In 1193, Nalanda University, one of the world’s greatest centres of learning, was attacked by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji on his way to conquer Bengal. He inquired whether a copy of the Koran was kept in its library. It wasn’t, and he ordered the library to be burnt. Historians say “smoke from the burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills”. India’s communal narrative had started long before the Congress party and its cronies, to stay relevant, started raising the minority bogey after their electoral rout in May. Smoke from failed manifestos, burned by pan-national pride, is hanging like a dark pall over their future.
India’s political secularism, which thrives on communalism, is redundant. Being the world’s second-largest Muslim population, even Indian Muslims don’t see themselves as a minority. The national narrative has changed from the communal agenda to the development agenda. Narendra Modi has completely hijacked the legacy of the Congress—nationalism, swadeshi and an unbowed India. All that’s left in its depleted bundle of tricks are the tattered remains of communal realpolitik that started with the Partition of India.
In 1905, a partition helped the Congress on its nationalistic agitational path. Lord Curzon set out to divide on religious lines the same Bengal where Bakhtiyar had spread his faith by the sword. It was the ground zero of Indian nationalism, and the Raj needed to bifurcate Bengal. In response was born the Swadeshi movement, inspired by Aurobindo Ghosh, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Chidambaram Pillai. India hence acquired a national narrative, which Mahatma Gandhi later appropriated and turned into the clarion cry of Swadesh. Everything that was Indian came to be identified with the Congress.
Where did the Congress go wrong? It was not just the fatuous dependence of the dynasty that was its undoing. It failed to understand modern India, which it had created by default with liberalisation. It did not realise that swadeshi needs contemporary innovation to flourish. But after Independence, India’s political leadership practised an inward-looking policy, dictated by Socialist xenophobia. Swadeshi became a sub-standard product: a corrupt non-performing public sector, protectionism towards industrial pedigree, and a non-convertible economy. By the 1990s, India was selling off its gold reserves. It was left to the late unlamented Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to take India out of the Socialist bogs and initiate the long march to an open economy.
Swadeshi is no longer an anti-foreign movement. Nor is it just a Hindu concept that recreates Chandragupta Maurya’s India that included parts of Iran and Afghanistan, or Akhand Bharat of pre-Independence India. The world has shrunk as much as it has expanded in knowledge and connectivity. The Murthys, Bhatias and Boses who dominate Silicon Land are swadeshi—the global Indian who is as much at ease in a Michigan temple as in a Soho nightclub. Indian and India-born corporate captains, academics and politicians overseas are as much swadeshi in spirit as they are citizens of their adopted country. The Volkswagens, Hondas and Toyotas built in India are as swadeshi as Marutis. There is osmosis between Indian business, education, science and medicine, and the world. Ironically, both Prime Ministers who built India’s road to the world were Congressmen—Rao and Manmohan Singh. But Rahul Gandhi is stuck in Muzaffarnagar, as the Congress was stuck in Godhra for decades.
The Congress, which fought the May elections on a minority political platform, is identified with communalism, as proved by the 2014 mandate. To counter a Prime Minister who projects the holograms of development, the Congress is just sending telegrams from the past. Swadeshi is not about an India that once belonged to the Congress, but a Bharat that owns the world today.
ravi@newindianexpress.com