Erasing Nehru
Indian history has always been a battleground of identity politics and a contested territory of colonial, anti-colonial and post-modern historiographies. While the neo-colonial historians and intellectuals keep trying to belittle the national movement and to pit Gandhi against Ambedkar, creating a false binary to paint the former as some sort of a feudal casteist, the Hindutvavadi historians have been attempting to whitewash their icons and erase their ideological rivals. It is a miracle that the Mahatma has so far survived the Hindutva censorship scissors, for Gandhi and Nehru had all along been blamed for all that had gone wrong with the nation. The ‘what if’ history-writers have wanted Subhas Chandra Bose as India’s first Prime Minister and they finally seem to have succeeded in at least releasing a poster as part of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav celebrations with the first President, Rajendra Prasad, to Gandhi’s left and Bose to his right, with Nehru completely absent.
The erasure of Nehru and the inclusion of VD Savarkar ought to lead any history enthusiast to a ‘what if’ question: what if the Nehru government had vigorously prosecuted the Gandhi murder case and refused to accept the acquittal of Savarkar by the trial court? All those who celebrate Savarkar in the Indian Council for Historical Research poster should thank Nehru for not appealing against the trial court order. They ought to be grateful to Indira Gandhi too for legitimising Savarkar’s memory by issuing a postage stamp just a year after the JL Kapur Commission probing the Gandhi assassination found that ‘all these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group’.
Nehru is not just the nation’s first and the longest serving Prime Minister, but a brilliant leader of the vanguard of India’s freedom struggle who spent about nine years in British prisons. He made mistakes, no doubt, but who hasn’t? When the government hails Savarkar and Ambedkar, who opposed the Quit India struggle, as heroes, it could be accused of political pettiness if it removes Nehru from the publicity material for the celebrations of 75 years of Independence.
