Rajaji's bust vs Padmaja's

A young law student,  Niveditha K Prasad has published an article in Scroll claiming that the BJP is trying to appropriate Rajaji. This seems unlikely to me. Rajaji is unpopular in Tamil Nadu where the BJP hopes to make inroads. Kalam would have been a better choice.

I suppose the intention was to get rid of Lutyens's statue because his negative view of niggers had come to light in recent years. Rajaji's bust was put in because he was uncontroversial (being unconnected to any present political party). However, Rajaji had already been honoured with a portrait in the former 'throne room'. A better replacement would have been a bust of Padamaja Naidu's bust- which captivated Pandit Nehru. But for Padmaja, Edwina would have raped Nehru to death. Indian law students are not knowing the details of Indian history because they don't spend enough time on Pornhub. 

With the bust of statesman C Rajagopalachari replacing that of English architect Edwin Lutyens in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, an old icon is being recast in a new political form.

Lutyens wasn't an icon. It was an anomaly that his bust was retained after the statue of George V was removed from India Gate. 

Rajagopalachari, one of Mohandas Gandhi’s closest confidantes,

Rajaji's daughter married Gandhi's son. They were 'sambandhis'.  

was independent India’s first governor-general and chief minister of the Madras State. In his twilight years, he challenged the Congress by forming the Swatantra Party – at one point it was the single-largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha.

Only because the Left was split.  

By appropriating Rajagopalachari, a prominent leader in the Independence struggle and early years of the Republic, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is once again attempting to force-fit a historical figure into its own ideological mould.

No. People care about Bose. Nobody gives a fart about Rajaji.  

President Draupudi Murmi, in her speech at the installation of the bust, said that the event was a sign of “mental decolonisation”.

Modi has remodelled the central vista under that rubric. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

But BJP’s vision of decolonisation has long been clear: it aims to delegitimise the freedom struggle led by the Congress

No. It simply points out that it traces its ideological genealogy back to Bal Gandadhar Tilak & the Bengali Anushilan Samitis. Savarkar was in jail for 'waging war against the King Emperor' at a time when Gandhi was recruiting soldiers for him. 

while positioning Hindutva politics as “true decolonisation”.

as opposed to slavish devotion to a half Italian dynast. 

Over the years, this has meant erasing colonial influences, such as dropping the Christian hymn Abide with Me from the Beating Retreat ceremony at the end of the Republic Day celebration,

It was replaced with Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon which was a big hit at the time of the 1962 war. 

removing the bust of Lutyens – the architect of the colonial city of New Delhi and the mansion in which the President now lives – and renaming the Prime Minister’s Office “Seva Teerth”. It has also erased “Islamic” influences, as seen in the rechristening of roads and cities with Muslim names.

Decolonisation does involve getting rid of the colonial names for things or the statues they erected to themselves. But Congress did the same thing when it was in power.  

This variant of decolonisation is based on

Hegdewar & Gowalkar's ideology 

Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar’s

he was the head of the rival Mahasabha.  

claim that Hindus alone have a civilisational and racial claim to India, a Hindu nation, in which Christians and Muslims are outsiders.

Or want to secede.  

In Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, Savarkar claims that Indian civilisation is exclusively a Hindu civilisation, defined by Hindu history, heroes, epics, festivals, and literature.

Muslim Pakistan certainly thinks so. 

On the surface, Rajagopalachari would appear like a figure who fits this framework.

On the surface, he was a sickularist. Deeper down he was Hindu to the core. What he wasn't was 'Hindutva' which is why he supported, as late as 1953, "Kula Kalvi Thittam"- i.e. caste based education. That is why Tamils of all castes think he had shit for brains. 

Unlike the more agnostic Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajagopalachari publicly identified himself as a Hindu.

So did Nehru. Why? Because he was a Hindu. These guys were lawyers. They knew that religious identity is a matter of law.  

He was also deeply invested in the propagation of Hindu culture, patronising the work of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan educational trust,

He was close to K.M Munshi- the founder of the Bhawan. Munshi chaired the meeting where the VHP was founded. But Munshi & Rajaji were seen by the RSS as old fashioned & dogmatic in their opposition to Socialism which the younger generation had great faith in.  

which was rooted in Hindu philosophical and cultural traditions.

Both were Brahmins. Jan Sangh sought to appeal to the mercantile castes.  

Rajagopalachari also considered his life’s greatest work to be his retellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

He was a Vaishnavite.  

His religious outlook influenced his politics.

Not really. He was a pragmatist. His mistake was to think that the landlords still decided political outcomes in the countryside.  The were afraid that if the children of labourers became educated they would run away from farm work. 

When addressing the Bangalore Municipal Council on August 20, 1948, as India’s Governor General, he invoked Mohandas Gandhi’s vision of “ram rajya”, but went a step further saying that rulers like Rama, who is alive in the hearts of the people of India because of his cultural appeal, was the real Governor-General of India.

In other words, I'm super special because Lord Ram is living in my heart.  

The manifesto of the Swatantra Party, which Rajagopalachari founded and led, also refers to dharma, or “God-oriented inner law”. It says that beyond the rule of law, there exists a rule of dharma and that a government led by the Swatantra Party is committed to realising this inner law.

Which is why the Jan Sangh disliked him. India needed nukes. Rajaji was against them. Also he was too cosy with the Americans. The Soviets had no objection to our rising up. Americans don't like niggers.  

In light of all this, Rajagopalachari may come across as a Hindu nationalist.

Which Munshi undoubtedly was. Rajaji, like Gandhi, believed Hindus were shit at fighting. You can't be much of a nationalist if you think your nation is shit.  

But there is a distinction between his religiosity and the politicised religiosity advanced by Hindutva advocates.

It is the difference between caste Hinduism and 'Hindutva' which rejects any type of hereditary privilege.  

This distinction is most evident in their conception of history.

Gandhi & Rajaji thought that what History showed was that Hindus were shit at fighting. Munshi knew otherwise. 

For Hindutva advocates, the Ramayana is more than a revered religious text: it has historical value as an archival document.

Plenty of Indians are descended from the heroes mentioned in the two epics.  

Referring to Rama’s victory in Lanka in his Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar extols the Ramayana as a narration of revolutionary war and violence: “At last the great mission which the Sindhus had undertaken of founding a nation and a country, found and reached its geographical limit when the valorous Prince of Ayodhya made a triumphant entry in Ceylon and actually brought the whole land from the Himalayas to the Seas under one sovereign sway.”

Savarkar had shit for brains. Lord Ram gave the Lankan throne to Vibhishana. Sinhala is an Aryan language. Prince Vijaya brought it to Sri Lanka more than 2500 years ago.  

In the Hindutva reading of the text, the Ramayana’s lesson is

that if a dude kidnaps your wife, kill him & ensure she has liberty to do whatever she wishes.  

not that the path of dharma is thorny and rife with uncertainty

It isn't if you are an agent, rather than a principal. In the latter case learn statistical game theory or take advise from a smart dude who understands it.  

but that violence is the divinely sanctioned right of Hindus against “aggressors” identified by Hindutva. 

Everybody has a right to self-defence.  

Rajagopalachari reads the same text in a different light.

He was a Vaishnavite. The Supreme Lord can take a human incarnation to fulfil his own plan. This is an 'Occassionalist' metaphysics.  

He makes it abundantly clear that the epics like the Ramayana are not history.

No. He believes that there was actual Divine Incarnation though no doubt the epics are aesthetic, not alethic, productions. The difference between Lord Ram & Spiderman is that God did incarnate as Ram. Nobody bitten by a radioactive spider gained super-powers. 

The epic was moral instruction,

provided by a Divinely inspired Sage 

providing lessons in courage and will that was to save mankind – and not one single community – from “error and extinction”, he says in his introduction to the retelling.

In other words, you don't need to be a Vaishnav to benefit from the Ramayana.  

This distinction between religion and history allowed Rajagopalachari to see history as a continuum formed by shared living.

Or non-shared living. Rajaji knew that the Secretary of State for India wasn't sharing living quarters with a bunch of coolies.  

His statements about the Partition of India reflect this line of thinking.

It reflects his pragmatism.  

Commenting on Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s proposal to create an independent state from Muslim-majority regions, Rajagopalachari on March 29, 1940, stated that “Mr Jinnah’s proposition is based on the fundamental conviction that it is impossible to harmonise the inconsistent elements in India.”

Talk about stating the fucking obvious! 

He further points out that “not even Tippu Sultan, Hyder Ali, Aurangzeb or Akbar, all of whom lived during the days when differences should have seemed more deep-rooted than now, imagined that India was anything but one and indivisible…”

They believed Muslims would rule. They were wrong. Anyway, British India was bigger than any previous Empire. But, the Brits were reasonable. If Burma wanted to go its own way, it was welcome to do so. Ditto, Pakistan.  

Urdu is Indian too, said Rajagopalachari. “The very language for which Mr Jinnah stands, that is, Urdu, is born of Hindus and Muslims combining.'

On April 21, 1938, Rajaji, as CM of Madras, made Hindi in Devanagri script, not Urdu in Nastaliq, a compulsory subject in Government Secondary Schools. The Governor, Lord Erskine, officially repealed this order on February 21, 1940, after the Congress Ministry resigned. This gave a great impetus to the Dravidian movement. 

The poetry, music, and architecture of India are the results of combination and not division,” he states.

Rajaji, like other blathershite politicians, ignored the fact that George Washington spoke the same language as George III>  

In this, Rajagopalachari views Muslim icons as national icons,

while the country was undivided. After that, Muslims were welcome to fuck the fuck off or live as second class citizens stripped of every type of reservation or affirmative action.  

creators of an inheritance common to all Indians, unlike Hindutva ideologues who reject a pluralist reading of Indian history.

They also reject a Queer Theory reading of Indian history such that Mahatma Gandhi sodomized Jinnah but refused him a reach-around which is why the fellow demanded a separate nation for Muslims.  

For them, history holds no space for a

homosexual? 

relationship between different communities outside of political animosity.

Why is BJP not permitting Rahul Gandhi to marry Mahua Moitra's dog? Is it because they don't want to allot space in Lutyens's Delhi for this canine sodomy to occur.  

Religion is instead constantly weaponised as a test of Indian identity, citizenship and belonging.

Mahua Moitra says those who don't support TMC aren't Bengali & thus should get the fuck out of Mamta's demesne.  

For Rajagopalachari, religion was

established by God who could even take human incarnation for that purpose 

an institution of public good that had been formed and reformed through centuries of coexistence.

Nonsense! Rajaji didn't think Muslim Sultans had 'formed or reformed' his own Iyengar faith. True Lord Erskine did suggest that Ram be renamed Rodney and Krishna be renamed Christopher but Rajai politely but firmly rejected his counsel.  

In his acceptance of the Islamic elements of Indian history and culture,

but not the homosexual elements involving sodomy by the ancestors of Mahua Moitra's dog 

Rajaji recognised that Muslims too have a right to contribute and belong to India’s national imagination, something that is vehemently denied by Hindutva politics.

In the opinion of a shithead. I don't suppose Modi would have any very strenuous objection to Muslims contributing to India's national imagination by depicting him heroically shitting on the head of Field Marshal Munir.  

Like Rajagopalachari, other founding leaders and thinkers such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Subash Chandra Bose, Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda have been conscripted into making Hindutva ideology more palatable, despite the politics of these figures being distinct from and even opposed to Hindutva politics.

The guys she names were nationalists who either went to jail as part of the freedom struggle or inspired others who did so. It is more than plausible that, if they returned to life today, they would support Modi over the cretin Rahul. 

On the whole I would say Aurobindo & Vivekananda (both Kayasths) were opposed to the caste system & thus qualify as 'Hindutvadi'. Patels believe in rising through your own hard work & enterprise & thus can be included. Bose too was Kayasth & not enthused by caste vote-bank politics. 

But the case of Rajagopalachari shows how his religiosity is what allowed him to articulate and hold political visions antithetical to Hindutva politics.

He was very old & grew up believing that the caste system was immutable. If kids from working class families get educated, they won't want to engage in productive labour. Rajaji was wrong.  

The renewed interest in Rajaji

there is no such interest.  

should not be used to mistake the scholar-statesman as a “decolonised” Hindutva icon

the fucker supported Khilafat! He said Hindus have a duty to die in that sacred cause.  

but as an invitation to understand the productive ways in which religion and cultural language can shape secular, democratic politics

under the rubric of Queer Theory & Rahul's right to be publicly sodomized by Mahua Moitra's dog.