After my last post on LinkedIn, the one where I speculated that if I had shouted “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!” during the recent RSS parade on Gandhi Jayanti, I would probably have been charged with “intentional insult to provoke breach of peace” or “promoting enmity between communities”, a whole chorus arrived to correct me.
They said, no, no, you’re mistaken. If you were to shout “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!” at an RSS path sanchalan, the entire cadre would shout it back with equal fervour. Some even promised to post videos to prove the point. Others spoke proudly of how Gandhi Jayanti is celebrated with devotion in RSS-run schools, how Gandhi’s portraits hang reverently in halls named after Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, how the RSS respects and honours Gandhi’s legacy.
(Side question: how many Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalayas celebrate Hedgewar’s or Savarkar’s anniversaries? Says something, doesn’t it?)
And yet, these very same people, or their ideological cousins, were in the comments section of my previous post on LinkedIn (reproduced here) insisting that Gandhi was an overhyped, Western-sponsored fraud, a soft-centred appeaser, a “tool of the British”, and that his name would vanish from India’s memory within two generations. They parroted the same lines their so-called historians and intellectuals have repeated for decades: that Gandhi weakened Hindu society, betrayed the nation, and never deserved the title of Mahatma.
So which is it? Is Gandhi the grand fraud of “leftist propaganda” or the revered icon whose name you now claim to shout with pride?
Let us not pretend. The record is clear. It was from among your ideological ranks that Gandhi’s assassin emerged. It was your organisation that celebrated his murder, literally bursting crackers and distributing sweets. It is your ecosystem that continues to justify it, to eulogise the killer, to deface Gandhi’s statues, to shoot at his portraits, and to flood social media with venom every 2 October and 30 January.
And yet here you are, boasting that your men would echo “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!” Your leaders go to Rajghat to pay respects. They call India the land of Gandhi and Buddha when abroad. They publish glowing tributes to him in foreign newspapers. They bow before his statues. And they plaster his portrait on banners alongside others who despised their toxic ideology.
You do realise, don’t you, that your party’s posters feature Gandhi, Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, and Subhas Bose, all of whom rejected everything you stand for? And that your government did not build a towering memorial to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee or Golwalkar, but to Sardar Patel, a Congressman who banned the RSS and openly detested its divisive politics? Or is that, too, suddenly irrelevant to this debate?
Do you not see the irony? The sheer humiliation of having to bow before the very man you once called a traitor? You, who built your entire identity around rejecting him, now forced to claim him because no path to respectability in this country can bypass Gandhi.
You tried to kill the man, and you keep trying to kill his memory. But here you are, compelled by history, by optics, by decency, to shout his name.
And that, I suppose, is the final triumph of the man you could not kill.
Later addition: After much मच-मच on LinkedIn, I posted the following. Who wants to guess whether I shall find anyone willing to take me up on it?
“There are many here who are asking me if I’d dare to go in front of a mosque and shout ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’. Here’s a challenge to them: If I were to go to a temple, a mosque, a gurudwara, a Buddha vihar, and a church, and if I were to shout ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’ and shoot a video of everyone there joining me in repeating that slogan, would you also, in return, prove to me that shouting the same at RSS shakhas and parades will receive the same enthusiastic response by doing so and posting videos about that? I am willing to take that challenge. Ready? For every video I post, you have to post one of RSS pracharaks in uniform shouting ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’. Deal?”
