Congress And The BJP, Tweedledum And Tweedledee
Saeed Naqvi
The statue, to be completed in five years, will be the tallest in the world, twice the size of the Statue of Liberty. Heaven knows who will be Prime Minister then. If it is Narendra Modi, the ceremonies will be an extravaganza on a global scale. Will the Congress refuse to attend?
If, by a quirk of fortune, Rahul Gandhi finds himself in
He will not be allowed to by
the party. The national mood, Rahul will be told, is more Patel than Nehru,
which paraphrased means more saffron than secular. If it is a complicated
transformation to communicate, let me try explaining. Imagine the Congress and
the BJP on a stage as two puppets, holding hands and jigging, the accompanying
song would be:
In form and feature, face and limb
I grew so like my brother.
That folks went taking me for
him
And each for one another.
Patel may well be the perfect
symbol of this synthesis. And Nehru? A discard? On which perch do we place,
poor Maulana Azad who, with touching naivette, hankered for a united India which
ironically RSS ideologue H.V. Seshadri also wanted?
When Nehru switched and
supported the Partition plan, imagine the pain and bewilderment with which
Maulana Azad must have looked at him. Et tu, Jawaharlal? Nehru was mesmerized
by the Maulana’s intellect. In a letter to Indira Gandhi he describes him “too
erudite”. The Maulana dedicated India Wins Freedom to “Jawaharlal Nehru, friend
and comrade”. As Congress President from 1939 to 46 he successfully negotiated
with the British Cabinet Mission and handed over to the party a plan for a
united India .
Who wrecked it? And we have arrived in this twilight between hard and soft
saffron primarily under Congress rule.
This Patel debate is something
that neither the Congress nor the BJP can be sanguine about. How does one
square Modi’s admiration for Patel with the Tragic Story of Partition, by the
RSS ideologue, H.V. Seshadri. He has taken both, Nehru and Patel, to task for
having partitioned the country. Modi’s difficulty is this: Patels are the only
caste in India
who control agriculture and business. Without their support in Gujarat he is a cipher. The statue insures his security
in the state, in case of a tumble on the national stage.
Seshadri wrote: “when the new
Viceroy Lord Mountbatten announced on June 3, 1947, the plan for transfer of
power, it came as a stunning blow to the people. For that plan, approved by
Nehru and Patel, had envisaged cutting up Bharat and creating Pakistan ! The
great and trusted leaders of Congress had turned their backs on the sacred
oaths they had taken, and the pledges they had administered to the people.”
If you are inclined to take
the Seshadri version with a pinch of salt, let us read the version of someone
who was present at the Congress conclaves in those fateful days: Ram Manohar
Lohia. In his Guilty Men of India’s Partition, he describes Nehru “throwing a
fit”, when Lohia urged that Congress leaders should reject the Two-Nation
theory. Did you know that Congress leaders had accepted the “Two-Nation”
theory, that Hindus and Muslims constitute two nations? Why has the Congress
not spelt it out ever? Everything would have fallen in place. Indian Muslims
would not have been marginalized by deception; they would have been confronted
for a bargain. And it may well have been a grand bargain. In Lohia’s version,
Nehru was exhasperated with “this continual harping on Hindu and Muslim being
brothers or one nation, when they were at each other’s throat”. He described as
“fantastic, this continual debate with Mr. Jinnah”.
Nehru smiled at Lohia’s quip:
“as a results of the Civil war, had Americans from the north and the south
ceased to be brothers and one nation?”
Lohia is something of a red herring for most congressmen. Let us, therefore consider the following version of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: After Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination on January 30, 1948, at Birla House, the Home Minister, Sardar Patel came under a scanner.
“At a meeting held in Delhi to express our
sense of horror and sorrow at Gandhiji’s death, Jayaprakash Narayan said
clearly that the Home Minister of India, Sardar Patel, could not escape
responsibility for what had happened”. He sought an explanation. It was only
when his colleagues had put him in the dock, that Patel ordered the arrest of
RSS Supremo Golwalkar.
After the bitter experience of
the 1946 interim coalition government with the Muslim League, Sardar Patel
became a “greater believer in the two-nation theory than even Jinnah”. The
Maulana is unable to disguise his pain at his good friend Nehru, Patel and later
even Gandhiji, accept the plan for partition, leaving him and Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan twiddling their thumbs.
Little wonder the Muslim has
many issues with the Congress. What has become of him in the 60 years of
Congress rule, he was able to see in the mirror of the Sachar Committee Report
in 2006. Why, he asks, does he hear the same slogan, riot after riot?
“Mussalman ke do sthan.
Qabristan ya Pakistan .”
(There are two places for the
Muslim: the graveyard or Pakistan )
Is it because the Congress allowed
the misapprehension to persist that the Muslim divided the country and then
stayed on? If that were the case why have Seshadri, Lohia, Maulana Azad and
scores of others taken the Congress to task as the Guilty Men of India’s
Partition? Ofcourse, the BJP shouts the morbid slogan, but it is the Congress
which created conditions over the past 66 years for that slogan to carry.
Is there a way out? Ofcourse there is. But first let us find the courage to discuss history.
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