Modi in Parliament: Poverty, Farmers’ Suicides, Unemployment, Hindutva Terrorism, Rapes, Violence Against Working Class Are No Problems, But Nehru Is

PM Modi’s speeches in both the Houses of Indian Parliament on February 7, 2017, while defending the Motion of Thanks on President Ram Nath Kovind’s address, belied the hope which some political analysts carried that Modi after becoming the PM would mature and overcome the Hindutva traits of double-speak, rabble-rousing and resorting to lies which he learnt in the RSS shakhas. While replying he showed that he remains a Hindu nationalist which he claimed to be his identity while talking to Reuters in 2013 as the CM of Gujarat. He resorted to lies, half-truths and demagogy as a seasoned Hindu nationalist.

He talked of Gandhi and Sardar Patel and talked of India of their dreams. The PM thinks our nation does not know what the Hindu nationalists did to Gandhi and what opinion Sardar Patel had about the Hindu nationalist organisations like the RSS and Hindu Maha-sabha. Gandhi was killed by Hindu nationalists who described his killing as a heavenly-ordained ‘vadh’. According to a favourite author of the RSS, K.V. Sitaramiah, Gandhi was ‘terrible, wicked and most sinful’. Rejoicing at the killing Gandhi he declared,

“As Bhagwan Shri Krishna said in the Gita, ‘For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked and for the establishment of righteousness, I am born in every age.’ On...30th January 1948 evening, Shri Ram came in the form of Nathuram Godse and ended the life of Gandhi.”

Shockingly, the conference in Goa where this dehumanised author celebrated the ‘vadh’ of Gandhi began with a congratulatory message from Modi in 2013.

So far as the Sardar as the new love of RSS/BJP is concerned, he as the first Home Minister of India banned the RSS for its role in the murder of the Father of the Nation. When the RSS denied it, Sardar in a letter dated September 11, 1948 to the then boss of the RSS, Golwalkar, told him that as a final result of the poison spread by the RSS against Gandhi,

“the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji...The RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”

PM Modi talked of democracy. It looks funny when the PM, a seasoned RSS cadre groomed by Golwalkar into a political leader, talks of democracy. He has become India. It is, in fact, what Golwalkar decreed as early as 1940. This guru of PM Modi while delivering a speech before the 1350 top level cadres of the RSS at the RSS headquarters, Resham Bagh, in 1940 declared, “RSS inspired by one flag, one leader and one ideology” was to light “the flame of Hindutva in each and every corner of this great land”. This is exactly what is happening under Modi. Indians are living under constant fear, under Emergency without a declared one.

Democracy under PM Modi is for crony capitalists and business cartels. Self-confessed Modi-bhakt, renowned columnist, Tavleen Singh, last week wrote:

“In the villages I visited, living standards were so degraded that all that mostly illiterate villagers aspired to daily was finding enough water and food to keep their families alive. Their homes were huts of thatch and mud and their poverty was extreme. I met nobody who owned a cellphone or a television. The villages were bereft of schools, health centres, roads and public services of any other kind...This kind of desperate poverty exists in some measure in most States that the BJP has won since 2014...So in Davos when I listened to the Prime Minister expound upon the successes of his style of governance, I found it very disquieting.”

Under PM Modi’s rule, so far as gathering of wealth is concerned, it is a one-way traffic. It is for the rich; so far as the vast majority of poor Indians is concerned, they have Hindutva to live with and enjoy. The Modi mantra seems to be wealth for the rich and Hindutva for the poor.

Modi is angry with the Congress for agreeing to Partition. It is true that the Congress agreed to Partition, Sardar Patel being the first Congress leader to be convinced by the sadist Viceroy, Mountbatten. But what were our Hindutva zealots doing? They were fighting for a democratic-secular India? No, absolutely not. The Hindutva gang joined the Muslim League in declaring that India was not one nation but two nations: Hindu nation and Muslim nation. Long before the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution it was the RSS’ darling Savarkar who, while addressing the 19th Session of Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in 1937, declared:

“India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Moslems, in India.”

Modi wants us to forget about the criminal betrayal of the united freedom struggle by the Hindutva gang. During the ‘Quit India’ Movement when the Congress was banned, all Congress leaders jailed, thousands of Congress workers shot dead for carrying the Tricolour, it was the Hindu Mahasabha which ran coalition govern-ments with the Muslim League in the provinces of Bengal, Sind and NWFP. Not only this, the Hindu Mahasabha under the leadership of Savarkar organised recruitment camps for the British armed forces throughout India when Netaji was trying to liberate the country militarily. Savarkar was doing all these with the full support of the RSS. If the Muslim League, as the flag-bearer of Muslim separatism, was demanding Pakistan, the RSS too demanded a Hindu state to replace democratic-secular India. The RSS organ, Organiser, in its issue on the very eve of Independence, dated August 14, 1947, rejected the whole concept of a composite nation (under the editorial titled ‘Whither’):

“Let us no longer allow ourselves to be influenced by false notions of nationhood. Much of the mental confusion and the present and future troubles can be removed by the ready recognition of the simple fact that in Hindusthan only the Hindus form the nation and the national structure must be built on that safe and sound foundation...the nation itself must be built up of Hindus, on Hindu traditions, culture, ideas and aspirations”.

In the same issue Organiser, the RSS’ flag-bearer of Hindu nationalism, demeaning the choice of the National Flag, wrote:

“The people who have come to power by the quirk of fate may give in our hands the Tricolour but it will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country.”

Jawaharlal Nehru was the special target of PM Modi’s hatred. Modi seems to be possessed with the obsession of Nehru. He was responsible for all ills faced by India. Nehru, a close confidant of Gandhi and Sardar Patel, died in 1964 and to subject him to unparalleled insults and denigration 55 years after his death was sickening, pure and simple sadistic. It not only showed the true character of our Hindu nationalist PM but made it clear that Nehru remains the most formidable opponent to the Hindutva juggernaut which is on roll to destroy our democratic-secular polity. It is not the physical Nehru but his idea of an all-inclusive India. The Hindutva rulers know that despite the ‘vadh’ of Gandhi by the Hindutva terrorists and death of Nehru long back, the Idea of India, propounded and practised by these two, continues to cause shiver amongst their Hindutva adversaries. Gandhi and Nehru may be killed every day but it is an undeniable fact that it is due to the versatility of their Idea of India that India is the only country which survives as a democratic-secular polity out of 35 countries which were born after World War II.

PM Modi’s intolerant speech made it clear once again that Nehru remains the greatest stumbling block in taking India on the path of Pakistan; 71 years after that path had destroyed Pakistan. For PM Modi poverty, farmers’ suicides, unemployment, Hindutva terrorism, rapes, violence against working class are no problems but Nehru is the biggest problem!

Shamsul Islam, a well-known theatre personality, is a former Associate Professor (now retired), Department of Political Science, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. For some of the author’s writings in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati see the following link: http/du-in.academia.edu/Shamsullslam