What is it with RSS not apologising and Modi honouring Gandhi in South Africa?

Years ago, Karl Marx in one of the moments of brilliant insight proclaimed rhetorically that "history repeats itself twice, first time as a tragedy, second time as a farce".

History since Marx's departure has become even more ironic and far more farcical. The use of media has allowed history to be even more dubious and ironic.

I was reminded of this on July 10 when newspapers blandly inserted a front page picture of PM Narendra Modi enacting one of the great moments of history, the alchemical moment in 1892 when Gandhi, the young lawyer, was ejected out of the train for travelling in first class.

I looked closely at the picture. Modi sits wooden as if he is posing for a Tussauds wax portrait. No newspaper had any reaction.

I guess most people saw it as normal, a PM playing tourist with history. I was appalled and agitated when I saw Ela Gandhi welcome him to Phoenix Farm. I was reminded of a comment by a historian who said today every party rewrites history.

The Stalinist left foes itself declaring opponents as non-people, the liberals do it by commoditising history and the Right by sanitising history. The Modi photograph was something Swachh Bharat would have been proud of.

Irony

Of late, the Left and the Right have been trying to reclaim the national movement.

The Communists played second fiddle to the British and even happily acted as informants. The Right, especially the RSS, was opposed to Gandhi and had little to do with the national movement.

Yet, no two groups have been more hyperactive trying to reclaim their role in nationalist history.

There was an even greater irony in Modi's trip as the RSS, of which he was a pracharak, was opposed to Gandhi. Ashis Nandy points out that even today people send money orders to support of Nathuram Godse's family.

I do not know what Modi thought while he sat in the wood planked train.

But I was wondering whether at that moment the RSS and its ilk thought of apologising to Gandhi and the nation for the assassination.

I was for one moment even expecting an apology for the 2002 riots.

An apology would have made history doubly alchemic if he had used his sense of the truth commission to offer a new sense of reconciliation in Gujarat.

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It would have made the train ride another turning point in history. Yet, Modi is not moved enough. He is not yet of the stature of Willy Brandt ready to kneel and apologise for Germany's role in World War II.

Modi will remain an aspiring leader content with the second hand, a tourist/pilgrim at a historical site when he could have made history.

As he and Jacob Zuma step out one becomes worried for two legacies - the legacy of Mandela now cannibalised by Zuma and the ANC and the lessons of Gandhi which a majoritarian BJP/RSS regime has quickly sidestepped.

I confess I am crotchety old-fashioned, and often feel irrelevant today. Yet, I am afraid of the new sense of normalcy I see around me.

It is as if a whitewashing of history has taken place and the RSS has appropriated two strands of the nationalist movement while it emasculates the third.

It has already begun playing second fiddle to Sardar Patel and it is trying to appropriate the Gandhian legacy.

To do this it has begun sanitising its role in history, while isolating the Congress from its great genealogies.

Beyond the political economy of such acts, there is a wiser question of memory itself.

Nuggets

Memory today seems bits and nuggets of data without context. It seems to lack the density of the value frames of the earlier era.

I remember my old friend and teacher, Ramachandra Gandhi. During Emergency, Indira Gandhi had gone to Rajghat to pay respects to the Mahatma.

Ramu met her and quietly with folded hands asked her not to insult the memory of his grandfather. Ramu believed that for Mrs Gandhi to declare Emergency and seek solace in Gandhi's was obscene.

It was not a question only of insulting history but showing disrespect to the value frame, the everyday ethics of the Gandhi era.

Watching him, no one in the crowd felt Ramu had done anything wrong. There was despite initial consternation an acceptance.

Each accepted the call of their respective roles. But one senses a different travesty of history today.

Policy

The media is focused on the changes in Cabinet, praising Modi for removing Smriti Irani, punishing her for being loud or abrasive.

Everyone claims that the entry of the more indecisive Prakash Javadekar suits the temper of a department of education more.

Yet, the very superficiality of policy and debate diverts attention from real happenings on the ground.

While Modi is being praised for his statesmanship on education, few forget to mention or connect what the RSS is doing at the ground level.

Its targeting of schools is more lethal than any act of groundwater pollution.

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The toxicity of the RSS large-scale effects on education will have to be reassessed across generations.

Newspaper reports claim that teachers from RSS who run shishumandirs could soon get sanction to teach in government schools in Madhya Pradesh where the BJP is in power.

The VHP and the Swaminarayan are planning programmes in 10,000 schools in Gujarat. It is the double strategy that worries an observer.

At one level a sanitisation over the history of the RSS and at another a deep attempt to inculcate biased history into children.

The BJP, in an odd way, seems to make history only by tampering with it.

It is time democracy and civil society keeps a "history watch" on the RSS.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)