On October 2, we are observing Gandhiji's 153rd birth anniversary. On that fateful day, Rahul Gandhi, with whom Gandhiji shares his surname, completes 25 days of his `Bharat Jodo' Yatra.
How would Gandhiji have seen Rahul's 150 days long odyssey? Gandhiji usually approved of those he thought worked selflessly for society and made sacrifices for the common good. How does Rahul's march measure against the values Gandjhiji upheld, lived and died for?
Leaving aside semantics, Rahul's entire enterprise is aimed at strengthening his family's vice-like grip on the Congress party, which has been rudely shaken following a string of resignations by senior leaders in the last couple of years. Ghulam Nabi Azad's explosive resignation letter in the last week of August, scalding in content and acerbic in style, was probably the last straw on the camel's back.
While Rahul owes his predominant position in the party to its dynastic mores, for Gandhiji, it was an alien concept. Gandhiji had four sons (three of them freedom fighters), and all were alive when India became independent in 1947 - and without a doubt - he was its uncrowned king. But none of his sons ever had a role in the public life of the freshly free country.
The eldest, controversial Hari Lal, died of tuberculosis at 59 in a municipal hospital in Mumbai, within months of Gandhiji's assassination. Mani Lal, 63, breathed his last in Phoenix, Natal in South Africa, in 1956. Ram Das, who, along with his younger brother Devdas, had lit Gandhiji's pyre, died in 1969. Devdas, born in 1900, died comparatively young at 57 in 1957.
None of them ever got any recognition on account of being Gandhiji's progeny, or managed to build a business empire. While Hari Lal was a rebel, converted to Islam for a while to spite his father, and reconverted to Hinduism later, the rest three led honourable, non-controversial, middle-class lives, sans any sense of entitlement. Can one say this of the Nehru-Gandhi clan - Indira, Rajiv, Sanjay, Sonia, Rahul or Priyanka?
Gandhi's stand against religious conversions, purdah among Muslim women and untouchability among Hindus, is well known and unambiguous. In the ongoing controversy on Hijab, Congress is with those who want to continue with this anachronism. Just at the start of his yatra, on September 9, Rahul called on a controversial catholic priest George Ponnaiah in Kanyakumari.
A video clip of Rahul's interaction with the Tamil Nadu pastor went viral, in which Rahul Gandhi can be heard asking, "Jesus Christ is a form of God? Is that right?" to which Ponniah replied, "He is the real God." Ponniah went on to say, "God reveals him (self) as a man, a real person .. not like Shakti.. so we see a human person." The pastor was arrested last year in July for his hate speech targeting the Hindu community at Arumanai in Tamil Nadu.
For Rahul, India is not a nation, but a Union of states. For Gandhiji, India was "one nation ". Writing in Hind Swaraj (1909), while talking of "our ancestors ", he said, "they established holy places in various parts of India, and fired the people with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world. And we Indians are one as no two Englishmen are."
Gandhiji fell to the assassin's bullets on January 30, 1948. And within hours, Congress leaders, who laid claims to his political and moral legacy, killed Gandhism many times over.
On the one hand, internecine bushfires lit by Congressmen started singeing innocent Brahmins in large parts of Maharashtra, and on the other, in Delhi, his funeral was planned with a royal extravagance. His message of simplicity and non-violence were buried fathoms deep by those claiming to be his followers.
A British General was put in charge of his funeral arrangements. The prophet of non-violence was transported to the cremation ground on an army weapons carrier pulled by two hundred uniformed troops, preceded by armoured cars, mounted lancers, and a police regiment. Air force planes, and a naval vessel were used to complete the ceremonies connected with the immersion of his ashes.
The dastard act of Nathu Ram Godse of shooting Gandhiji dead took the mask off from the faces of Congressmen, bringing out their hidden character, a complete negation of Gandhian values. Gandhiji's killer was a Chitpawan Brahmin of Maharashtra. D P Mishra, (twice Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh) has described in detail how the unfortunate tragedy was used by Congressmen to target RSS and the Brahmin community in the state.
According to him, fast police action had saved the then RSS chief Guru Golwalkar and dozens of his colleagues from being burnt alive - by a mob which had surrounded the Sangh office in Nagpur, with plans to set it on fire. One of the first cases of mob lynching in independent India took place in Mumbai. A violent mob surrounded Veer Savarkar's house in Shivaji Park. Since he was not there, they pulled out Dr Narayan Savarkar (younger brother of Veer Savarkar) and his wife. When they tried to escape the mob fury, they were stoned. Later Dr Narayan succumbed to his injuries.
Mishra recalling the developments following Gandhiji's assassination in "Living an era", writes, "The Nagpur incidents were not isolated as more harrowing scenes of violence against Brahmans were enacted in many parts of Marathi-speaking areas, particularly in southern Maharashtra. In fact, in Nagpur and Berar, the troublemakers were mostly Congressmen, some even office-bearers of the various Congress committees. Among those arrested by the police, there were more than a hundred Congressmen, and I was immediately subjected to pressure for their release."
This sordid trend was followed over three decades later when Sikh bodyguards of Indira Gandhi shot her dead in 1984. Hordes of Congressmen swarmed public streets in several cities, leading rampaging mobs, which systematically looted and burnt Gurudwaras and properties owned by Sikhs. Thousands of innocent Sikhs were also killed by these violent mobs. The then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who had succeeded his mother, justified the murderous attacks by saying, "whenever a big tree falls, the earth shakes a bit."
Gandhiji had indeed seen this decline in the Congress coming. On January 29 1948, a day before his assassination, Gandhiji wrote, "the Congress in its present shape and form, i.e. as a propaganda vehicle and parliamentary machine, has outlived its use. India has still to attain social, moral and economic independence in terms of its seven hundred thousand villages as distinguished from its cities and towns." The All India Congress Committee is therefore advised, "to disband the existing Congress organisation and flower into a Lok Sevak Sangh." It's time Rahul and all those who claim Gandhiji's legacy took his last words seriously.
(Balbir Punj is a former Member of Parliament and a columnist)