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BJP'S GANDHI PARADOX
During the recent"Howdy Modi"rally in Houston, which welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States, a bald man appeared in the crowd dressed in white, holding a stick and altogether looking like Mahatma Gandhi. In an interview after the event, the man compared the Indian anti-colonial leader to the current Indian PM, calling them both "fakirs, saints" It was a moment that perfectly illustrated the post-truth era we live in. Today the government of India led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly embraces the towering figure of Gandhi, a man who was deeply committed to the politics of truth and nonviolence and who openly rejected ethnic and religious nationalism and hatred.
But uncomfortable facts are easily swept aside in these post-truth times. Since 2014, when Modi's first term in office started, a large section of the Indian media began to side with the propaganda of power, instead of pursuing the truth for its own sake.This has allowed the party to celebrate Gandhi's legacy and appropriate his symbolic power.
Doing so is perhaps an attempt to conceal its own politics. After all, you gain moral currency in the eyes of the people when you declare Gandhi to be on your side. It acts as a mark of trust. Gandhi believed deeply in the doctrine of"ahimsa" (compassion and nonaggression). He applied it not only to the anti-colonial struggle he led, but also in his aspirations for relations between the various ethnic and religious groups living within the borders of post-colonial India. His mode of politics rejected the invention of an enemy as a tool for political and social control. Gandhi believed in democracy and saw the religious "other" as a friend. While his insistence on nonviolence contributed to the success of the anti-colonial struggle he led, it also earned him many enemies. The RSS, for example, strongly disagreed with Gandhi's methodsand ideology.
In his 1939 book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, one of the leaders of the RSS, MS Golwalkar, rejected the idea of living with difference. He saw all non-Hindus as "traitors and enemies to the National cause."
Drawing inspiration from the Nazis, Golwalkar wrote: "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 Hindustan to learn and profit by."
He believed that a nation could only be defined against a racial and religious "other" and promoted the idea of a Hindu-only India. According to Golwalkar, "wrong notions of democracy duped [us] into believing our foes to be our friends." Today, it is the ideas of Golwalkar, not Gandhi, that Modi and the BJP espouse.
In its rhetoric and policies, the BJP government has systematically sought to exclude the "other". Muslim migrants have been called "termite$"and critics "anti-nationals". National registers have been updated to exclude immigrants; cow vigilantism and lynchings have not been discouraged; dissenting journalists, activists and academics have been systematically silenced.
India under the BJP is being made to forget Gandhi's core teachings. But he is still being used as a symbol for programmes like the "Swachh Bharat" mission which aims to clean up the streets, roads and infrastructure of India's urban and rural areas. India indeed needs clean toilets, streets and neighbourhoods. But Gandhi in Noakhali, as Manubahen described in her diary, cleared with his own hands, the dung and human excreta thrown into the streets by Muslims opposed to his visit. He cut through social prejudice against manual scavenging in an atmosphere of distrust. Gandhi's idea of cleanliness included the cleansing of hatred from people's hearts.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA