Mahatma’s ideals in the age of Modi

December 29, 2014 10:42 pm | Updated 10:42 pm IST

POLITICS IN THE TIMES OF CHURNING — A Journalist’s Perception: V. Krishna Ananth; Daya Publications, 30, TNAUColony, 6th Street, Rajagambeeran, Othakadai, Madurai-625107. Rs. 450.

POLITICS IN THE TIMES OF CHURNING — A Journalist’s Perception: V. Krishna Ananth; Daya Publications, 30, TNAUColony, 6th Street, Rajagambeeran, Othakadai, Madurai-625107. Rs. 450.

In the last five years, politics in India was under the sway of a blitzkrieg of corruption allegations. A larger-than-life image, that of Narendra Modi, capitalised on it, gave the impression of ‘a wave’ and reaped electoral dividends. However, the country’s largest minority, the Muslims, chose not to invest their belief in this ‘wave’ — most of them didn’t vote for Bharatiya Janata Party. That Muslim MPs number just 22 in the current Lok Sabha, the lowest in half-a-century, is a reflection of the limited voice they will have in our legislature in the next five years.

V. Krishna Ananth’s assertion is that our Muslim fellow citizens have reasons to feel betrayed that the vision of Gandhiji for a secular, democratic state has been short-sold to accommodate politics of polarisation. He refers to the superb M.S. Sathyu movie Garam Hawa in which the character of Salim Mirza chooses to live the vision of the Mahatma rather than that of the Quaid-e-azam. Perhaps the Salim Mirzas would be a disillusioned lot at present?

However, just like Mirza in the movie, Ananth shows unshakable belief in Gandhian ideals through his articles selected for this book. In the prelude, he outlines his belief when he admits that “from celebrating violence, particularly where it is against the state,” he was transformed into “a votary of non-violence” over a period of time. He also admits that, in being committed to Leon Trotsky’s permanent revolution, he is closer to Gandhi than ever.

This book, a collection of newspaper and journal articles that appeared between 1991 and 2013, including the years in which he was active in journalism and wrote for The Hindu, was completed before the recent Lok Sabha elections. More notably, it is written more from the point of view of a historian than a journalist.

Vested interests When we examine the zeitgeist of the last two-and-a-half decades, we find that they have been more momentous than the previous four decades of independent India. These decades made us realise that India’s nation-building process, initiated by Gandhi in the early years of the struggle for independence and left unfinished by Nehru, had come to a halt sometime in the 1970s. Our country has seen seven elections since 1991, at the rate of one every three years.

Parliament has become a theatre of vested interests rather than a centre for law making. This is symptomatic of a lack of political imagination — both on the part of the political class and that of the voting masses — in providing a progressive path to the nation-in-the-making that is India.

Over the next five years, in the absence of a strong parliamentary opposition, the Fourth Estate has to rise to the occasion. In such a scenario, Ananth’s repeated critiques on themes like the Emergency, liberalisation of our economy and the communalism afflicting our polity come as a welcome blast from the past.

His concerns on various themes — like the tendency of our politicians to play politics of polarisation and the lack of a credible social democratic opposition to the Congress party — look relevant even two decades after some of them were written. This just shows that though we have a lodestar in the form of a progressive Constitution, our democratic project is just going in circles.

The most important section of the book is the one on communalism. Some questions the intelligentsia has been grappling with in the past two months are: Do religious figures like Ganesha and Karna represent ancient scientific advances? Should the teaching of Sanskrit be made compulsory in central schools? Is the Gita to be made a national scripture? These questions of ‘soft Hindutva’ that shock but fall short of offending had their precursors in the dark 1990s documented by Ananth, a time when majoritarianism was at its peak.

The author keeps revisiting the argument that history textbooks can be used as a battleground for competing ideologies. The glimpses of our past provided by the books can be used to either strengthen our Founding Fathers’ project of secularism or nullify the gains we have made so far.

Also, he espouses the theory that if history is a way of understanding the past to make sense of the present, there is room for multiple interpretations. However, he is also clear that for the cultivation of scientific temper, certain lines need to be drawn.

Guiding force Here, our Constitution needs to act as the guiding force and there is no place for anachronisms like the Aryan supremacy hypothesis. A secular democratic republic cannot indulge in glorification of the varna system. A nation that has right to equality as a fundamental right cannot entertain a theory that promotes discrimination based on caste or religion. This way of making history ‘many-sided’, in other words, goes against the egalitarian ideals of our freedom movement and the Constitution born out of it.

As we move on in the seventh decade since independence, this book asserts the need to go back to the ideals that inspired our freedom movement, not to blindly follow the philosophy, but to adapt it to come up with a viable framework of governance. When we revisit the moderation advocated by the Mahatma, we feel that there could be no better starting point than the contemplative satyagrahi’s My Experiments With Truth .

POLITICS IN THE TIMES OF CHURNING — A Journalist’s Perception: V. Krishna Ananth;Daya Publications, 30, TNAU Colony, 6th Street, Rajagambeeran, Othakadai, Madurai-625107. Rs. 450.

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