Last week, the name of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library was changed to Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society. For close to 60 years, the institution was directly associated with Jawaharlal Nehru. Anything that transpired is memory and, therefore, fiction. That is why history can be read as a novel without an end.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team believe history as not what happened but what ought to have happened. Since the past can’t be materially changed, they have settled for the next best option, a new telling. In the telling of things, names are crucial. You own a thing by naming it, including children, dogs, railway stations, roads, cities and monuments.
Until last week, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, a landmark of New Delhi, existed. The building exists, but the name on the wall says Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya.
What did it take to alter a bit of history and give it new ownership? A name and some paint. That it was almost a fated turn of events is clear from the fact that the Parliament building inaugurated by Nehru is now a curio, a museum artefact. A certain history itself is becoming history.
BJP president J P Nadda tweeted: “Classic example of political indigestion—the inability to accept a simple fact that there are leaders beyond one dynasty who have served and built our nation. PM Sangrahalaya is an effort beyond politics, and Congress lacks the vision to realise this.” The BJP might have a point had the overnight metamorphosis of the institution been a singular incident. It is not.
Deep in its bones, the BJP believes there are three colonial periods in India: The Mughal period, the British period, and the Nehru period. Roughly a thousand years of foreign rule, then.
This is a potent perspective. From this perspective, there is to be sourced endless outrage, universal victimhood, and righteousness of the cause. Perhaps, in destruction—in the demolition of signs, monuments, and relics—we often perceive how a creation might be conjured; the historic task of resurrecting great ancient India from the ruins. Apocalypse as the Beginning.
Last year, Delhi BJP leader Adesh Gupta asked the AAP-led Delhi government to rename 40 villages with “Mughal-era” names after freedom fighters, artists and martyrs, including IB staffer Ankit Sharma and constable Ratan Lal, killed in the 2020 Northeast Delhi riots. He said there were 40 villages that had names “associated with the Mughals” and “symbolise slave mentality”.
There are scores of other town square instances of attempts at forging a new memory even as we remember. And there are perhaps good reasons for this ongoing lobotomy.
For the BJP, their wrecker-ball solution to a perceived history is not a make-believe. It is their political scripture and religious faith. Where the urban, secular, liberal India goes wrong—with generally sad electoral results—is in their superiority of attitude, an attitude that isn’t hard-earned but inherited.
The signs of the BJP’s righteous wrath are everywhere. To recoup the past and salvage pride from ancient wrongs, perceived or real, they must inhabit the past even as they live in the present to build a new future: a modern, nuclear New York of temples, forts and eight-lane highways. But it can be done only if the party points a constant finger at the demon spirits from as far back as 1000 years ago, still drifting through time mists, riding their horses down the erstwhile Raj Path, marauding.
So, Aurangzeb has not died. He cannot. If he is dead, he cannot be killed again and again as and when the need arises. Aurangabad naturally must be renamed Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar. Or Aurangzeb Road must be renamed Abdul Kalam Road when in the interests of perceived truth, a new road could have been built in memory of the former president. A tweet—a Brahmastra of a kind—praising a long-dead Mughal king or British general could set off a riot killing and maiming hundreds, watched by children who do not know why suddenly they are orphans.
Overnight, school textbooks become lighter for dropped chapters on India’s past. The scriptures are scoured to discern the secrets of particle physics. A time India ruled the world is sought to be discovered—naturally in the myths. And all of it is happening in the present for a genuinely aspired, beautiful future. All of it is the result of an earnest yearning for glory. The glory we once had. It is nostalgia—for a golden future in the past.
There is a pain in the BJP’s vision and punishment, and glory. This is what goads them on. The Nehru-shaped Opposition signals virtues; for example, decency. In realpolitik, that is just drawing room decorum. It works well—with cocktail revolutionaries of all persuasions and genders. Tweets. Black masks. The odd, heroic yatras. But Congress’ skin is not in the game.
If the old Parliament building was canned, no one attempted immolation in search of a democracy-saving headline. When the Central Vista renovation happened, no one fasted to death, and all the MPs lived next door.
When the Nehru Memorial was rechristened, surely at least one Congressman in the management committee would have known the agenda of the meeting in advance. No one called a press conference. The secular, liberal Opposition’s greatest problem is secularism and liberalism. What they need is street politics. They can’t do it because they are gentlemen. And gentlemen dress well and behave. They don’t bloody their noses.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B