The Rajaji Utsav initiated by PM Modi is more than just a celebration; it is a mirror held up to the Congress party’s history of silencing its own nationalists. The current existential crisis of the Congress stems from its historical decision to erase the legacies of honest critics like Rajaji and Narasimha Rao, paving the way for a singular "Nehru-Gandhi" cult of personality.
CHAKRAVARTHY RAJAGOPALACHARI belongs to that extinct breed of scholar-statesmen who was somewhat of a rarity in the political climate of his own time. Sharp, shrewd, perceptive, quick-witted and magnanimous, Rajaji’s felicity for straddling multiple realms simultaneously was not only legendary but remains an understudied area of his prolific legacy. He was a leading light of the freedom struggle; he could draft the Constitution and write a scholarly speech on Vedanta for Maharaja Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar. His idea of taking a respite from hardscrabble politics was to write the abridged Mahabharata in English in less than a year. Around the same period, he also contributed regular columns to the acclaimed Bangalore-based journal, Public Affairs on a wide range of topics including the current political happenings, law, Hindu society, economics, free enterprise and the “growing menace of black money in politics.”
Needless, Rajaji's Trivikramaesque stature unnerved Nehru who, after Sardar Patel’s death, began sidelining or ousting threats to his personal power and prestige. The list of Nehru’s victims is as long and as stark as the methods that he used to crush them. Acharya Kriplani, Ambedkar, John Mathai, Ramnath Goenka, Rajagopalachari… Apart from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, it was Rajaji who till the end of his illustrious life, mounted a spirited fight against Nehru and everything that he represented. In his own lifetime, Nehru won the day but Rajaji exacted his sweet revenge in a history-altering manner. It became the festering wound that Nehru took to his grave — this was Rajaji’s public promise that the Congress would never again return to power in Tamil Nadu.
In balance, the good that Rajaji bequeathed to Indian public life greatly outweighs his negatives such as they were. And so, when PM Modi announced the Rajaji Utsav, it was a mixed bag. One, it was a welcome gesture of a long-overdue recognition. Two, it was a loathsome reminder of the countless sins that the Nehruvian establishment has inflicted upon India. The Congress seems to be the only party that punished patriots and nationalists for being patriots and nationalists even if they hailed from its own fold. Small wonder that its sprawling ecosystem spasmed with fury at Rajaji Utsav — actually, Narendra Modi did nothing spectacular; he simply showed the mirror to the Congress.
The non-Congress side expectedly hit back with equal ferocity by quoting Rajaji’s 1951 letter to Mountbatten and reeled out an extensive litany of how every Congress Prime Minister from Nehru to Rajiv Gandhi had compromised the Indian national interest. While that is entirely true, it is only the fractional story of a much deeper corrosion unleashed by the Nehruvian apparatus almost immediately after independence. This is the story of the calculated destruction of decency, morality, ethics, and even basic humanity in the Indian public life. Its most apt title is this: Transforming a Civilisational Nation into a Fascist State.
Only the barest highlights of the processes and people that led to this transformation can be given in the space of an essay — collated from a huge archive of events, editorials, news reports, analyses roughly from 1947-1952. First, here’s a top level view of the situation barely eight months after India achieved “independence.”
The brimming legions of famished, phoney Gandhian opportunists and reformers of every hue had overnight transformed into traders in treachery and merchants of patriotism occupying high ministerial berths. It was the outbreak of an epidemic of epic proportions especially in the provinces (states). These ministers who had never eaten two square meals a day in the era of the freedom movement, now began devouring everything in sight; their illicit acquisitions were limited only by the imaginative boundaries of their skullduggery; the more creative the imagination, the more fecund the loot.
This brand new political class did not exist before 1947.
Freedom fighter, journalist, writer and litterateur D.V. Gundappa had closely worked with several members of this class and parted ways with them about five years before independence as they slowly revealed their true colours. His assessment for the reasons behind the birth of this species is worth its weight in gold.
During the freedom struggle, there was a high degree of optimism about the dawn of a new, vibrant and fair political system called democracy. And now that we have freedom, why has the same system become so abhorrent in practice? Back then, we didn’t have an estimate of how wretched human nature will become when confronted with the treasure-chest called power. Our patriotic zeal concealed the basic, natural human weaknesses from us. A class of famished people now find themselves faced with a supply of unlimited feasts. They will naturally devour it as if there is no tomorrow. (translated from Kannada)
This new political class was in bed with black-marketers, bootleggers, pimps, and lawbreakers of every stripe. Less than a decade ago, they had travelled on foot, in bullock carts and in trams. Now they were cruising in fancy Buicks, Packards, and Cadillacs. Some changed as many as five cars each year. American cars were in great demand among this class of Gandhian pseudo patriots who loudly and publicly upheld the ban on British cars. But there was a catch even in this area. Import laws on automobiles were stringent. Unsurprisingly, only these patriotic Congress ministers could magically import them at will at controlled prices. It was quite a tidy racket. Congressmen who were not ministers also made a killing in a different fashion. Using their clout, they would buy these American cars at the same controlled prices, hoard them for some time and then resell them in the second hand market at double or triple the price. Needless, all such transactions were executed in cash. The most favoured denomination was ₹ 100 notes.
Another sub-sect of Gandhian patriots exhibited true daredevilry by transforming treason into a lucrative business. In 1950, editor and journalist D.F. Karaka unearthed a sinister racket in which “some of the office-bearers of the Congress party had formed a company to trade in arms and ammunition and had given the address of Congress House [Bombay] as being that of their company. Congress House had virtually become an ammunition dump."
We repeat: this was the situation just eight months after “independence.”
In an astounding feat of clairvoyance, Jadunath Sarkar had predicted the emergence of this degenerate political class as early as the 1940s when he wrote,
….the first generation of Indians into whose hands Free India has fallen [has] acquired a distorted mentality. A class of professional politicians has risen to power, and are only held back from doing incalculable mischief by the few giants at the top. A false sense of values has been taught to the electorate: to have been held by the English in political detention is proclaimed as a qualification for a ministership; a coat without a collar is the symbol of true patriotism… Patient constructive workers for the nation’s uplift are taunted with having made no sacrifice compared with the white-cap patriots. Patriotism of this type is sometimes cashed in to found bogus joint-stock banks.
EVEN AS THE TOP LAYERS of the Congress political machinery were fast corroding, there still remained spirited voices of sanity and idealism in the party. Three names, now forgotten, but highly respected in that period, come to mind.
The first is Gandhi’s direct disciple, Konda Venkatappaiah, an eighty-year-old Congressman from the Andhra Provincial Unit. He wrote an anguished and cautionary letter to Gandhi two days before his assassination.
Swaraj was the only absorbing passion which goaded men and women to follow your leadership. But now that the goal has been reached all moral restrictions have lost their power on most of the fighters in the great struggle. . . .the situation is growing more intolerable every day. The people have begun to say that the British government was much better. They are even cursing the Congress.
This then is the other Great Myth: of the alleged, unquestionable goodwill that the Congress supposedly enjoyed, which allegedly in turn, was the reason for its repeated electoral successes.
The second name is K.G. Mashruwala, another devoted follower of Gandhi. He became the Editor of Harijan after Gandhi’s death. Its cover story dated 3 October 1948 leaves nothing to the imagination. It was an unambiguous rebuke directed against Congressmen who were brazenly encashing their sole calling card: “sacrifice” during the freedom struggle. Mashruwala laid special stress upon a new scheme: of providing special facilities like admission to educational institutions for students who had taken part in various political movements initiated only by the Congress Party. Mashruwala deplored the vile practice of using “political service as a short cut to scholarship.” But more devastatingly, he wrote:
… it seems to be a doubtful method of consolidating one’s party through the power which a governing party necessarily possesses in the State. It sets a bad example for other parties to follow when any of them come into power… the present Government has been taking…criminal action against followers of other political parties. It is not impossible that in course of time the very heat of coercion might enable some of these parties to grow strong enough to overthrow the Congress party. Such a new party in power will follow the example of Congress party by rewarding all those who might have suffered under the Congress regime, and in this way the country will always have the kind of government which thrives on nepotism...by rewarding those who suffered out of patriotic sentiment we are transferring them from the list of patriots to that of mercenaries or farsighted businessmen.
Needless, Mashruwala’s prophecy came true; he wasn’t offering any profound insight but wrote words of common sense.
The third name is comparatively prominent. Sarat Chandra Bose, Subash Bose’s brother. He had quit the Congress as early as January 1947 in disgust over its brazen Muslim appeasement. In 1948, he contested elections as an independent and trounced the Congress candidate so humiliatingly that Nehru took it as a personal affront and eventually destroyed Bose's career. In a public speech in Bombay in July 1948, Sarat Chandra Bose launched a frontal attack against the Congress:
After ten months of existence, India has produced a maimed and crippled baby without much sign of life. She has been regulated and regimented to such a state that she is unable to throw up her arms and kick her legs… we have copied in every detail the example of the British. The repressive ordinances, acts and regulations of the British have all been made into law to-day… what is most shameful is that these repressive measures are far more stringent than the British ever dared to take… free speech, association and assemblies are things of the past. Our newspapermen are representatives only of a servile press; the same men who once had the guts to criticize the British regime in their newspapers are to-day looking to New Delhi for orders… corruption, nepotism and graft are on the increase in every province… Pandit Nehru had once said that all black-marketeers should be hanged from the nearest tree and that the public services should be manned by patriots and not by Indian civil servants, as these were misfits… all these utterances and promises made in the last twenty years remain merely utterances.
Among other things, this is perhaps the earliest and the most chillingly accurate description of the ecosystem that Nehru had already set in motion. The nationwide machinery of Congress servility and corruption mutated and engorged over the years precisely because Nehru had incredible tolerance for corruption, a fact that Philip Spratt points out:
An item of his policy which I believe testifies to Nehru’s Marxist feeling… is his tolerance of corruption… [his] party leaders had no objections: why bother about bourgeoisie financial prejudices? Nehru has the same bohemian attitude towards audit objections: they belong to the fussy era of Gokhale and Gandhi.
Long story short, this is the other great achievement of the Nehruvian Congress: to shunt out honest critics within the party, and terrorise honest men and women who didn’t belong to either the Congress or any other party. Small wonder that every genuine patriot and freedom fighter who had hailed from the original Congress mothership was tabooed, their memories permanently erased from our national life and history. This paved the way for the Nehrufication of India itself. Naming institutions and parks and hospitals and airports after the Nehru clan pales in comparison with that ultimate national insult — Indira is India.
And today, when the Sonia-Rahul Congress finds itself in existential crisis, it also finds that it can no longer mine the legacy of stalwarts like Rajaji. Forget Rajaji, even P.V. Narasimha Rao now firmly belongs to the BJP camp, to use a political idiom.
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