Swami Vivekananda is by no stretch of imagination a Marxist or even remotely aligned to the economic or political thought of the German philosopher. But that did not stop the young Marxists of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, a frontal organisation of the CPI(M), to celebrate the Hindu renaissance hero in Kerala last year. Vivekananda justifiably belongs to the pantheon of religious leaders who recast Hinduism to suit the times.

Politicians are no philosophers and facts hardly matter to them in the face of opportunistic exigencies. An emergent electoral or societal need can force a political group to modify its identity to suit what it perceives is the demand of the electorate. But a misplaced perception of what the electorate wants often leads leaders and their parties to come up with slogans, symbols and other signifiers of ideologies that don’t really belong to them.

Sardar Patel

The BJP too is borrowing its electoral opponent’s legacy in trying to appropriate Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. This is despite the fact that Patel was often referred to as the engine of the Congress party, taking up impossible tasks like raising funds and enrolling lakhs of members to fight colonialism. The Hindu Maha Sabha (HMS), the RSS and the Chamber of Princes were all competing with the Congress to seek legitimacy and the leadership of the masses.

The HMS was founded in 1914 and the RSS in 1925. A person like the Sardar need not have built up the Congress organisation, had he been soft towards Hindutva as is being made out now by the Hindu-right. On the contrary, the last 25 years of his life were spent in creating the composite idea of India as envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi.

Members of the first Cabinet, like B. R. Ambedkar and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, had fallen out with Nehru and quit the government to found their own parties and persuade the masses to follow them. Unlike Ambedkar or Mukherjee, Patel embodied the spirit of Congress. He was the Mahatma’s lieutenant and he had moral authority over a vast array of leaders across the country.

His disapproval could have been costly to Nehru. But Patel he chose to be the deputy of a man 14 years his junior. His decision to be Nehru’s deputy Prime Minister and to continue in that post through the difficult days of the Partition Holocaust only speaks of his devotion to the Mahatma, the Congress organisation and his comrade, Nehru. And after Gandhi's assassination by Nathuram Godse, one time RSS pracharak of Ratnagiri, Patel as Union home minister banned the RSS and detained its leader M. S. Golwalkar. Yet, the BJP and the RSS want to appropriate the legacy of the Sardar, why?

The BJP or its parent body, the RSS, sadly lacks towering persons of a glorious past. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the fountainhead of the Hindutva ideology, was tried for Gandhi’s murder, and was someone who had pleaded and obtained clemency from the British.

In this context it is imperative for a party bereft of a nation-building iconography to borrow an icon, who invokes the sacrificial sentiments of the freedom struggle. The modern Indian nation imagines Sardar as the man who united the country and drew its boundaries in blood and sweat. The police action in Hyderabad against the Nizam even adds a saffron hue to his stern persona. The Sardar is the best suited for this project because unlike Gandhi or Nehru, Patel the masculine, “iron man”, had no political heirs. After all, he lifted the ban on the RSS too. What better reason to borrow the idol or share the “imagined past”?

But it would have been more appropriate had the Sangh Parivar borrowed V.P. Menon instead of Patel. Menon was the bureaucrat who actually went around getting the princes to sign on the dotted line to redraw the map of present day India. He was never a Congressman and after his retirement, along with C. Rajagopalachary and others, was instrumental in bringing the princelings together to form the Swatantra Party, the first real right wing party of the country.

In fact, in its electoral debut in 1962 Swatantra Party came third and became the primary Opposition party in the Lok Sabha in 1967, way ahead of the Jana Sangh. It was the merger of Swatantra Party with the Jana Sangh that opened the doors of the old Maratha and Rajputhana kingdoms to the Janata Party and later the BJP. Interestingly, the BJP in its initial days had also borrowed Gandhi. The newly formed party had claimed political legitimacy by invoking Gandhi and insisting that its economic vision was that of Gandhian socialism.

Bhagat Singh

Nobody, no historical person, has ever been used by as many diverse ideologies as Bhagat Singh, the biggest youth icon of the Indian freedom movement, the living spirit of revolution, sacrifice and nationalism. From Maoists who abhor nationalism to Hindutva organisations to even the newest party in the political firmament Aam Admi Party, just about everyone claims the Bhagat Singh legacy. But who was Bhagat Singh? The 23-year-old wrote to his comrades a month before he was hanged: “We want to snatch and handle it (government machinery) to utilise it for the consummation of our ideal, i.e., social reconstruction on new, i.e., Marxist, basis.” The acceptance by the entire post-independence political spectrum of the young man, who wrote Why I am an Atheist and who was concerned with questions of “national or socialist revolutions” only proves that political parties are merely parodying history.

Equally ironic is the Congress’ utter contempt for national icons. Forget the Sardar, the UPA under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wanted to honour the man who offered testimony against Bhagat Singh. Manmohan Singh wrote to Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit in 2011 asking her to rename Windsor Place after Sir Sobha Singh. In what could have probably been false testimony, Sobha had told a British judge that he had seen Bhagat Singh throwing the bomb down from the visitor’s gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly. Fortunately, a public hue and cry stopped Manmohan and Sheila from committing a grievous sin to the memory of a national hero. After all, desecrating an idol is far worse than borrowing one to worship.

But to claim that Nehru did not attend Patel’s funeral goes beyond mere appropriation. According to a sympathetic biography of Patel, Nehru had broken down so badly at Patel’s funeral that Rajagopalachari had to deliver the funeral oration. It is worth remembering that while accepting Nehru’s invitation to join his cabinet, Patel had replied: “Our attachment and affection for each other and our comradeship for an unbroken period of nearly 30 years admit of no formalities. My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me…. Our combination is unbreakable and, therein, lies our strength.”

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