Anil Vij is right, Gandhi is no longer an icon like Modi, Virat Kohli or SRK
Anil Vij is a cannon, but not, as we are told, a loose one. The BJP is a disciplined party. Loose cannons cannot survive in it. You can, however, behave like one, when it’s opportune for the party. Anil is an early shot. He is tomorrow’s mouth speaking into today’s ears. We must heed him.
One thing is certain. India is being remoulded. If we may use an analogy from high school physics, one magnetic field is being replaced by another by a change of magnets. The iron filings are the same. But the magnets have changed. The pattern of the field of force will change.
It is changing, says Anil Vij. To say that he was speaking in his personal capacity and, hence, what he said does not matter is hogwash. Vij is not a private citizen, minding his camels in the deserts of Jaisalmer. He is a minister in the Haryana BJP government. Even then, we could have dismissed his declaration as an accidental aberration, except for the louring national ambience that only the willfully blind will overlook.
We need to go back to PM Narendra Modi’s pre-election promise: to create a Congress-mukt Bharat. We were excited then. And so forgot to wonder what would take the vacuum this was to create. The answer, as the popular song has it, "is blowing in the wind".
It is imperative that (Mahatma) Gandhi is got out of the way. He symbolises a national outlook that is far too inconvenient to the emerging order of things. From the perspective of Parivar politics, allowing Gandhi to stay as the national icon is like revving a sports car, without shifting to forward gears, in order to surge ahead.
The symbolism of Khadi Udyog’s 2017 calendar and diary is a stroke of genius. It is a shrewd act of displacement; a sort of symbolic disenfranchisement. Gandhi has yielded to Modi. The nation is now put on notice.
There was a time when Gandhi defined our sense of being a nation. So we called him the Father of the Nation. India was punctuated with the Gandhi legacy. But we squandered it over the years. We confined Gandhi to khadi and currency notes.
In this the Congress, more than anybody else, is to blame. Modi is building a giant statue of himself on the vacant foundation that the Congress has provided. Had the Congress remained loyal to the Gandhi legacy, Modi would not have been PM today.
The Congress must avoid the hypocrisy of sounding aggrieved or indignant at the elimination of the Mahatma. They pursued Godse’s unfinished agenda and completed the murder of Bapu. Modi is following up on that murder with an elaborate ritual of burial.
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| Had the Congress remained loyal to the Gandhi legacy, Modi would not have been PM today. |
Let’s return to what is best described as the Modi-fication of India. To understand what is currently afoot, a glance at the educational process could help. After all what is currently unfolding is the re-education of a whole nation. India is going the Gujarat way. We are now in a gigantic Moditva laboratory.
What we do in formal education is the creation of an environment, a carefully crafted ambience, so as to socialise young minds in the desired fashion. Education is the means to create a society with shared perceptions, convictions and goals. It forges solidarity out of a disparate human mass and makes individuals conform to set ways of understanding and acting. Formal education depends heavily on the use of symbols.
Secularism, for example, is an environment we sought to create. We made a hash of it. Now, clearly, a counter ambience is being created. In that new ambience, Gandhi has no place. It is imperative that Gandhi yields to Modi.
In martial history, the victory of the conqueror is incomplete without the humiliation of the god of the vanquished. It is a ceremonial and psychological requirement. So long as the old god remains, the authority of the victor stays unsteady and insecure.
Now come to demonetisation. Money is the foremost aspect - today the total matrix - of our existence. It is the ground on which we live, and move and have our being. Anyone who wants to make a whole nation feel the shock and awe of his presence and authority can do no better than redefine its money-environment.
By arbitrarily and peremptorily ordering, successfully as it now seems, a whole nation to move from cash to plastic money, by shaking up 1.3 billion lives with demonetisation, Modi has proved himself to be the contemporary god. It was not for nothing that the masses were made to chant, “NaMo… NaMo… NaMo.”
The next step, Vij tells us, is that Gandhi will be erased from currency notes. And why not? These are Modi’s notes. Gandhi has no right to be there. Gandhi is, at best, an anachronistic relic of the past on such pieces of paper. It will be a mercy to Gandhi to let him go, even otherwise; for haven’t we turned these very notes into means and symbols of corruption, mocking the soul of a man who deemed truth and purity his very life-breath?
We have to agree with Anil Vij that Gandhi is not a good marketing icon for khadi or any other product. He does not stand a ghost of a chance against the likes of Big B, Shahrukh Khan and Virat Kholi.
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| A year or two from now, schoolchildren would not know who Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was. |
Gandhi advocated the very opposite of consumerism. We do him a favour by setting him free from the market. We insult the Mahatma, for whom simplicity was power, by expecting him to boost sales! Let’s leave it to Modi.
The journey from Gandhi to Modi is what we have willed and voted for. We were swept off our feet when we were promised that our votes, if cast in favour of Modi, would fetch us Rs 15 lakh each within 100 days. We did not have the minimal moral sense to realise that we were voting for a de facto bribe.
It was bribe because we were told, not that the money would be used for national development, but credited to our accounts. Is that not how bribes are paid and received? But we were happy. We perked up and congratulated ourselves! Because we were faithful followers of the Mahatma?
Once Gandhi’s talisman was summarily rejected from every aspect of national life, what difference does it make that his picture is removed from a diary or calendar? Gandhi’s dream of “Ramarajya,” a nation of righteousness, died a long time ago. We voted, instead, for ruthless pursuit of material gains and limitless pleasures; both, assured agendas of personal degradation and mass enslavement.
Welcome to Modi’s India! Here you and I have to be de-schooled and re-educated, on the analogy of demonetisation and remonetisation. The old way of life - India as we have known and loved - has gone with the wind. That is why it has become imperative to order citizens to show public respect to the national anthem. Coercion becomes unavoidable when spontaneity dies. There are times when we "force" ourselves to laugh, right? It’s somewhat like that.
Well, the good thing is that like the new money, human nature too is plastic, though in a difference sense. We can be reshaped and made to fit any mold. Allow a little time, we will get used to anything.
A year or two from now, school children would not know who Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was. If asked who led India’s struggle for freedom, they could give varying answers, depending on which history textbooks they are made to read.