Author: Priyadarsi Dutta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 21, 2002
During the infamous Noakhali riots
of 1946, where the Hindu minority was ravaged, the visit of Gandhiji, along
with Sucheta Kripalini, Renuka Roy and Sneharani Kanjilal, greatly helped
restore peace. Gandhiji went to a village called Kadihati and planted a
jackfruit sapling as a symbol of peace in the compound of the Kadihati
High School. Over the years, the sapling grew into a tree, first in East
Pakistan, then in Bangladesh, alongside a diminutive and steadily declining
minority community.
A couple of years ago, Muslim fundamentalists
felled the tree to make way for a mosque (p 114, Hindu Samproday Keno Bangladesh
Tyag Korche, Salam Azad). It was obviously less necessary to erect a mosque
inside a school than for Islam to disavow the pre-Islamic past or political
legacy. During the Noakhali riots, a Muslim had asked Gandhiji to dismantle
the Indian National Congress flag flying atop his camp, and Gandhiji had
obliged him without thinking twice.
Subhas Chandra Bose, in his famous
essay on Gandhi, had observed that while Gandhiji could understand his
friends he did not understand his enemy (the British). I would say Gandhiji
could not even read the mind of the Muslims he treated as his friends,
though less than five per cent of them subscribed to the 'secular' Congress.
He had some queer political fantasies on Hindu- Muslim unity. One was that
partition of the country would in no way affect the activities of the Congress
in the seceding territories: The party would function there as before.
Another was his wanting to spend
the rest of his life in West or East Pakistan, and planning to resettle
Hindus and Sikhs uprooted from there. When he died, MA Jinnah referred
to him as a great "Hindu", not Indian, leader in a condolence message.
So if after his lifelong effort to bridge the unbridgeable Hindu-Muslim
chasm, he qualified as no more than a 'Hindu leader', so in the country
of 'Mian Musharraf', he fares no better than Sardar Patel or Savarkar.
Secularists have condemned the recent
Gujarat riots, by saying the State is "Gandhi's Gujarat". Ironically, Gujarat
is also the State of Jinnah who said that he would either have India divided
or destroyed. I wonder if these proxy-Islamists ever deplored that the
province of Frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the NWFP (which had
voted all out for the Congress in 1946 Interim elections), is now the epicentre
of fundamentalism in Pakistan. Gandhiji could not comprehend this de-nationalising
and de-Indianising effect of Islam.
Gujarat was awarded to India in
1947 not in honour of Gandhiji but for the plain fact it was overwhelmingly
Hindu. Contrarily, terrorists are ruling the roast in the land of the Sapta
Sindhu where Vedic sages sang the song of cosmic harmony. Those who torched
the Sabarmati Express at Godhra proved they didn't subscribe to the Sabarmati
Ashram's cherished values. The hymn Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram, in which
Gandhiji inserted "Ishwar-Allah tero naam", failed once again because Islamic
believers do not recognise Ishwar. It is time Gandhi's political progeny-let
us call it the Gandhi tree-and the communists, who reign in the State of
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, realise all their political epistemology
is valid only till the ground beneath their feet is Hindu. Else they would
be cut down like Gandhi's jackfruit tree by the iconoclasts of Islam. To
this end at least we need the RSS, the VHP and Narendra Modi, as much as
we do a Hindu- Sikh army to protect the border, particularly for the ivory
tower secularists.
