Salil Tripathi | Narendra Modi and 100 days
Rome wasn't built in a day, and Narendra Modi has not transformed India in a hundred days
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Narendra Modi has not transformed India in a hundred days. Perhaps nobody can, because of the functionally anarchic nature of the Indian society. If Charles de Gaulle was exasperated enough to exclaim: “How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese", referring to France, Modi has a far more formidable task in remaking India, with its multi-everything nature.
Send tweets in Hindi, and the vast number of Indians who don’t consider it their mother-tongue find those incomprehensible (readability is another question). Wear tribal headgear, or worship at a Hindu shrine, and reject a Muslim skull-cap or avoid an iftar party, and many more wonder if Modi can ever be truly inclusive.
To own the present, it is important to own the past; to remake the present and the future, it is critical to rewrite the past. Since those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, why not recast it? The appointment of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao to head the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) was the Modi administration’s first strategic step in the long march to transform how Indians think about themselves.
Rao is not known for historical research that his academic peers consider important, although he has written copiously, expounding his views on a range of issues which promote a particular sectarian view of India, in which the caste system wasn’t so bad, and where history —and facts—could not trump what people believed to be true, because faith was an important source of history. Rao considers the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata to be authentic depictions of what happened, and has said in interviews that he would like to document what he calls “continuous Indian civilization".
The purpose of such an exercise is hardly academic. Once you knock at the edifice of Indian history, and raise questions about what happened and what the motives were of various actions of historical figures, you can imply that the past is a conjecture. And then offer the alternative reality, based not on evidence alone but also on faith, as another interpretation of that past. Once the inroad has been made, build on it, and recast the Indian narrative drawn from a narrower belief system. Surely, it cannot be achieved in a hundred days; it takes a generation and more to do so. But then whoever said that promoting Hindutva was a five-year plan?
The incursions appear isolated, but are significant. The Gujarat government wants the library of every school to have copies of Dinanath Batra’s books, which are concoctions of imagined anecdotes and unsubstantiated generalizations about Indian civilization. Some of those are racist, and by including parts of South-East Asia to the idea of undivided India, some give legitimacy to the fantasies that until recently resided in the sillier parts of the Internet, and the minds of conspiracy-nuts who had published pamphlets on that issue. Banning Batra’s books would be wrong (and this government is hardly likely to do that); however, giving it state-sanctioned legitimacy is the problem.
The central purpose of the exercise is to reinject pride in India’s past. And to do that, it wants to change how we perceive the past. Wipe out the parts that interfere with the narrative, and reinforce myths and facts that support it. To be sure, rewriting history is often necessary, as in the case of Japan. Successive Japanese governments have done little to educate Japanese children about what the Imperial Japanese Army did in East Asia in the first half of the last century. Those who want to rewrite Japanese history want to inject remorse and humility.
But Batra’s—and other Hindutva historians’—intention is the reverse: to make Hindus feel proud at the expense of others. Its goal is not to win only the next election, but also the next generation. The Hindutva movement is not concerned only with what India was like; it wants to shape what India will be like. It does this by raising scepticism about complex heroes and muddying the prevailing narrative, and discrediting all those who stand in the way. Part of that battle is being played out on the Internet. On social media websites, Hindutva supporters have been citing purported statements and quotations of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda, in which those historical figures have reportedly said rather unpleasant things about religions other than Hinduism. All three wrote or spoke extensively on many things; there is nothing hidden about any of it, since their writings are widely accessible; all of them often took positions that might seem contradictory to what they might have said another time; and none of them was perfect.
They were all human, and human beings are inconsistent. It is for scholars to check what they actually said, and the context in which they said it. They were all important figures, whose reputation can’t be eroded because of a few persistent tweets. However, these statements can succeed in raising doubts about Gandhi, Tagore and Vivekananda among those who are young or are new to history. So the strategy is, first, to attack those who are considered pillars of secularism or admired universally, and transform them into divisive figures, fitting another narrative; then flood the market with bizarre theories of India’s civilizational greatness; and then, use the authority of institutions such as ICHR to promote an alternative rendering of history, to remake the Indian society.
It is not necessarily coordinated, and it is nobody’s case that Modi has encouraged these statements to be disseminated widely. His agenda is full; he has many priorities. But his victory encourages these foot soldiers to advance their agenda, and Modi won’t stop it because it fits his own agenda.
This is not the task for a hundred days. But a hundred years is not a long time when you have a civilization to reclaim and defend.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
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