Politicians, don't mess with Delhi's name
The latest in the series of bizarre and incredible statements that have been emanating from the offices of ministers and the newly emerging managers of our destiny, is this demand from M Venkaiah Naidu, the minister of Urban Affairs, that Delhi should be renamed Hastinapur. Why Hastinapur of all places? No one has till now made a connection between the historical site of Delhi to the city referred to in the epic tale of the Mahabharata? But these matters of detail have never bothered those who are bent upon inventing a fantastic history of our past, a history that would present them as knights in shining armour and the rest of humanity as knaves and scallywags.
Those in power always try to twist history in their interest, but the discipline has shown that it is not so easily pliable and that it exists outside the wishes of individuals and classes. Those who have tried to distort history to serve their narrow ends tend to land up sooner or later on the dust-heap of history. Our rulers are acutely aware of this and have therefore decided to erase history and to create their own histories. This exercise began fairly early on in our independent existence and by the late 1960s it had assumed epidemic proportions.
The exercise began with the removal of sculptures of the British rulers and then it spread to the obliteration of all reminders of our colonial past, they forgot about the English language though. The names of roads, bridges, parks etc were changed, a few new roads or localities were built and named but mostly we were renaming old structures, Curzon Road became Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Wellesly Road became Dr Zakir Hussain Marg, Cornwallis Road became Subramaniya Bharti Marg, Harding Avenue and Harding Bridge were rechristened as Tilak Marg and Tilak Bridge.
We were no longer building a new nation, we were recycling the old as new, we were erasing histories and were creating new memories, many of them were half-truths and only a partial representation of history. This sleight of hand operation reached its apex when India Gate, a poor imitation of the Arc-de-Triomphe of Paris and a memorial to the Indian soldiers, used as cannon fodder to protect British imperialist interests in Africa and Turkey during the World War I, was turned into a memorial to the unknown soldier and the Mutiny Memorial built by the British to valorise their loyalists of the East Indian Company, was renamed Ajit-Garh and turned into a memorial to the martyrs of the first organised struggle for freedom.
Over the decades these two tendencies have continued to grow side by side, the tendency to rename and appropriate has far overshadowed building the new.
The first bout of renaming drew upon the reservoir of tall figures thrown up by the anti-Imperialist struggle. Unfortunately the choices were not inclusive, mainly political personalities and almost exclusively from the Congress stable were memorialised. The leaders of the Socialist movement, the Communists, the revolutionaries of the Ghadar Party, Anusheelan, Chittagong Armoury raid and the leaders of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny along with artists, social reformers, writers, poets and others were all excluded. In phase two of this continuing charade we only had Indira Gandhi and her arrogant son Sanjay Gandhi, where everything from hospitals to reserved forests and slums to parks were named after Mrs Gandhi or her son - this scourge of the Emergency.
The short stint of the Janata government gave an opportunity to the socialists to iconise Ram Manohar Lohia and Jai Prakash Narain, the Willingdon and Irwin hospitals were thus renamed. The founding fathers of the BJP who drew inspiration from Adolf Hitler and followed Savarkar in articulating the idea of the two nation theory, making common cause with the Muslim League in the promotion of the two nation theory were singularly lacking in tall national figures and so they ended up naming anything and everything (including a gate of the ICSSR building), that had not yet been named, after Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and the founders of the RSS, KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalker.
65 years ago we started with a vision of a secular, self-reliant democratic India, now we only have visions, each passing day, more graphic and colourful of becoming suppliers of cheap labour to the world. The journey from “Made in India” to “Make in India” is one of regression that can only end up digging up whatever has been built in the futile search of Ayodhya and Hastinapur.