A nation comes of age when history reconciles the past with the present seamlessly for a roadmap for the future. A war is going on in India’s collective memory between Our History vs Their History. This conflict has birthed warring ideologies of Subjective Nationalism and Muscular Nationalism. The turning point was when Narendra Modi became India's 15th prime minister in 2014.
Since then he has been relentlessly erasing the subjectively interpretative description and portrayal of India's heritage and recasting its struggles against Mughal tyranny and colonial cravenness. Writing in 'Crowds and Power,' Elias Canetti outlines the difference between the mass and the elite: the former unites to disagree or agree on a particular subject while the latter agrees or disagrees on the subject, but for different reasons. The Modi era has midwifed a new Indian elite, which doesn’t tolerate mementos of India’s enslaved past. The names of the cities and institutions are being changed. New icons are being fleshed out in the fields of culture, art, religion, social work and even the Independence movement that fit the current narrative. His mission is loud and clear: exile the pluralistic present into the dishonourable past to create a purely Native Now.
For secularists, India's present and the conception of the Congress are concurrent events. The nationalists share the BJP’s vision of India’s past as a terrain of saints, social reformers, poets, authors and warriors who were martyred protecting the motherland centuries ago. The past is now the property of the Modified dispensation that firmly believes that the Congress and its fellow travellers converted India into an inferior nation that sought endorsement and alms from foreigners. The fatal flaw in the Congress dogma is that the national leadership was the sole property of Nehru and the Gandhis. Modi wants to change this perception. He believes that his bête noire shrunk India’s geography by promoting the Partition and, worse, expelling other players from the subjectivity of the Congress-led freedom struggle.
Last week, Modi decisively reminded Indians that the Nehru-Gandhi parivar grabbed the credit for India's Independence from Muscular Nationalists who aggressively opposed British rule. A 28-feet tall statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, India’s best known military leader, has come up at India Gate. Modi told the nation, “In the last eight years, we have taken many such decisions one after the other, which are imprinted with the ideals and dreams of Netaji. Netaji Subhash was the first head of Akhand Bharat, who freed Andaman before 1947 and hoisted the Tricolor.” And he defined the contours of New India as “we are filling the picture of tomorrow with new colours, leaving behind the past”.
The Akhand Bharat terminology is notable since it is the Sangh's pan-Asian trope. The parivar to which Modi belongs has been swedging against the Congress propaganda as India’s singular saviour. Their seven decade old grouse is against the narrative that promotes fake liberalism, slavish secularism and amplifying the family cult. While the BJP has retained Mahatma Gandhi as one of India's greatest leaders, it is purging the Nehruvian model of politics and governance from the national mainstream. From 2014 onwards, it is adopting and promoting other leaders like Patel, Veer Savarkar, Baba Sahib Ambedkar, et al. to minimise the spread of the dynastic political pandemic. Its emphasis has always been on personalities who defied the Congress and the Mughals with either weapons or wisdom. Bose is one such credible alternative icon.
Promoting the INA’s founder is a politically correct action that puts in perspective militant nationalism which could have prevented Partition. Modi’s sights have been on West Bengal for a while now—the BJP needs an ideological mascot to challenge Mamata Banerjee’s domination of the voter gestalt. Modi started to aggressively market Bose in 2018. To commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the proclamation of the Azad Hind Provisional government, the PM hoisted the Indian national flag on Red Fort. Wearing an INA cap, he took a dig at the Congress: “In an effort to highlight the role of one family, efforts were made to deliberately ignore and forget contributions made by others in the independence struggle and later in creating a new India,...But our government is changing all that.” His government declassified numerous Bose related documents. Such actions dovetail with the Sangh’s belief in Bose as the most powerful proponent of a militarised struggle against colonialism.
Bose isn't the only militant nationalist the Centre has adopted. During the past decade, the BJP has showcased pre-Congress and Mughal era heroes who have been just footnotes in history textbooks. Shivaji is one such prominent national idol who fought the Mughals and won. Though confined to Maharashtra, the Modi government placed him in the company of national figures, and named institutions after him. In March, Modi unveiled a 9.5 feet-tall statue of Shivaji in Pune. Inaugurated by the prime minister, the Indian Navy unveiled a new Naval insignia that proudly displays the octagonal seal of the erstwhile Maratha kingdom while commissioning the INS Vikrant, India’s first indigenously built aircraft carrier— a metaphor for Atma Nirbhar. A statement by the Indian Navy explained: "The twin octagonal borders draw their inspiration from Shivaji Maharaj Rajmudra or the Seal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, one of the prominent Indian kings with a visionary maritime outlook, who built a credible Naval Fleet that earned grudging admiration from European Navies operating in the region at the time."
Besides Shivaji, Modi is exalting Laxmi Bai, the Hindu queen of Jhansi, as a brave Bharatiya naari who took up arms and sacrificed her life in a battle against the British. Just before the UP Assembly elections, he travelled to Jhansi, where he vowed to develop the backward Bundelkhand region—the Rani's karma bhumi—as India's only defence corridor. Celebrating the valorous sacrifices of forgotten heroes, the BJP is projecting the image of India as neither submissive nor defensive. Various cultural bodies and Bollywood are being nudged to glorify Indian heritage and heroes. Over half a dozen documentaries, about 50 books and numerous feature films have been liberally financed by the establishment and its admirers. The aggressive new depiction of the leonine national symbol reflects Modi's Muscular Bharat, where mock modesty has no place. Confrontation for a Cause, at the risk of sounding divisive, is the new normal. As the Congress marches to its own drum in a countrywide padayatra, Modi is beating the drums of war in his battle against history’s mistakes artistically stored and preserved in archives and museums.