they often
lived in separate neighbourhoods, so that they lived an entirely
separate life and were fit to be considered a separate nation. While
it was reasonable to the modern British rulers, it was equally
self-evident to the Islamic orthodoxy and ummah.
Golwalkar
John
Stuart Mill (Considerations
on Representative Government,
1861, p.292-294): "Free institutions are next to impossible in a
country made up of different nationalities. It
is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the
boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of
nationalities." (Mill is mentioned as a source of inspiration
for Hindu nationalists by M.S. Aney in his foreword to Golwalkar: We,
p.ii.) That Golwalkar was so particular about looking to democratic
authorities
for advice is of course never mentioned in the secondary literature
seeking to portray him as a Nazi.
Even
M.S. Aney (We,
p.ii) also mentions a long list of non-Nazi inspiring thinkers on
nationhood in his foreword including
Israel Zangwill, an
Anglo-Jewish nationalist playwright. While the Hindu nationalists
rejected Mahatma Gandhi's passive pacifism and envisaged the
necessity of preparing for confrontation, they never entertained the
nihilistic or vitalistic belief in war
for war's sake which
is so typical of Fascism. At the time of Golwalkar's writing,
Hitler's ‘final solution’ only consisted of legal discriminations
and vague plans to banish the Jews either to Madagascar or to
Palestine, there were secret negotiations between Nazis and Zionists
i.e. removing them from Germany rather than killing them.
When
Golwalkar wrote that Germany was proving (in a way which he
explicitly considered "shocking") the impossibility of
culturally distinct nations to live together, he was not referring to
the Shoah, which was still three years in the future, but to the
removal of Jews from office, their loss of citizenship and their
resulting exodus from Germany, phenomena paralleled by the treatment
of non-Muslims in Muslim countries even today.
Nothing
indicates that Golwalkar understood the exact nature and antecedents
of the anti-Jewish policies in Germany and other countries. The
intricate story of anti-Judaism in Europe was beyond his politically
uneducated intellect. Though many RSS people consider Guruji a great
thinker, his assessment of contemporary political phenomena including
Nazism was amateurish and poorly conceived when not downright
mistaken. Rather, it seems he simply projected his Indian concerns on
a world situation of which he knew little and understood less.
The
Jews had become less and less distinct from the 18th century onwards,
more and more assimilated, and therefore more and more part of German
society including its upper layers, for whom Hitler created
an elaborate class so as to bracket them like Stalin and Mao. While
Muslims had been increasingly dissimilating themselves from their
mother society. The Khilafat,
Antifa, Intifada, Tabligh
movements are all examples of growing chasms between democratic and
Muslim worlds. In the 1930s, a new political articulation was given,
viz. Muslim separatism crystallizing around the demand for Partition.
This had no parallel at all in the situation of the Jews in Germany.
While
Golwalkar wanted the Muslims to identify with India rather than with
their transnational community, Hitler wanted to dis-identify the
assimilated Jews with the German nation and to push them back into
their transnational communal identity. Hitler forced Jews into
visiblilty by wearing the yellow David star, a practice modelled on
the enforced recognizability imposed on the Jews in the medieval
Islamic empire, typically by means of a yellow strip of cloth.
Talibani
orthodoxy encourages
dissimilation,
proritises
faith over nation, to gather fodder for self-sustenance.
John
Stuart Mill wrote in his Considerations
on Representative Government (1861),
"Free
institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different
nationalities. It is, in general, a necessary condition of free
institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in
the main with those of nationalities."
M.S. Aney in his foreword to Golwalkar's We
and Our Nation Defined mentioned
Mill as a source of inspiration for Hindu nationalists. M S Aney
mentions a long list of non-Nazi inspiring thinkers on nationhood in
his foreword, including Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish nationalist
playwright. While Hindu nationalists rejected Mahatma Gandhi's
passive pacifism and envisaged the necessity of preparing for
confrontation, they never entertained the nihilistic or vitalistic
schools. At the time of Golwalkar's writing of We
and Our Nation Defined,
Hitler's solution consisted of legal discriminations and vague plans
to banish the Jews either to Madagascar or to Palestine i.e. removing
them from Germany rather than killing them.
When
Golwalkar wrote that Germany was shockingly proving the impossibility
of culturally distinct nations to live together, he was not referring
to the Shoah, which was still three years in the future, but to the
removal of Jews from office, their loss of citizenship and their
resulting exodus from Germany. Nothing indicates that Golwalkar
understood the exact nature and antecedents of the anti-Jewish
policies in Germany and other countries. Golwalkar wrote "The
Russian nation adheres with religious fervour" to Communism at a
time when Stalin had just murdered millions of Russians and
Ukrainians. In 1939, Golwalkar did not know that Russia had been
turned Communist by brute force rather than by the people's will.
Golwalkar’s
racial definition of nation and nationality, in consonance with his
time, was composed of what he called five unassailable and scientific
units, namely, country, race, religion, culture and language. ‘Race’
(jati) was the foundational component of a nation for Golwalkar.
Scientists at one point identified as many as nine races: African,
American Indian or Native American, Asian, Australian Aborigine,
European, Indian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian. It is
incorrect to base races on physical attributes as we often tend to
do. There are physical differences within
a
race as well. For example, Scandinavian whites have lighter skins
than Mediterranean whites. Some whites (as Europeans like being
called) have darker skin than some blacks (as Europeans like to call
African Americans). If clear racial differences ever existed, they
have most certainly become increasingly blurred. A century ago, for
example, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews who left their
homelands for a better life in the United States were not regarded as
white once they reached the United States.
Truth
is no person born in the country, whose ancestors have enjoyed rights
of citizenship for centuries together, can be called a foreigner on
the ground that it follows a different religion. Religions evolve as
humans do. They witness evolutionary ebbs and flows. It is these ebbs
and flows that carve faiths and people. Some faiths emphasize time
while some faiths are timeless. The difference between past and
future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between
regret and intention, appears to be no difference in the elementary
laws that describe the mechanisms of the world. It is for these
reasons that religion (as we know it in the 21st century) can never
be successful criteria for nationhood if the aim is national
progress. Israel, a much-touted example of a faith-based nation,
thrives because it shares a border with Syria, Jordan, Egypt and
Lebanon. It would have struggled if it had Saudi Arabia, Iran or
Pakistan as next-door neighbours. Carlo Rovelli, an Italian
theoretical physicist, deduces the crux of time, “In Hindu
mythology, the river of Cosmos is portrayed with the sacred image of
Shiva dancing, his dance supporting the course of the universe, it is
itself the flowing of time. What could be more universal and obvious
than this flowing?”
The
intricate story of anti-Judaism in Europe was beyond his young
inexperienced intellect. Though many people consider Golwalkar a
great thinker, his assessment of contemporary politics was
ill-conceived, when not incorrect. He was simply associating Indian
concerns with the world situation. The Jews had assimilated into the
German society, particularly the upper class, for which Hitler had
created an elaborate structure to identify and categorise them, just
like Stalin and Mao did in USSR and China. Muslims, on the other
hand, had increasingly dissimilated themselves from their
motherlands, becoming more and more Arabic over time. In India of the
1930s, a new political articulation was given to Muslim separatism by
allowing crystallization around the demand for Pakistan. This had no
parallel in Germany. The Khilafat,
Antifa, Intifada, Tabligh movements
are all examples of growing chasms between democratic and Muslim
nations. Muslim orthodoxy encouraged dissimilation and prioritised
faith over motherlands to gather recruits and fodder for
self-sustenance. While Golwalkar simply wanted the Muslims to
identify with India, not Arabia, Hitler wanted to dis-identify the
Jews. Hitler, like the Taliban, forced Jews to wear Yellow Badges, a
practice modelled on the medieval Islamic empires which enforced Jews
to wear a yellow strip of cloth for recognisability.
Why neither
Savarkar nor Golwalkar elaborated upon exactly how the Hindu nation
and people could re-vitalise the Hindu national consciousness and
re-establishing Hindu nationhood might be attributed to their
acceptance that the Indian vision can not be rallied behind singular
individuals as Netaji Bose and Dr Ambedkar has warned, that it needs
a more democratic approach. The writings of Veer Savarkar and Guru
Golwalkar are not operating manuals of the Hindu nationalist movement
or the theory of nationhood as accepted by all Hindus. Their theories
were mere continuity of the Burkean tradition in daring to bring the
ugly versions of truth even in face of destructively dominant
narratives and counter-narratives, even on topics as serious as
nationhood, good-vs-evil, protagonists and antagonists. The
mobilisation strategies of all movements should be continuously
scrutinised by academics, political commentators, and journalists
alike, bearing in mind the intellectual harm caused by eventual
depletion on account of prejudices.
1. How
Mahatma Gandhi became a US news star in the 1930s | Research
News,The Indian Express.
https://indianexpress.com/article/research/how-gandhi-became-a-us-news-star-in-the-1930s4871557/.
2. Chandrasekaran,
R. HINDUTVA MOVEMENT: BURKEAN EXAMINATION OF VIOLENCE AS
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE In Partial Fulfillment for the degree of MASTER
OF ARTS Major Department: Communications. (2012).
3. Chaturvedi,
R. North Kerala and Democracy’s Violent Demands. 47,
(2012).
4. Untold
Story Of Tipu Sultan’s Atrocities in Kerala - The Analyst.
https://theanalyst.co.in/untold-story-tipu-sultans-atrocities-kerala/.
5. 307c.
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_partition/307c.html.
6. Khan,
S. S., Svensson, T., Jogdand, Y. A. & Liu, J. H. Lessons from
the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu
nationhood by the hindu nationalist movement of India. J. Soc.
Polit. Psychol. 5, 477–511 (2017).
7. When
Mahatma Gandhi chided Hitler and called his actions monstrous - News
Analysis News.
https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/when-mahatma-gandhi-chided-hitler-and-called-his-actions-monstrous-1605346-2019-10-02.
8. Unearthed
Mahatma Gandhi’s WWII letter wishes Jews ’era of peace’-
The New Indian Express.
https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2019/sep/25/unearthed-mahatma-gandhis-wwii-letter-wishes-jews-era-of-peace-2038567.html.
9. Savarkar:
Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 - Vikram Sampath - Google
Books.
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=E46nDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT559&lpg=PT559&dq=gandhib+patriots+who+were+fighting+for+what+they+consider+as+religion,+and+in+a+manner+which+they+considered+as+religious.&source=bl&ots=zBcYomnd93&sig=ACfU3U29FWPBfVFZelH2pSMji-81VEFzmg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRjNzVzMrpAhXH6XMBHcxRAAkQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=gandhib
patriots who were fighting for what they consider as religion%2C and
in a manner which they considered as religious.&f=false.
10. No,
dear land of liberty, you can’t judge Bose. He sought it, too.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/clicklit/no-dear-land-of-liberty-you-cant-judge-bose-he-sought-it-too/.
11. A
Beacon Across Asia: A Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose - Google
Books.
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=hYaMBfgT2y8C&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=Your+Excellency,+I+have+been+in+politics+all+my+life+and+I+do+not+need+any+advice+from+anyone.&source=bl&ots=CeH5lB_mQS&sig=ACfU3U2GCOsO3_YxPBUQAzL8DXsQJhqhaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiJ8qWmmsrpAhX46nMBHfolCEUQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=Your
Excellency%2C I have been in politics all my life and I do not need
any advice from anyone.&f=false.
