Whitewashing of
Modis grave human rights violations will have grave impact upon
Security
concerns: A closer alliance between the
Minorities; Minorities in
Financial Impacts;
Khalistan ;Supporters of Khalistan will
also face more brutal illegal actions already three Khalsitani leaders have
been killed in extra judicial killings .
https://www.ft.com/content/a0b17ed9-092d-4e83-90fe-2a6cea952518
Gandhi is
the major hate figure (in Modi's
He is
blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing
the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more
authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan;
blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the
rights of equal citizenship.
BJP
members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot);
praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to
erect statues to him and temples in his memory.
YouTube
videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of
views.
Seventy-five
years after his assassination, the ‘father of the nation’ is a problem for
Narendra Modi — but the country still needs his ideas
Born in 1958,
a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards
the Mahatma.
One of my
great-uncles helped to edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a
pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial
influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time.
Gandhi
was the father of the nation, the leader of the struggle for freedom against
British rule, whose techniques of non-violent resistance had won admirers and
imitators across the world. It was largely because of him that we were free and
proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike
neighbouring
In our school assembly we sang a 17th-century
hymn that Gandhi was particularly fond of, which he had rewritten to reflect
his vision of the
And it
was to these lines that our teachers drew our particular attention. The first
criticisms of Gandhi that I remember encountering were in a book I read as a
student at
This was
the autobiography of Verrier Elwin, an
In later
years, while he retained his admiration for the Mahatma’s moral courage and
religious pluralism, Elwin became sharply critical of Gandhi’s advocacy of
prohibition, which he thought damaging to tribal culture (where home-brewed
alcohol was both a source of nutrition and an aid to dance and music), and of
his exaltation of celibacy, which Elwin thought damaging to everyone
. In
Amritsar in 2006, members of the Congress party place garlands on a statue of
Gandhi to mark the anniversary of his birth © Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty
Images Elwin’s strictures were mild, even timid, when compared with those of
the Marxist intellectuals of Kolkata, whom I encountered in the 1980s when
beginning my academic career.
These
scholars identified with the Naxalites, a band of insurgents who were inspired
by Mao Zedong and who vandalised and destroyed Gandhi statues wherever they
found them.
Books
were written arguing that Gandhi was an agent simultaneously of the British
colonial state and of the Indian capitalist class; non-violence was presented
as a cunning device to wean the masses away from the revolutionary path. I had
many arguments with my Marxist friends about Gandhi.
I sought
to persuade them that his adherence to non-violence arose out of a
disinclination to take human life. I asked them to give Gandhi at least the
qualified praise that Mao himself had bestowed on Sun Yat-sen, the first
president of the Chinese republic, as creating a rudimentary national
consciousness on which was built a superior socialist consciousness.
On these subjects my interlocutors at least
talked back, but our relations came to breaking point when I chose to focus my
own research on a forest protection movement led by Gandhians, which the
Marxists dismissed as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.
Those
debates with Marxists shaped me profoundly, personally as well as
intellectually. Yet recalling them here perhaps conveys a whiff of
antiquarianism. For now, in the 2020s, the main attacks on Gandhi in
For the
past eight and a half years, the Hindu right has been in power in
While he is still officially the “father of
the nation”, with his birthday a national holiday and his face on the currency
notes, the public mood has turned hostile to Gandhi.
To
understand why Gandhi is increasingly unpopular in his homeland, one must go
back to the circumstances of his death 75 years ago.
Gandhi was murdered on
Founded in 1925, the RSS believed — and still
believes — in the construction of a Hindu theocratic state in
They have
a particular suspicion of Muslims and Christians, on account of the fact that
their religions originated outside
Mahatma Gandhi c1947 © Mirrorpix ‘It was
largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was
largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the
religious and linguistic diversity of our land’ Gandhi, on the other hand, held
the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their
religious affiliation.
After the
subcontinent was partitioned in August 1947, separating Hindu-majority
Muslims
of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements
in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his [Gandhi’s] help.
Normally too fearful even to leave their
homes, they came to him because they had learned and believed that he had their
interests at heart and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of
preserving them from destruction.” Gandhi’s efforts to maintain religious
harmony enraged the head of the RSS, an intense bearded man named MS Golwalkar.
A police
report of an RSS meeting in
They
would have to quit the country. Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in
Mahatma Gandhi could not mislead them any
longer. We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it
is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus.
If we are
compelled, we will have to resort to that course too.” A few weeks later,
Gandhi was murdered in
In the
decades that followed, it steadily built up its following across
The gulf
between his ideals and their ideology remained vast. A rally for the Hindu
nationalist RSS in the 1970s, with (right) a portrait of MS Golwalkar © Sondeep
Shankar/Getty Images Narendra Modi at an RSS event in Ahmedabad in 2006, when
he was chief minister of Gujarat © Shailesh Raval/The India Today Group via
Getty Images
The RSS
is the mother organisation of the Bharatiya Janata party, which has been in
power in
In control of the state, of education and
propaganda, and with a very efficient social media machine, the BJP and the RSS
have assiduously attempted to rewrite the historical narrative. Past Muslim
rulers of
The
leadership of Gandhi and his Congress party in the freedom struggle is denied,
and those who advocated armed revolution against the British extolled as the
true patriots.
The
formative role of the progressive and secular constitution of 1950 in shaping
the democratic republic is ignored. Instead, Indians are told that they have
been a Hindu nation from time immemorial. Professional historians derisively
refer to these claims as “WhatsApp history”, but the tragic truth is that they
are gaining ever wider currency.
In this
new narrative, Gandhi is the major hate figure.
He is
blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing
the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more
authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan;
blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights
of equal citizenship. BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as
a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30;
there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.
YouTube
videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of
views. Gandhi with Nehru in 1942 © Photo12/Universal Images Group ‘In the new
narrative, Gandhi is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence;
blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir
instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure’
This
decertification of Gandhi has been aided by the hypocrisy and misconduct of the
Congress party. In its many decades in power, the Congress invoked Gandhi
often, while in practice moving ever further from his ideals.
Congress
politicians ostentatiously wore homespun cotton while promoting cronyism and
corruption. They centralised power in the state and harassed human rights
activists. The political rise of the Hindu right has been accompanied by the
construction of a colossal personality cult around Modi.
While his
followers revile Gandhi, Modi himself has adopted a position of strategic
ambivalence.
On the one hand, he professes veneration for
VD Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist who detested Gandhi and Muslims with equal
vehemence, and whom Godse regarded as his ideological mentor. On the other
hand, recognising that Gandhi is the best-known Indian globally, Modi has
instrumentally used him to advance his own profile by taking visiting
presidents and prime ministers on tours of Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Narendra
Modi pays tribute to VD Savarkar at Parliament House in New Delhi in 2014 . . .
© Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images . . . and at a statue of Gandhi
in Washington the same year © Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images On October 2 2019,
the 150th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth, the New York Times published an
article in praise of Gandhi, written by Modi.
The piece
was artfully constructed; it began by speaking of the admiration for Gandhi
expressed by one great American, Martin Luther King Jr, and ended by speaking
of the admiration for him expressed by another great American, Albert Einstein.
Modi proclaimed: “In Gandhi, we have the best teacher to guide us.
From
uniting those who believe in humanity to furthering sustainable development and
ensuring economic self-reliance, Gandhi offers solutions to every problem.” What
was most striking about the article, however, was what it did not say.
There was
not a word about the cause for which Gandhi lived his life, indeed for which he
gave his life — that of inter-religious harmony. The omission was not
accidental.
For the
idea that
Gandhi
visits Muslim refugees in
After the
subcontinent was partitioned, Gandhi worked strenuously to stop violence
against Muslims’
Such is the broader context for the now
widespread animosity towards Gandhi in the land of his birth. It has
principally to do with his commitment to religious pluralism.
While Modi stays silent, BJP leaders taunt and
intimidate the 200mn-strong community of Indian Muslims, asking them without
reason and provocation to prove their “loyalty” to the motherland. (Notably,
among the 300 or so BJP members of parliament elected in May 2019, there was
not a single Muslim.)
While
Modi praises Gandhi — selectively — many of those who support and vote for him
believe Godse was right in murdering Gandhi; indeed, that he should have
murdered him earlier, before the Mahatma’s last fast in support of equal rights
for those Muslims who chose to express their own patriotism by staying in our
country, which was also theirs.
There are
other ways in which the
He had precociously warned against emulating
the resource- and energy-intensive model of industrialisation favoured by the
west, writing in 1926 that to “make
Hindu nationalists place garlands on a statue
of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, in Meerut in 2020 . . . © Smita Sharma/New
York Times/Redux/eyevine . . . and activists from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul
Muslimeen gather near a Gandhi mural in New Delhi last year © Prakash Singh/AFP
via Getty Images Without the access to resources and markets enjoyed by those
two nations when they began to industrialise, India has had to rely on the
exploitation of its own people and environment.
Under both Congress and BJP regimes, the most
brutal assault has been by large mining companies, to whom successive
governments have given free licence to destroy forests, displace villagers and
foul air, water and soil in search of massive monetary gains.
Many of the
most polluted cities in the world are in
Writing
for an international audience, our prime minister might laud Gandhian
prescriptions for “sustainable development”, even as these prescriptions are
being violated most thoroughly in his — and Gandhi’s — homeland.
Even
without the threat of climate change,
Gandhi
hoped that the clause allowing such arbitrary arrest would be repealed when
Leading 1930’s
‘Salt March’, a nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly © United
Archives/Getty Images ‘The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of
Indian independence may have been extreme.
Yet what
we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide’ Gandhi, were he
around today, would also have been dismayed by the deceit and dissembling of
the political class, saddened by the growing gulf between rich and poor, and
distressed by the continuing attacks on low castes and women.
His
country has turned its back on its greatest modern figure in many respects.
The lives
and legacies of major historical figures are always subject to
reinterpretation, and that is how it should be. Consider thus the revaluation
of American icons such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of
their complicity with slavery; or of the pre-eminent British war hero Winston
Churchill, because of his imperialism and indifference to the deaths of Indians
through famine.
Revisionism and iconoclasm are infinitely
preferable to idolatry. The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years
of Indian independence may have been extreme.
Yet what
we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide, the outright
repudiation of the person who perhaps did more than anyone else to nurture this
nation into being.
Many years ago, when the demonisation of
Gandhi was first becoming apparent, I was speaking with my friend Gopalkrishna
Gandhi, a diplomat and scholar and also, incidentally, a grandson of the
Mahatma.
Gopal
said that Gandhi’s posthumous fate might increasingly come to resemble that of
the Buddha, scorned by the land where he forged his moral and social
philosophy, yet with followers and admirers in distant parts of the globe that
he had never visited and possibly did not even know about.
As that
prediction comes starkly true, I find it simultaneously depressing and
comforting. We Indians seem to have rejected Gandhi, as we once rejected the
Buddha; no matter, humans elsewhere will take up and nobly affirm the ideals of
those we have so cruelly and carelessly discarded. Ramachandra Guha’s books
include ‘Gandhi:
Godhra,
Where the Fall of
The
burning train on
This week
is the 20th anniversary of the single most fateful event
in the
history of Independent India.
Had
carriage S-6 of the Sabarmati Express not burnt down outside
Godhra
station in the early morning of
59
persons, the
Modi
would not have been the prime minister of
Had that
tragic event not taken place the Bharatiya Janata Party
could
easily have lost the assembly election that was originally
scheduled
for April 2003 but brought ahead to December 2002
at Modi’s
urging to capitalise on the religious polarisation the
violence
had caused. The BJP had lost the gram panchayat
elections
in 2001 and three assembly by-elections the same
year, and
was badly rattled. This was what had led to the
replacement
of chief minister Keshubhai Patel, whose health
had
allegedly begun to fail, with Modi in October 2001.
Modi
faced the daunting task of shoring up the BJP’s support
base in
came as
an answer to the party’s prayers.The train was carrying a
large
number of kar sevaks who had forcibly boarded the train at
Ayodhya.
When it
arrived at Godhra,therefore, it was carrying 2,000 or more passengers against a
capacity of 1,100.
When
coach S-6 caught
fire, it
was jam packed with some of these kar sevaks.
The
presence of the kar sevaks, the fact that some of these had
misbehaved
with Muslim vendors on the platform at Godhra both
while on
their way to Ayodhya and on their way back, and that
an ugly
spat had broken out on the platform minutes before the
train
left Godhra on that fateful morning, made just about everyone in
train and
set fire to the carriage, as an act of revenge.
By the
afternoon of February 27, local Gujarati newspapers had
universally
ascribed the act to Ghanchi Muslims of a nearby shanty
colony,
who had been waiting with stones and rags dipped in
kerosene
to seek revenge.
According
to those news reports, no
sooner did the train stop did they smash the
windows and t
hrow
flaming kerosene-soaked rags into the bogey and set them
on fire.
These
reports formed the basis of the first police chargesheet
in the case, with manufactured eyewitnesses,
all from the
Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, who presented identical statements
about kerosene
being thrown into the coach from outside.
The
pogrom that followed is now history. But, in another of history’s fateful
ironies, this initial claim by the police about the train fire was completely
unfounded and had to eventually be abandoned in favour of a supposedly more
plausible but equally unbelievable theory. Having declared from day one that
the fire had been a deeply planned (Muslim) conspiracy, all the facts had to be
tailor made to sustain this claim.
The
lengths to which the Modi-led state government went to reinforce and sustain a
falsehood in the face of the anomalies that it could not explain, was not
accidental. On the contrary, it was sanctioned and sustained by Modi himself,
with the express purpose of creating a wave of Islamophobia that would sweep the BJP back to power in
In 2005,
the railway minister in the then UPA government, Lalu Prasad Yadav, appointed a
retired
The
Bannerjee commission appointed a five-man team of experts to re-examine the
evidence. After a three-year lapse, the expert committee was left with only one
way to do this: look at other carriages that had caught fire and compare the burn
and smoke patterns in them to the one in S-6.
There
were five burnt carriages preserved in the railway yards after earlier forensic
examinations. In one of these, the burn and smoke pattern was almost identical
to that found in S-6. The cause of that fire was known and not in doubt: it had
begun in the centre of the carriage, possibly when someone knocked over a
lighted cooking stove on which food was being warmed or tea made.
The
flames had remained restricted to that area but the smoke the fire created had
spread to the rest of the carriage, through the gaps
between
the upper and lower berths, and along the underside of
the
ceiling.
As in S-6,
the majority of deaths had resulted from
asphyxiation.
This
explanation gained credibility because the railways
were not
using flame-retardant materials in second-class compartments then. So even a
lighted match could start a fire and create large
volumes
of toxic smoke.
What is
more, cooking or warming one’s
own food
on long train journeys was, and may still be, a common
practice
among orthodox Hindus.
The BJP
vociferously rejected the Banerjee commission’s report.
The party’s
then spokesman, Arun Jaitley, raised procedural objections, saying that the
railway ministry, even while belonging to the Union government, had no right to
conduct such an inquiry.
“If it
was an accident, what prevented passengers from jumping out?”
he asked,
rhetorically.
Following
a strategy with which we have now become familiar, the state government got one
of the Hindus who had been injured in the fracas
on the
Godhra platform in 2002 to challenge Justice Banerjee’s report
in the
The
presiding judge then declared the
formation
of the Banerjee Committee “unconstitutional, illegal and
null and
void”, and called it a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”.
He went
on to berate the railway ministry for daring
to set up
the committee when the state government had already
appointed
the Shah commission, later joined by retired Supreme
Court
justice G.T. Nanavati, on March 8, immediately after the riots.
He also
dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level
committee
to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property,
in order
to make sure that it did not happen again.
This
judgment was extraordinary, to say the least, but one does not have to rely on
the Banerjee commission’s report alone to question the official account of how
the fire started.The report prepared by teams of experts from the Gujarat
government’s own Forensic Science Laboratory in Ahmedabad after a site visit on
May 3, 2002, formally debunked the police’s earlier explanation and concluded
that the fire was consistent with what might happened if “60 litres of flammable liquid had been
poured using an unusually wide-mouthed container like a bucket” on to the floor
of the coach and set alight.
Why did
the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) so comprehensively
debunk
the claims made in the police’s chargesheet?
The
answer could be that Modi had learned
through the intelligence department that the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal (CCT),
headed
by former
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, was planning to visit Godhra
in the
beginning of May.
The
Ghanchi Muslim revenge plot
explanation
was therefore about to come apart.
This is
what the CCT concluded after its own visit:
“On
Again, if
one takes into account the height of the bund and the height of the train, and
if fire-balls were to be thrown at the train, the outside of the coach should
have shown signs of being charred. But we found that there were no such marks
below the windows; the charred marks were to be seen only around the windows
and above that height. This is a clear indication that the fire started inside
the coach and the flames leaping out of the windows singed the outside of the
compartment, above window level (emphasis added). Therefore, even to the naked
eye, it was clear that the fire was from within and not from outside.”
But if
the fire started within, who could have possibly lit it? The
The
absurdities in this theory have been pointed out many times in the last two
decades. First, since buckets would have had to be carried by hand, and very
few buckets have a capacity of more than 20 litres, a minimum of three buckets would have had to be carried on
to the train. Would a train jam-packed with hyped-up kar sewaks spoiling for a
fight have allowed three persons carrying buckets of a fluid whose smell is
easily recognisable to board the train at a place where a large crowd of
hostile Muslims had already collected? Clearly not, which is why the police
could not find a single passenger to corroborate this absurd claim.
Curiously,
the FSL’s ‘experts’ based their 60 litres calculation upon how far the liquid
would travel in an empty carriage, not one that was jampacked with people whose
shoes, and luggage, would have come in the way. For, as the tally of the dead
and injured showed, there were at least 108 persons in the carriage when the
fire broke out, not counting those who escaped before the rush of panic-stricken
passengers to the doorways began. It is inconceivable that forensic experts
could have made such an elementary mistake. So the only explanation is that
they were commanded to find another explanation that would continue to point
the finger of blame at the Muslim community. And they obliged.
In
Ahmedabad, on
The
railway booking chart for the carriage at
The first
to die would have been the weakest among them, the women and the children. The
forensic examination of the dead, carried out three days later, confirmed this
for it showed that whereas 20 of the dead were men, 26 were women, and 12 were
children. In all, 38 of the 58 dead were of the wrong sex and age to have been
kar sevaks. Even among the male casualties, a large number, probably the
majority, would have died because they stayed with their families, trying to
get out till the smoke overwhelmed them.
The
number of kar sevaks killed may have been even smaller for, as the Concerned
Citizens’ Tribunal headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer pointed out, all but a
fraction of these were physically fit young men who, having muscled their way
on to the train, were more likely to be at the ends of the carriage than the
middle, and would have been able to muscle their way out of the burning
carriage with relative ease. That many did indeed do so is suggested by the
fact that of the 43 persons who are known to have managed to escape from the
carriage, only five needed to be hospitalised. Taking all this into account, it
is unlikely that even a dozen of those killed were kar sevaks.
Looking
back at the events of
Prem
Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former editor. He is the author of Dawn
of the Solar Age: an End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage 2017) and is
currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Environment Studies, School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Copyright of Hitler’s agenda, infringed upon by Narendra Modi in India — by Sumanta Banerjee ;I am raising a serious issue that touches upon a person’s legal right of exclusive possession of his/her personal creation – whether a scientific formula, or a literary piece, or even a political programme. This is known as copyright, or patent in relation with certain products. If anyone uses that material without the permission of its original author, or fails to acknowledge credit to its producer, he will be liable for prosecution. Now, may be I am being the devil’s advocate, as I am raising a hypothetical question. Suppose if Hitler were alive today (thank God, he isn’t !), under the prevailing copyright and patent laws, wouldn’t he have been entitled to sue Narendra Modi for infringement of copyright of the Nazi model which Hitler alone designed in Germany in the 1930s ? After all, it’s Hitler’s ideas and tactics that Modi has plagiarized from the Nazi text book. Modi’s speeches, like those of Hitler’s are filled with misinformation, religious majoritarian and nationalist chauvinist sentiments, and aggressively promote his personal image to the mindless cheer of the mob. His lieutenants in the BJP, in their public utterances and lectures, spread vitriol against Muslims, and political opponents who are branded as urban Naxalites – in the style of the same hate -filled anti-Jewish and anti-Communist propaganda that was spewed by Goebbels and other Nazi leaders . Similar to Germany in the 1930s, we witness today in India, armed marauders and murderous gangs of the Sangh Parivar, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal and other outfits going on a killing spree, in the footsteps of the Nazi Storm Troopers, shouting `Jai Shri Ram,’ almost sounding like `Heil Hitler !’ Even India’s official snooping department, the NIA (National Investigative Agency), has taken a leaf out of the book of the Gestapo (`Geheime Staatspolizei’ – the Nazi secret police). Like the Gestapo which hounded, imprisoned and killed Hitler’s political opponents and other intellectual dissidents, the NIA in India today is hauling up social activists, students and youth participants in civil liberties movement, independent journalists who expose cases of the violation of human rights both by state agencies and the ruling BJP leaders. They are arrested and put behind bars for years, without trial. (I have dealt in detail with the neo-Nazi functioning of the NIA in my article: India’s `Gestapo’ – National Investigative Agency in Countercurrents, 26/12/21). If we turn to another institution – the jails in India – where these social activists and political dissenters are imprisoned, we again find that the Modi government is stealing the patent of `concentration camps’ that Hitler invented. He created the camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and other places, and established a strict model whereby the prisoners were to be exterminated through different methods – gas chamber, torture, starvation, denial of medical treatment among other means. Narendra Modi has adopted some of these methods from the jail manual that Hitler fashioned for his concentration camps. Instead of spending money on setting up separate gas chambers, Modi has modified Hitler’s model by turning the Indian jails into mini-gas chambers. Thanks to the suffocating toxic environs within their premises, polluted drinking water and food, and denial of medical treatment, the number of deaths in these jails increased by seven percent from 2019 to 2020 – according to the officially released Prison Statistics India, 2020 report. Among the victims of these mini-gas chambers in Indian jails, there are prominent social activists and political dissidents. To mention two recent cases – the octogenarian Father Stan Swamy who was imprisoned for organizing the tribal poor to assert their rights, died in Taloja Jail in Maharashtra on July 5, 2021, after having been denied medical treatment by the jail authorities. On August 25, 2021, in Nagpur Central Jail, a political activist Pandu Narote died – again following similar denial of necessary medical care. Pandu Narote was a co-accused with G. N. Saibaba, a professor of Delhi University, who remains confined in the same Nagpur central jail, on the charge of association with Maoists. Wheelchair-bound Saibaba is 90% disabled, and is confined in isolation within a narrow cell which is shaped as an oblong . Known as `anda cells’ (egg-shaped cells), similar cells have been set up in other jails too for the solitary confinement of political prisoners and social activists. In fact, the Modi government has improved upon the Nazi model of concentration camps by inventing the `anda cell.’ In the Nazi concentration camps, while the prisoners could at least share each other’s company and ordeals (and often put up collective resistance), in the `anda cells’, the individual prisoner is left alone to protest against acts of injustice, and wrestle within his own mind to protect himself from sinking into mental depression. Judging by the record of the style of governance by Narendra Modi, as described above, Modi should acknowledge his debt to Hitler – along with his `gurus’ in the Sangh Parivar – from whom he derived inspiration. He should not have any qualms in including a foreigner among his political teachers, or even placing him on a higher pedestal, in his altar of devotion. To recall the past, Narendra Modi’s Hindu guru M.S. Golwalkar way back in 1939, paid tribute to Hitler by praising him for exterminating the Jews, and advised Indians to imbibe that model by destroying their Semitic counterparts in India, the Muslims. Following is Golwalkar’s infamous statement: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic races and the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here…. a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” (We or Our Nationhood. 1939). Shouldn’t Narendra Modi in public announcement, pay tribute to Hitler for `learning and profiting by’ him ? Only by this acknowledgement, he can overcome the allegation of stealing Hitler’s copyright and patent rights – an allegation that might be hurled against him by the present day neo-Nazi followers of Hitler in Europe and elsewhere. Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008);
