Kanhaiya Kumar's idea of 'azadi' for those who talk of nationalism
From the Budget, to Rahul Gandhi's "suit-boot ki sarkar" quip, to Kanhaiya Kumar's speech, we keep speaking in terms of the Left and the Right. In doing so, we are ignoring the things that matter, for the sake of the packaging.
Let us begin with the end. Godwin's Law states that as an online discussion grows longer, somebody will always bring up an analogy to Hitler or the Nazis. Mostly such analogies are inappropriate and usually render such discussions infantile and absurd.
In the case of the RSS Godwin's Law is rendered moot. This is because of two reasons. The first is because of the well-documented praise that the key ideologues of the RSS showered upon the Nazis.
The clearest of these, of course, was Golwalkar, the second man to head the RSS, and who in his book, We, or our Nationhood Defined, heaped special praise on the Nazi treatment of German Jews, stating, "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."
The book was published in 1939, and so it can be suggested that Golwalkar was not aware of the full horrors of what the Nazi regime did to the Jews - or anybody else they considered an "undesirable". You would think that as soon as he knew, he would distance himself from such thoughts. Golwalkar lived until 1973, and changed his views not one bit.
It took until 2006 for the RSS to disassociate themselves from the book, saying that actually it had not been taught since 1946. Of course, Mr Modi, our current prime minister, published a glowing commentary on Golwalkar in 2007. Godwin's Law does not hold if the person discussed, and the organisation of which he was supreme leader, was not just an avowed fan of the Nazi regime, but also a cheerleader for their genocide of the Jews.
Godwin's Law does not hold also because Kanhaiya Kumar, the newly released president of the JNU Students Union, brought him into the equation in his electrifying speech, as he laughed at the forces of a Right-wing government to suppress dissent.
Very soon thereafter, you have Rakesh Sinha, of the India Policy Foundation, asserting that the RSS is not Right-wing at all! In fact, Sinha argues, and suggests that the presence of socialist workers organisations within the RSS umbrella, such as the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, makes it not "Hindu Right". Mr Sinha might have saved himself the trouble of trying to prove a falsehood if he bothered to recall that the full name of the Nazi party was the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei (NSDAP), or in English, National Socialist German Workers Party.
Adolf Hitler himself had approved of this name and changed it, adding "national" before "socialism" to identify that the Nazis believed in socialism all right, but only for ethnic Germans. And, oh yeah, he built up the first centrally run social welfare state.
Sound familiar? If not, it may be well for you to read Savarkar, and his definition of true Indians/Hindus, a race - jati, who have common blood flowing through their veins. Apartheid South Africa was also similar. Although it was, supposedly, on the side of the "capitalist" societies, it practiced its own style of socialism by stealing the land of African and Asian origin people under the Group Areas Act of 1950 so that 80 per cent of the land could be distributed to the European-origin minority.
The archetypes of Left and Right make very little sense in today's world. You only have to look at Singapore, so beloved of the free market lovers that it is consistently at the top of the ease of doing business index of the World Bank. In fact it has been up there as number one for more than a decade. Of course, it kind of hinds that the state stole all of the land, and pretty much all the housing is state provided - which would have everybody crying socialism, communism.
Our great neighbour, China, is ruled by a Communist Party, so much so that it now has more than 400 billionaires, approaching the US which has about 550. Of course, once in a while a billionaire just disappears in China, but you know how it is, maybe they needed a Communist. So, here is the thing, the Left and Right do not really explain things anymore - if they did to begin. What matters, though, is freedom, or azadi, as Kanhaiya Kumar says.
We need azadi for women, so that people like Jyoti Singh - our Nirbhaya - are not raped and killed; we need freedom from riots and their instigators, whether convicted like Maya Kodnani, or alleged, like Sanjeev Baliyan and Sangeet Som; we need freedom from policemen like Bassi, who will stand and watch as goons attack students and teachers in court; we need freedom from casteists who drove Rohith Vemula to suicide; we need freedom from archaic laws like Section 377 (criminalising "carnal intercourse against the order of nature") and Section 124A (criminalising dissent as sedition), that will throw people like Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya and SAR Geelani into jail for holding a meeting; we definitely need freedom from all the religious babas who seem very political, not at all theological, and quite, quite rich. We also need freedom from hunger, a freedom from a life of slavish indignity.
This is the challenge that Kanhaiya Kumar has thrown the way of our political leaders. Who can actually deliver freedom, azadi, to the youth of this land? Forget your speeches, ladies and gentlemen of the Parliament, don't offer us your head on a platter, don't tell us fine stories of national glory, don't sell us the tales of scientific progress, just give us our freedoms or get out of the way.