If only statues could speak & clear the air!

More truth may come from them than is now on offer from the living icons of “new India.”

By Badri Raina

Every time I feel small-minded about my own insignificance in history, I turn to Jonathan Swift’s Battle of Books.

Therein, you may recall, modern writers vent their spleen at the ancients for having “unduly” occupied the heights of Parnassus, leaving them the lowly ridges.

The ancients of course make the simple argument that they have earned their places through deep thinking and hard work, and that it were best for the moderns to do the same; rather than seek parity by cutting Parnassus down to match the height of their own hillock, they had best work harder to rise to deserve the pinnacles where the ancients rest.

I have always thought this just the right talisman for those who are in a hurry to approximate the greatness of others without quite earning it. And, worse, using what clout they have to erase that which rebukes their own craven and insecure hubris.

So, whom Atal Bihari Vajpayee had christened Durga ought to have been left to occupy that pride of place, rather than be amalgamated into a canny rearrangement with a modern flame dearer to the ruling heart.

The fact is any old honest Casper will continue to sing of that liberating battle, “It was a great victory” – the official forgetting notwithstanding.

It is said that Netaji has been made to languish and needed to be rehabilitated. Never mind the hundreds of parks, buildings, institutions, neighbourhoods etc. that bear his honoured name, the politically clouded coordinates notwithstanding. And never mind also that the much-maligned Jawaharlal Nehru donned advocates’ garbs after decades to appear in defence of the Indian National Army.

And, it was thought that the best way to centrestage Netaji was to, you guessed it, make of him first a holograph and then a statue, rather than read what he had written, or live the values he had pursued. That would hardly serve the purpose of using his memory merely to spite an ancient.

Now imagine that Netaji could speak. What do you think he might have said to the rulers of the day? Rather the following:

“I would much rather that you had not stood me in the unholy place where stood our enslaver – a place where I learn the Congress had refused to install even the Mahatma.

“But, more to the point, why install me? What have you in common with me? What in me do you admire – that I took up arms against the British with whom your people maintained a friendly equation?

“I christened Gandhi ‘father of the nation’; people of your persuasion finished him off. Indeed, one of them who venerates his assassin sits in parliament as one of your elected party members.

“I adored Nehru, and made him chairperson of my Planning Committee when I was Congress president in 1938; you revile him and his legacy, and you dissolved the Planning Commission that he had established to carry forward the idea of planned, equitable economic growth.

“I named my army units in the INA as “Gandhi Brigade”, “Nehru Brigade”, “Azad Brigade” etc. and had three Urdu words for its motto; yet you think Gandhi, Nehru, Azad were my antagonists, and that I was a Hindi nationalist at heart.

“When I invoked heroes at parade time, chief among them was Tipu Sultan. Your people in Karnataka can hardly bear to have him mentioned.

“I wrote that all Savarkar seemed interested in was to enlist Indians in the British army so they would acquire military know-how; I despised sectarian thinking and called for “secular and scientific education”; you seem to want to say to the people that Nehru alone was a secularist who damaged your idea of India.

“My INA recruited volunteers from all communities, and some of my foremost generals were Muslims; you refuse to give even a single ticket to a Muslim to stand for your party in elections. I see that the reviled Owaisi has done better – having already given party tickets to four Hindus in Uttar Pradesh.

And if the Statue of Unity could speak, what might the great Sardar have said? Somewhat along these lines:

“May I first suggest that you search your heart, leave aside your slogans, and ask yourself: are you a uniter as you say I was, or are you a divider? Does your refusal to wear a Muslim skull cap unite Indians or divide them? Do your metaphors of shamshan/kabristan unite Indians or divide them? Does your refusal to speak one word of condemnation against those who called for genocide of Muslims in a ‘Dharma Sansad’ at Haridwar, and abused Gandhi in vilest terms in Raipur, unite Indians or divide them?

“You pr