Break from colonial history needs caution

The Republic Day celebrations of 2022 have been tempered with controversy which has a degree of inevitability about it, given the intensity of the socio-political churning that India is now experiencing. Every major national issue has become contested and this corrosive pattern was on display this week.

The three issues that have led to varying degrees of discord and disquiet are: The government’s decision to move and merge the eternal flame from its India Gate location to the newly erected National War Memorial (NWM); the unveiling of a hologram of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at the India Gate on his 125th birth anniversary; and the decision to drop the tune of the hymn ‘Abide with me’ from the Beating Retreat ceremony. This hymn, composed in 1847, has a universal resonance to it and was very dear to Mahatma Gandhi. The evocative, soothing refrain has been associated with the closure of the Republic Day ceremonies for five decades and Gopalkrishna Gandhi (grandson of Bapu) has noted with sadness: “Without the song, the ceremony will lose something at its heart.”

Shifting the eternal flame that was consecrated first in January 1972 to honour the Indian military personnel who had lost their lives in the 1971 war that led to the birth of Bangladesh ought to have been an occasion when the nation would close ranks. But alas, this did not happen. It merits recall that when this modest memorial (a helmet atop an upturned rifle) at the India Gate was first envisioned — weeks after the momentous victory of December 1971 — it was expected that India would soon have its permanent national war memorial and the flame would be accordingly re-located.

The India Gate memorial that was erected in February 1921 to pay tribute to the soldiers of the British Indian Army who fell in World War I is part of the sub-continent’s colonial history and does not have any correlation with independent India. It is estimated that almost 80,000 Indian soldiers lost their lives in that war but not all their names are inscribed at India Gate.

Since the late 1970s, the Indian military had been urging the government of the day to create a national war memorial that would appropriately honour the fallen Indian soldier, but this fell on deaf ears. Ironically, both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have paid tribute to the Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the 1971 war and the IPKF operations, respectively.

It is a matter of shame that it took 47 years, from 1972 to 2019, for the NWM to be realised and thus shifting the eternal flame from a temporary to a permanent site was logical. Regrettably, the manner in which this decision was communicated to the country was sudden and the word ‘extinguished’entered the discourse. While a clarification was issued that the flame was only being ‘merged’ with that at the NWM — the discord about India Gate had acquired its own momentum.

In an unfortunate sequence of polarised exchanges on different social media platforms, those who were in support of the Modi government suggested that the Indian soldiers who had died in World War I were ‘mercenaries’ and hence shifting the flame was not consequential. This was an invalid formulation, that under the colonial rule — it was only the Indian soldier who had become a ‘mercenary’ in going to war for the oppressor, while the rest of colonial India that was part of British governance — whether the ICS officer at the top of the pecking order or the lowly peon — were untainted. All of them were acting as per the colonial diktat and among them, it was the soldiers who took an oath of allegiance to bear arms and lay down their lives for the crown and the honour of the ‘paltan’.

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer had noted of politics and memory: “When a big power wants to deprive a small (subjugated) country of its national consciousness, it uses the method of organised forgetting” and many monuments and memorials of colonial India are a testimony to this policy of sanitised and burnished narratives and the India Gate is no exception.

This segues to the second of the controversies, the installation (January 23) of the Bose hologram under the canopy at India Gate, that had till 1968 housed the statue of King George V. At one time, it was proposed that a Mahatma Gandhi statue would replace that of the British monarch — but again, this was not pursued and the void in the canopy for half a century conveyed India’s ambivalence about its colonial past.

Paradoxically, while Netaji Bose and Mahatma Gandhi sought freedom from colonial rule — the means they had adopted were very different. If the latter was an apostle of non-violence, the charismatic Bose saw his alliance with Hitler as an acceptable tactical means for a larger objective. The Bose legacy has been shrouded in mystery and conjecture but his role in the Indian freedom struggle and the raising of the INA is a variation of ‘organised forgetting’ and an issue where consensus is tenaciously elusive. While there is no doubt about his commitment to India’s independence and communal amity which must be remembered and emulated, one would still aver that Bose was on the wrong side of the world war.

But India in 2022 has resurrected and rehabilitated the Bose legacy in the larger national consciousness in a very calibrated and selective manner and the political subtext points to a radical shift that seeks to devalue the Gandhian commitment to non-violence and communal amity. While unveiling the Bose hologram, PM Modi dwelt on the manner in which the contribution of many leaders had been ‘erased’ after Independence and that the country was now ‘taking steps to correct those mistakes’.

Thus, many practices and ceremonies that were once part of the Republic Day traditions are now being reviewed for their colonial texture and a new template is being evolved. In that schema, ‘Abide with me’ is no longer acceptable and the reflective notes of that hymn and the poignant symbolism with the fallen soldier is now interred.

It is a new tune that India will march to — but as Kundera had cautioned: “A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses itself.” Nations, alas, can lurch into amnesia.