Ever since Narendra Modi seized power through a largely manipulated election exercise in 2014, there has been an intense struggle unfolding between the right-wing, the centrists and the “liberal left” (including the parliamentary left) to usurp the legacy of people like MK Gandhi, BR Ambedkar and JL Nehru. As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) attempt to establish their leaders and ideologues as pioneers of the nationalist movement in India and as they attempt to change the history of India to favour their Hindutva narrative, the opponents of the saffron brigade in the parliamentary sphere cry foul and strive to erect Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar as antidotes to the venom that is now reinforced upon the country. But their attempts are failing due to two broad reasons, firstly, they fail in marketing their icons vis-a-vis Modi’s and by the time the opponents decide to fire their salvo, Modi even usurps their icons as his, for eg the case of Gandhi and Sardar Patel. Secondly, Modi’s government has rightly dug the concealed part of the past of these so-called “nationalist” freedom-fighters of the Congress, who were not lesser British agents than the khaki knicker clad RSS chaps like Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, and by blackmailing the so-called “left-liberal” camp with the threat of exposing more about the political bankruptcy of these icons, Modi and his coterie manage to place their own Hindutva hate mongers as strong contenders for the “nationalist” legacy.
Take, for example, the case of MK Gandhi, whom the Prime Minister hails as a national icon on one hand, while his lieutenant Amit Shah calls him a “chatur Baniya” or a clever merchant from the upper-caste Baniya sect of the Hindus, on the other hand. Many people in the RSS and the BJP openly express their happiness over the fact that Nathuram Godse, an RSS man and a hardcore Hindu Mahasabha fanatic, killed Gandhi. Even the head of BJP’s infamous IT Cell, the propaganda fountainhead of the Indian Hindutva fascists, hailed Nathuram Godse recently and justified the killing of Gandhi on his Twitter timeline. While the murder of MK Gandhi was a despicable act, as would be the murder of any individual by religious fanatics or fascists, the character of MK Gandhi was neither as secular as the RSS and the Congress-led “liberal” camp would force us to believe, nor did Gandhi ever show a desire to fight the British colonial rule, as his marketers would claim today. Rather, it was Gandhi’s openly declared standpoint that he would never resort to any such political process or revolutionary struggle that will threaten the existence of the British imperialism in India, which made him a favourite of the British imperialism and its media outlets, who made an icon out of him.
Gandhi was the ardent supporter of the British empire until the beginning of the Second World War, when the Axis Power, consisting of the German-Italian-Japanese fascists, showed immense prowess as an aggressive military bloc and the Nazi German Army even reached a few kilometres of Moscow’s city limit, threatening to overturn the Soviet Union’s government, the only working class-led government in the world then and also threatened to colonise the vast Soviet land. It was a sign, a deceptive one though, that showed the Germans were going to win the war and the Indian turncoat-fascist, Subhash Chandra Bose, then threatened to reach India by crossing the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, with the support of the Nazi Germany and the Axis power, which made the British colonial agent Gandhi switch his allegiance to the Axis camp and show his eagerness to hug the prospective ruler of India, including his once bete noire, Subhas Chandra Bose.
It was under the hallucination of this false victory that Gandhi dared to challenge the very British imperialism, on whose behalf he spoke right up to the beginning of the war. Gandhi said that it will trouble his heart if a single bomb is dropped by the Germans or the Axis power on London, he even promised the British of raising an army of indigenous Indians who would fight on behalf of the British empire, like he did during the First World War. However, the initial victories of Nazi Germany and the Axis Power in Europe, Africa and the Far East, convinced Gandhi and his loyal Congress supporters that the Axis Power will be invincible and it will be unwise to support the British in the war and become a thorn in the eyes of the prospective victors. It was then in 1942 that Gandhi announced the most “militant” of all campaigns he had led till then, the Quit India Movement. It was the movement in which though people like Nehru participated, but the camp of Nehru, which earlier formed the Congress Socialist Party to hoodwink a major part of Indian workers and peasants who were plunging into the arena of class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle, remained sceptic of the fascist victory as they saw the joining of Soviet Union in the war theatre and the opening of a second front against the Axis Power the beginning of the end of the fascist warmongers. It’s for this very reason, Nehru and his coterie started an anti-fascist movement from 1939 in London and gave support to the anti-fascist forces in their war against the Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. The Indian National Congress’ Nehru clique sent to China a medical assistance team to help the Chinese people in their war against Japanese imperialists. This anti-German and anti-Japanese role played by the Nehru camp, despite them paying lip service to Gandhi’s call, made Nehru a strong contender for the post of premier after the British were to give India dominion status.
Gandhi, who was sidelined since the victory of the allied powers, became a burden for the Congress as he tried to stay relevant by playing communal politics during the heydays of fratricidal riots, which was fuelled by the Congress-Muslim League-Hindu Mahasabha and RSS endorsed partition plan of India. The partition was done to secure the long-term interests of the imperialist camp in the world that was divided into two major camps after 1945. On one hand was the imperialist camp headed by the US and on the other, was the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union, which literally liberated 1/6th of the world from imperialist domination. It was in their bid to ensure that the people of India cannot take India out from the domination of the imperialist camp in the future, the British imperialists, with the help of its agents like the Congress, Muslim League, the RSS and the renegade leadership of the Communist Party of India, divided the country in communal lines and successfully sowed the seeds of permanent hatred, mistrust and communalism among the predominant Hindus and the minority Muslims in the entire subcontinent.
Gandhi was a cunning politician who used communalism wherever it suited his political interests and he remained a vehement supporter of the Brahminical fascist tyranny, due to which he often had to face the criticism of Ambedkar. Despite talking about communal harmony in his last few years, Gandhi actually worked overtime to appease the hardcore religious fundamentalists of the Hindu and Muslim community and opposed any type of religious reforms. His often contradictory views and political opportunism are well-documented by renowned author Arundhati Roy in her piece, “The Doctor and the Saint” - an introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. Roy wrote-: “History has been kind to Gandhi. He was deified by millions of people in his own lifetime. His godliness has become a universal and, it seems, eternal phenomenon. It’s not just that the metaphor has outstripped the man. It has entirely reinvented him (which is why a critique of Gandhi need not automatically be taken to be a critique of all Gandhians). Gandhi has become all things to all people: Obama loves him and so does the Occupy movement. Anarchists love him and so does the establishment. Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the rich.
He is the Saint of the Status Quo.
Gandhi’s life and his writing—48,000 pages bound into 98 volumes of collected works—have been disaggregated and carried off, event by event, sentence by sentence, until no coherent narrative remains, if indeed there ever was one. The trouble is that Gandhi actually said everything and its opposite. To cherry pickers, he offers such a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to wonder if there was something the matter with the tree.”
It was under the hallucination of this false victory that Gandhi dared to challenge the very British imperialism, on whose behalf he spoke right up to the beginning of the war. Gandhi said that it will trouble his heart if a single bomb is dropped by the Germans or the Axis power on London, he even promised the British of raising an army of indigenous Indians who would fight on behalf of the British empire, like he did during the First World War. However, the initial victories of Nazi Germany and the Axis Power in Europe, Africa and the Far East, convinced Gandhi and his loyal Congress supporters that the Axis Power will be invincible and it will be unwise to support the British in the war and become a thorn in the eyes of the prospective victors. It was then in 1942 that Gandhi announced the most “militant” of all campaigns he had led till then, the Quit India Movement. It was the movement in which though people like Nehru participated, but the camp of Nehru, which earlier formed the Congress Socialist Party to hoodwink a major part of Indian workers and peasants who were plunging into the arena of class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle, remained sceptic of the fascist victory as they saw the joining of Soviet Union in the war theatre and the opening of a second front against the Axis Power the beginning of the end of the fascist warmongers. It’s for this very reason, Nehru and his coterie started an anti-fascist movement from 1939 in London and gave support to the anti-fascist forces in their war against the Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. The Indian National Congress’ Nehru clique sent to China a medical assistance team to help the Chinese people in their war against Japanese imperialists. This anti-German and anti-Japanese role played by the Nehru camp, despite them paying lip service to Gandhi’s call, made Nehru a strong contender for the post of premier after the British were to give India dominion status.
Gandhi, who was sidelined since the victory of the allied powers, became a burden for the Congress as he tried to stay relevant by playing communal politics during the heydays of fratricidal riots, which was fuelled by the Congress-Muslim League-Hindu Mahasabha and RSS endorsed partition plan of India. The partition was done to secure the long-term interests of the imperialist camp in the world that was divided into two major camps after 1945. On one hand was the imperialist camp headed by the US and on the other, was the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union, which literally liberated 1/6th of the world from imperialist domination. It was in their bid to ensure that the people of India cannot take India out from the domination of the imperialist camp in the future, the British imperialists, with the help of its agents like the Congress, Muslim League, the RSS and the renegade leadership of the Communist Party of India, divided the country in communal lines and successfully sowed the seeds of permanent hatred, mistrust and communalism among the predominant Hindus and the minority Muslims in the entire subcontinent.
Gandhi was a cunning politician who used communalism wherever it suited his political interests and he remained a vehement supporter of the Brahminical fascist tyranny, due to which he often had to face the criticism of Ambedkar. Despite talking about communal harmony in his last few years, Gandhi actually worked overtime to appease the hardcore religious fundamentalists of the Hindu and Muslim community and opposed any type of religious reforms. His often contradictory views and political opportunism are well-documented by renowned author Arundhati Roy in her piece, “The Doctor and the Saint” - an introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. Roy wrote-: “History has been kind to Gandhi. He was deified by millions of people in his own lifetime. His godliness has become a universal and, it seems, eternal phenomenon. It’s not just that the metaphor has outstripped the man. It has entirely reinvented him (which is why a critique of Gandhi need not automatically be taken to be a critique of all Gandhians). Gandhi has become all things to all people: Obama loves him and so does the Occupy movement. Anarchists love him and so does the establishment. Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the rich.
He is the Saint of the Status Quo.
Gandhi’s life and his writing—48,000 pages bound into 98 volumes of collected works—have been disaggregated and carried off, event by event, sentence by sentence, until no coherent narrative remains, if indeed there ever was one. The trouble is that Gandhi actually said everything and its opposite. To cherry pickers, he offers such a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to wonder if there was something the matter with the tree.”
This saint of status quo was not actually the messiah of the Muslim community who happened to be an oppressed community in a Hindu-majority India, where the dominant upper-caste Hindus, who enjoyed the monopoly on the means of production and knowledge for centuries, despised the Muslims for opening up an evangelical drive to engulf the lower-castes, ie the labouring sections of the Indian society, who tilled the land for the upper-castes and Brahmins out of socio-religious compulsions and could never demand equality, social and religious, with those standing higher on the caste pyramid. Gandhi despised the Muslims and he loathed any politics that advocated the destruction of the caste system. His later-year romance for the Muslim cause and his most-cherished trips to riot-affected areas with the call for peace and harmony, while not opposing the partition of India actively by using his personal charisma, which could've stirred up a nationwide agitation, signalled that these were actually his last attempts to recapture the position he lost due to his over-enthusiastic support for the Axis Power in the Second World War, done out of sheer miscalculation of military and political alignments of the war. It was Gandhi’s frustrated attempts to stay relevant in Indian politics and get his due share in the power equation in the Congress-dominated new ruling set-up, which upset the Congress and threatened the RSS’ sphere of influence as well.
Gandhi was shot by the RSS footsoldier and Hindu Mahasabha member Nathuram Godse due to the intensification of the internal contradiction between the ruling classes, which became antagonistic as the Congress under Nehru was reluctant to allow further room to his opponents in his cabinet and centralised power in his grip. The Congress faction of Nehru tactically pitted RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, whose leader and representative Shyama Prasad Mookherjee was a minister in its transition government, against Gandhi to curb the latter and also, on the other hand, vilify the Hindutva camp and strengthen its own secular credentials, by showing that the Hindutva camp killed Gandhi out of its desperation to fuel communal fratricides. With the assassination of Gandhi, Congress led by Nehru secured a great victory in consolidating its position and made the pro-Gandhi camp members non-important members of the new government and didn’t prosecute or dig the charges against VD Savarkar, the father of the modern Hindutva camp and his RSS accomplice, MS Golwalkar, in the murder conspiracy. Though Patel banned the RSS for some time to hoodwink the people, the Hindutva camp was reinstated with its glory by the same Nehru whom the Hindutva camp members loath now. It was Nehru’s extreme anti-communist, xenophobic and chauvinistic drive during the Indo-China war of 1962 that the RSS was allowed to re-enter the Indian political space as a “nationalist cultural organisation” and the members of the fascist organisation even participated in state rallies during the last days of Nehru, expressing its allegiance to the Nehru government’s anti-communist drive.
Neither Gandhi nor Nehru played any secular or progressive role, except for their ostensible role to hoodwink the people and the international community, in the overall anti-imperialist struggle against the British colonial rule or after the power was transferred to the Indian ruling classes by the British. Gandhi and Nehru had been hardcore opponents of the working class and the peasantry who took the revolutionary path to overthrow the British imperialist rule, especially the valorous struggle waged by Bhagat Singh and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association or the communist-inspired struggles like the Telangana peasants’ war, the Tebhaga peasants’ struggle, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, the major strikes in the Bombay mills, the Bihar Police revolt, the struggle against the trial of INA prisoners in Red Fort, the Buxar revolt, etc. which shook the pillars of the imperialist rule and forced the British colonial rulers in London and New Delhi to transfer power to its trusted lackeys, the Congress and the Muslim League, who represented the interests of the big comprador capitalists, the feudal landlords and the imperialist powers, in a bid to ensure that the Indian subcontinent is protected from falling into the red-zone. Gandhi and Nehru played the role of British pawns, alike the RSS or the Muslim League leaders during the colonial period and their occasional strife with the colonial rulers was nothing more than mere contradictions rising out of unhappiness over the share of booty by the colonial masters.
The neo-left Ambedkarites operating out of the elite campuses of the country are confiding their hopes on the political line of Ambedkar, the architect of Indian Constitution, as the only path that can help the broad masses of the oppressed Indians, oppressed due to their immediate identity, salvation from the shackles of Brahminical fascism, of which the RSS and the BJP are loyal representatives. In the name of fighting Savarna fascism and Brahminical hegemony, these so-called lefts, who tail behind the spontaneous identity politics, propagated by a section of the ruling classes to divide the poor broadly on caste lines, especially pitting the lower castes against the Dalits, the Dalits against the Muslims, the Tribals against the Dalits, etc., now use each pretext to launch vilification campaign against the time-tested Marxist-Leninist politics of class struggle, to actually derail any constructive move to unite the people and fight against the root cause of Brahminical fascism - the predominance of semi-feudal production relations and ownership of means of production in the vast countryside of India.
We have earlier discussed about the bankrupt politics of the Ambedkarite pseudo-left forces, who shun any real revolutionary practice among the oppressed communities, remain divorced from the class struggle in the countryside or in the factories and preach their vague ideology, devoid of any revolutionary substance, that calls for annihilation of caste and annihilation of class, together, one complementing the other, without creating the practical base for such annihilation. While they grossly overlook that India never had a total bourgeois-democratic revolution like the Western countries like France or the US did, and that the Indian capitalism is comprador in nature, begotten by the British colonial rulers, who gave birth to the Indian capitalists, who mostly come from comprador merchant background, from its womb to serve its interests, especially for supplying raw materials and for acting as commissioned contractors for the empire, the pseudo-left, the Ambedkarites, preach a very constitutional, reformist and non-revolutionary approach to the problems faced by the oppressed communities, the majority of whom are poor. They talk about patriarchy growing out of capitalist exploitation, without telling the people that the Indian capitalists are entirely dependent on the foreign inflow of capital and technology; that the Indian bourgeoisie is comprador in character and are acting as the frontal organisations of big foreign corporations in India, corporations that own a large stake in these companies through numerous shell companies. The predominance of the Brahminical hegemony in the Indian society is due to the fact that the Indian socio-economic structure still largely depends on the semi-feudal production system and the capitalist production relations didn’t have a record of independent growth in India. This predominance of the semi-feudal production relations in the vast countryside, where the majority of the population lives, makes it easier for the reactionary outdated Hindu caste system to thrive and dominate the poor. It’s a hard thing to find the Dalit landlords ruling over Thakur or Brahmin landless peasantry anywhere in rural India. It’s because the very feudal system that nurtured Brahminical hegemony survived on the exploitation of the labour of the lower caste Hindus and the ostracised Dalit community, divided the classes into communal lines to compartmentalise the society and to consolidate the rule of the rich and elites. People living in cities or villages share common feudal lineages and their privileges are based on their feudal background.
Ambedkar preached a million things against the caste system but never gave a clarion call to overthrow the feudal production system in the countryside; avoiding Marx he chose Buddha’s path as the path of salvation with the vision to hoodwink the poor Dalits and keep them aloof from the path of Bolshevik-inspired revolutionary movement in the colonial and semi-colonial days. Rather than resorting to revolutionary struggle to arouse the broad masses of peasants, the poor and landless peasants, the majority of whom belong to the Shudra or the Dalit community, to unite against the common enemies like the British imperialism and feudal landlords, Ambedkar took the course of compromising with the British imperialists and derailed and diverted militant working class movements and peasant struggles to sectarian abyss. He took steps to ensure that the Dalits remain aloof from any nationwide anti-colonial uprisings inspired by the Bolshevik movement. Ambedkar strongly opposed the peasants' movements in Telangana, the Tebhaga movement, the RIN mutiny, etc. and opposed the British handing power to the Indian ruling classes on the ground that it will take a long time for the Indians to run the show like the Western people. Ambedkar unapologetically favoured a long-term direct colonial rule of the British imperialism in India.
As a staunch follower of the Western model of “liberal democracy” in a country whose society he called “undemocratic” with a democratic top-dressing, the proponent of Dalit empowerment (he didn’t fight for Dalit liberation, but empowerment through Constitutional reforms) cleverly avoided comparing India with its immediate neighbours like China, which eventually got rid of feudalism by following a tedious revolutionary struggle. Ambedkar had the same Brahminical views that were predominant in the Hindutva camp and in the imperialist camp; he was strongly critical of the Muslim community and his views on the community can be easily stamped as Islamophobia in the modern days, Ambedkar also called the tribal people - “savages” - an imperialist terminology, a manifestation of his elitism and anti-people views. It was Ambedkar, who held high the Constitution morality so high that he provided a well-founded theoretical foundation to Nehru and his successors to deny the Kashmiri people their right to self-determination by making Kashmir an inalienable part of the newly founded Indian state in the late-1940s, as with the coming into force of the Constitution all treaties made between the caretaker government of Nehru with other parties stood cancelled and all land under the occupation of the Indian government was made inalienable parts of India, providing the Indian big comprador capitalists with an easy opportunity to exploit the manpower of those regions and their resources also. His thoughts were self-contradictory on various occasions, strongly anti-communist and pro-imperialist in nature and it can be said, judging his actions and his reluctance to play a crucial role in arousing and leading the Dalits and oppressed communities against the colonial rule, Ambedkar largely served the interests of British imperialism and later the US-led international imperialist camp.
Today, these icons, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar are used as anti-imperialist, secular and anti-Brahmanical icons by the forces that enjoy the covert or overt support and patronage of the Indian ruling classes and their state machinery. At a time when the Hindutva fascist forces, strong proponents of Brahmanical hegemony, are ruling the country with impunity and launching attacks against the people of the country to divide them into antagonistic communal blocs, resorting to Gandhi, Nehru or Ambedkar and seeking inspiration from their dubious credentials to fight fascism will actually bolster the spirits of the Brahmanical fascists and their Hindutva juggernaut. It’s only by seeking the revolutionary inspiration from the great revolutionary fighters of the 1857 national uprising against British colonial rule, which was the uprising of the majority of the oppressed and exploited peasants, tempered in the fire of anti-colonial and anti-feudal hatred, only by seeking inspiration from the great rebels like Sidhu, Kanhu, Chand Bhairav, Birsa Munda, the protagonists of the Fakir and Wahhabi movement, the revolutionaries of the Bhagat Singh-Chandrashekhar Azad-led Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the revolutionary peasants of Tebhaga, Telangana, Naxalbari, Srikakulam, Magurjaan, etc., by seeking inspiration from the millions of working-class revolutionaries who have been fighting against comprador capitalists and neo-colonial exploitation since ages that the people can be tempted to fight for a democratic revolution that will usher India into the dawn of a new-found freedom, the freedom from economic exploitation of the feudal landlords, which is the base of Brahmanical hegemony in India, from the exploitation and oppression laden on the people by the big foreign corporations and their Indian comprador and crony pawns like Ambani-Adani-Tata, freedom from the loot and plunder of the mineral resources by the big corporations on whose behalf the Indian state-machinery is since waging large-scale wars against the poor tribal people to evict them from their land and seize it with their forests, rivers and villages to hand them over to the mining giants in return for a share of the booty. To reach that realm of freedom it’s imperative that the people, the large section of the poor and the exploited people, the oppressed nationalities and communities are brought under the umbrella of the democratic revolution and doing liberal blabbering or senseless confusion-mongering instead of this revolutionary struggle against fascism will now mean strengthening the hands of the fascist forces.
Modi and the Hindutva camp that he is leading will continue to rule the country with impunity and serve the cause of the big foreign corporations and their Indian crony-comprador allies until a strong and durable anti-fascist revolutionary struggle is successfully built by the democratic forces. Even if Narendra Modi or the BJP loses an election or two, the Hindutva empire will continue to dominate the Indian politics, bureaucracy and economy, communal hatred and disunity will reign and the people will continue to las backward, in a "savage state", and in need of civilising.ive under the reign of the sclerotic regime, which will continue to serve the same classes and corporations despite change of guard or the hue of the ruling party. It’s only a new democratic revolutionary struggle, literally led by the working class in alliance with its genuine ally, the poor and landless peasantry of the country that the root cause of the Brahmanical hegemony and Hindutva fascism -- semi-feudal production relation and comprador-crony capitalism -- can be overthrown and a progressive society can be established on the principles of socio-economic justice, equality between all people, equal rights for all genders and communities and the fair share of resources with all members of the society. Except for this path, there remains no other path to end the hegemony of Hindutva fascism and Brahmanical tyranny on the people, there can never be.
