Premchand had said — “Communalism always comes in the garb of culture.” Along with this, today’s truth is also that communalism falsifies history and presents myths as history. Today BJP-RSS is busy finding facts from aeronautics to organ transplantation and IVF treatment in Puranas and is citing mythical stories as proof of this. For them, Taj Mahal and all mosques are Hindu temples and for this they present the looting and destruction of some Hindu temples by Mughal rulers as proof. There are numerous examples in history of destruction of each other’s religious places. Shaivites have attacked Vaishnavites, Hindus have destroyed Buddhist monasteries, Brahmins have brutally suppressed Shudras. All these are hundreds and thousands of years old things and today our modern, scientific and rational consciousness considers them wrong. Despite all these distortions, our society has progressed, has become more civilized than before and the tradition of harmony, Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, has developed.
Lessons can be learnt from history, but revenge cannot be taken on the basis of this history. Doing so would mean dehumanising society, pushing society back to the era of barbarism, destroying all that human civilisation has achieved till date. But communal forces do not want to learn lessons from history, they want to do politics of revenge on the basis of the barbarism of history and want to push Indian society further back, back to the era of barbarism. Their intentions and declarations are very clear.
BJP’s bag is a magical bag, full of issues. But these issues are not the issues of our real life. This bag contains issues of hatred, issues of anti-Muslim hatred. It presents Muslims as an imaginary enemy, whose presence here is the root of all the problems of this country. It wants to snatch away the basic right of the Muslim community to live a life of dignity as a citizen. To realize its imagination, it wants to mobilize Hindus. This is the essence of the politics of ‘Hindutva’ that the Sangh-BJP talks about. The word ‘Hindutva’ was used for the first time by Savarkar. This ‘brave’ son of the Sangh-BJP has said that Hindutva has nothing to do with Hinduism and it is the politics of mobilizing Hindus to reach power, and to remain in power after reaching it. In this article, we will not mention Savarkar’s apology to the British.
The British used the politics of dividing the common people on the basis of religion to remain in power. The policy of ruling by dividing on the basis of religion is called communal politics. After the alleged bravery of the Kaala Pani Yatra, Savarkar had joined the British in this politics and he justified his step in the name of Hindutva. After independence, the Sangh-BJP, desperate to come to power, furthered this politics of the British in the country. Before 1857, many kings and emperors ruled in this country, during their reign they destroyed and looted temples and mosques, but no one did the work of dividing on the basis of religion to make their rule permanent. This is the reason that despite political enmity, neither Akbar had any hatred against Maharana Pratap nor Shivaji Maharaj had any hatred against Aurangzeb. Today, the Sangh-BJP is denying history by presenting the royal rivalry as religious rivalry. Believe me, it has no respect for Maharana and for Shivaji Maharaj. All these people have been made weapons of its politics.
The controversy over Aurangzeb has not even settled down and the BJP has brought Tughlaq out of his grave. Rajya Sabha MP Dr. Dinesh Sharma, Faridabad MP Krishan Pal Gurjar and Deputy Navy Chief Kiran Deshmukh have got Swami Vivekanand Marg nameplates installed at their residences instead of Tughlaq Lane. In fact, the party which does not have the courage to face the real issues of the common people, is busy in making headlines on such issues, no matter how dangerous the consequences are for the country!
But Swami Vivekananda’s soul will also be disturbed by this, because Swamiji was definitely a saffron-clad person, a follower of Hinduism and a knower of Vedas, but he was definitely not the carrier of the saffron ideas of Sangh-BJP. He was not even touched by Muslim hatred. He was a believer of Islamic body and Vedantic mind. He was prophesying the rule of the hardworking Shudras, indeed in his times the hard-working were Shudras. Sangh-BJP is trying to convert a secular Swami Vivekananda into a communal saffron-clad person. Similarly, they are trying to yoke the revolutionary Bhagat Singh in their communal yoke, whereas Sangh-BJP has nothing to do with Bhagat Singh’s socialist ideas. They want to put all the freedom fighters of this country to plough their barren fields of Hindutva, because they have only fighters who flatter the British and even today are devotedly engaged in the imperialism of America.
Tughlaq was not the first king who took crazy decisions during his reign, was cruel to his subjects and indulged in debauchery. In fact, monarchy was run in this way because the king was considered to be the representative of God and his will was supreme. These kings and emperors are the bearers and symbols of feudal values. But no ruler would have named a road after himself during his lifetime. After all, even kings and emperors must have followed some rules of morality. Here in our country, the Prime Minister himself has named a stadium after himself and perhaps he did not feel ashamed in doing so. If the stubbornness to write one’s name in history can bring down a ruler so much in a democracy, then Tughlaq’s stubbornness was the stubbornness of monarchy.
Aurangzeb, Akbar, Babar… and now it is the turn of Tughlaq, because the Sangh-BJP is friends with communalism! Before this ‘Tughlaqi obsession’ of the Sanghi gang towards history destroys the country, there is a need to stand up against the Sanghi campaign of falsifying history and imposing it on the entire country through the new education policy and to wake up the sleeping ones, so that a debate can begin on policy issues related to the plight of the common people.
Sanjay Parate is the Vice President of Chhattisgarh Kisan Sabha, affiliated to All India Kisan Sabha.
