Muting Indira legacy

October 31 this year marked a significant shift in the nation’s political discourse. In organising a nation-wide ‘Run For Unity’ and administering a unity pledge to thousands thronging New Delhi’s Rajpath, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rang in the new, without totally ringing out the old. He moved, but not fully, the focus from the death anniversary of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who was assassinated three decades back, to 139th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Converting a day of solemn observance of someone dead to a boisterous celebration of the man who united the country that could have gone asunder after its hard-won independence, was, of course, a political statement and a message. That Modi and BJP want to demolish old national icons connected with the Congress and replace them with theirs is too clear to be ignored. Also clear is the method of appropriating Congressmen, especially those not members of the Nehru-Gandhi elite. Sardar Patel, for long an icon of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, willy-nilly, falls into this category.

This is despite the argument made by sections of the intelligentsia that Patel was a secular man dealing with a volatile communal situation that erupted in the wake of the Partition. His talking tough on Pakistan was seen as communal, even though he banned the RSS after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. But this, again, is a debate among the appropriators and the appropriated.

It is heartening that moving away from this debate and underling the communal harmony essential to the nation, today as much as yesterday, some TV channels covering the Rajpath event ‘live’, telecast excerpts from Patel’s recorded speech where he asked people of all communities to think and work together as Indians and as “Bhai-Bhai.”

Union Minister Venkiah Naidu spoke of ‘injustice’ done to Patel and trotted out the familiar BJP/RSS line that the country’s fate would have been different had Patel been the first premier. But Modi must be credited with talking like a true Prime Minister – in keeping with the tradition that began with Jawaharlal Nehru, whom he has consciously ignored – asking that the occasion should not be limited to personalities and coloured with political prejudices. He did mention Indira’s assassination as an attack on the country’s unity and placed that in the context of Patel’s contribution to unite the country during dire times.

Modi’s references to Ramakrishna Paramhans being “incomplete without Swami Vivekananda” and Mahatma Gandhi being “incomplete without Sardar Patel,” perhaps, would have been more noble and universal, had he referred to the fact that Nehru and Patel were a team, despite mutual differences, real or perceived. That they sank these differences is part of the history. But Modi is entitled to his beliefs.

The need to honour icons without retribution is underlined by President Pranab Mukherjee, a life-long Congressman, who joined the cleanliness drive at Modi’s call and flagged off a unity run at Rashtrapati Bhavan underlines.