By Garga Chatterjee
Every statue in the subcontinent is a political site, their erection a political act. This is perhaps true outside the subcontinent too. Mohandas Gandhi’s statue was unveiled in the Parliament Square of London, England. The statue was unveiled by Arun Jaitley, finance minister of the Indian Union and a senior member of a party that looks up to the RSS for political direction. The same RSS was banned by the Indian Union government in 1948, in the aftermath of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination. By some viewpoints, Mohandas was a staunch opposer of British imperialism. In the same compound, stands the statue of Winston Churchill, former prime minister of Great Britain. As a Bengali, I know this person as one of the major conspirators behind the Bengal famine of 1943. Approximately 30 lakh people (about 5 per cent of the then population of pre-partition Bengal) died due to the famine, from starvation, malnutrition and disease. In the midst of the famine, Sir Winston had exclaimed, “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks.” Madhusree Mukherjee’s phenomenal research contained in her book Churchill’s Secret War makes clear the planned nature of the genocide of my people. It is rather amusing to see those who are creating a ruckus about some proposed Nathuram Godse’s statues being quite silent about Mohandas Gandhi sharing the same compound as the knighted mass-murderer. This sharing and unveiling comes without any acknowledgement from the British government about its role in the Bengal famine of 1943. Truth and reconciliation, forgiving and forgetting: these are all things that brown, black and yellow people are supposed to do. White people will and still continue to provide the ‘policy frameworks’ and ‘experts’ to oversee these processes. We have no shame.
Mohandas Gandhi joins Nelson Mandela in being in the company of various racist and imperialist pedestaled greats in the Parliament Square. By giving Mohandas’ statue a prominent location, the British government is signalling that that in its inclusive vision of the world, it can accommodate those who were staunchly opposed to the British loot of the subcontinent. Browns come off as small-minded people, who take their holy cows too seriously. There is some truth to that, but that is because Mohandas Gandhi is not a human being anymore, but God number one in the official pantheon of the Indian Union. Nathuram Godse’s statues and temple thus are not in the realm of officially allowable “dissent”, but really are acts of blasphemy. So let’s admit that even “seculars” also are supportive of blasphemy prevention. By driving Nathuram Godse underground in a superficial way, they are probably hastening the day when Godse will rise, not in rebellion but to take his place in the sarkari pantheon. Amidst all of this hypocritical anti-Godse posturing, the subcontinental landscape remains peppered with statues of men and women who have caused the killings of many innocents, directly or indirectly. Obviously, a small potato like me doesn’t have the guts to name and shame them. But at the end of the day, I know and I know that you know and that’s what matters. And we should not stop being irreverent on the sly.
A low stool at the high table comes at the cost of forgetting crimes of the those sitting on high stools and without whose clean-chit, even a low-stool cannot be obtained. At the Mohandas Gandhi statue unveiling ceremony, Arun Jaitley talked about the “deep and enduring connections between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest.” There is another bond: the one that exists between the looter and the looted, the rapist and the raped, the murderer and the murdered. The Indian Union government has never pressed for monetary reparations for the colonial plunders and massacres of browns from the British government. From this, we can judge the character of those to whom the British transferred power in 1947. It was a transfer laced with trust. All Indian Union governments, including the present one, have refused to declassify all the files on Netaji Subhash Bose saying that it would “prejudicially affect” foreign relations. No Indian Union government, from the Nehruvian to the antediluvian, has demanded that the British government and its brown collaborators pay for their crimes. Nothing is accidental. Few things ever are.
Every year, in the Indian Union, there is some hue and cry about how people in the subcontinent don’t honour “their” martyrs — especially those in uniform. Hence, lets spend more money from this poor subcontinent’s exchequer to remember the ‘sacrifice’ of those brown mercenaries of World War I who swore allegiance to the British monarch and laid down their lives while butchering non-British people in non-British lands in Asia, Africa and Europe, because that suited the taste of the then-British government. Who are the professional generation-next and next-after-next of these British loyal armed men? Does their treatment of and attitude towards common brown-folks today differ from the attitude by which the British looked upon those who protested the unjust policies of the pre-partition Government of India? Some browns of honour spat back at the British crown and joined the Azad Hind Fauj. They were not accommodated in the British Indian Army, the Indian Army or the Pakistan Army, before or after 1947. Thus we have what we have. Even this is not accidental. Few uncomfortable things ever are. (IPA Service)