The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (10 page)

Menon is the subject of a couple of biographies and a road is named after him. I think in my long years I got to know him better than his biographers or any of the leftists who acclaim him as a great son of India. General Shiv Varma summed him up aptly when he said, ‘Menon was a bachelor, the same as his father.’

My worry today is the rise of right-wing fascist parties in the country. The youth of today should be aware of the rise in communal politics and the dangers involved. If we love our country, we have to save it from communal forces. And though the liberal class is shrinking, I do hope that the present generation totally rejects communal and fascist policies. I shun people who are at the forefront of this communalism, and this includes the likes of L.K. Advani.

When I had first met Advani, I thought he was forthright and clean and able. So we kept in touch. In 1989, he chose me to file his papers for nomination to Parliament, and I supported him by proposing his name as MP from New Delhi. I set my hopes on him because Sikhs were targeted by the Congress in 1984 and Advani seemed to be the only choice. Advani cashed in, and there were photos and banners and what not. But my disillusionment began when he started fouling the atmosphere of the country.

The one event that pitchforked Advani to the centre stage and reshaped India’s politics was his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya, leading to the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. He, more than anyone else, sensed that Islamophobia was deeply ingrained in the minds of millions of Hindus; it only needed a spark to set it ablaze. The choice of Somnath as the starting point and Ayodhya as the terminal one was well-calculated. Mahmud Ghazni had destroyed the temple at Somnath; Ayodhya was believed to be the birthplace of Sri Ram—it was bruited about that a temple to mark the birth site had stood there till Babar destroyed it and built a mosque over the ruins. This is disputed by historians and the matter was being pursued in law courts. Advani ignored legal niceties and arrived with great fanfare at the site. Since he was determined to build a new Ram temple at the same spot, the fate of the mosque was sealed. What happened there on that fateful day was seen on television by millions of people round the globe. And repercussions were felt over the world. Hindu and Sikh temples were targeted by irate Muslims from Bangladesh to the UK. There were communal confrontations in different parts of India: the serial blasts in Bombay, the attack on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, the massacre of innocent Muslims in Gujarat—they can all be traced back to the fall of the Babri Masjid. Relations between Hindus and Muslims have never been the same in India. However, the BJP reaped a rich harvest, won many of the elections that followed and eventually installed Atal Behari Vajpayee as prime minister and L.K. Advani as his deputy.

Advani claims that breaking the mosque was not on his agenda; that he actually sent Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati to plead with those who went on the rampage to desist. If that is so, why were the two seen embracing each other and rejoicing when the nefarious task was completed? We don’t need the verdict of the Liberhan Commission to tell us what happened—we saw it with our own eyes. And, in his memoir, Advani recorded the jubilation that followed at the site, along with his triumphal return to Delhi. At an event at the IIC, I told Advani to his face, in front of an audience, ‘You have sowed the seeds of communal disharmony in the country and we are paying the price for it.’

The one time Advani faltered in his steps was when he visited Karachi and praised Jinnah’s speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 as ‘a classic exposition of a secular state’. It might well have been so, but Jinnah’s speech was delivered at a time when millions of Hindus and Sikhs were being driven out of Pakistan or being slaughtered, and an equal number of Muslims were being driven out of India. It was a bloody exchange in which over a million died and over ten million were uprooted. Advani’s eulogy must have pleased Pakistanis; it was badly received in India, particularly by his colleagues in the RSS and the BJP.

Advani should have left the political scene in a blaze of glory; but not many tears will be shed for him now. And for good reasons. Did he ever regret the role he played in the demolition of the Babri Masjid? If he did, as he claims, why did he not tender an apology? Did he regret the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat? If so, why did he protect Narendra Modi from being sacked, as Prime Minister Vajpayee evidently wanted? It was a symbiotic relationship between the two—Modi helped Advani win elections from Gandhinagar; Advani, in turn, exonerated him from the anti-Muslim pogrom charges of 2002. Is it possible that as home minister Advani did not know of Jaswant Singh’s mission to Kandahar to swap three jihadi militants for 150-odd Indians held hostage in hostile territory? There cannot be an iota of truth in his statement that he knew nothing about Jaswant’s mission till it was over. Advani once described Manmohan Singh as ‘nikamma’—useless. It so happens that Manmohan is still very much in use, whereas Advani’s own erstwhile colleagues have pronounced him of no use any longer.

Advani has done grievous harm to our efforts to create a truly secular India. I have no regret over his discomfiture and eventual fadeout from national politics—it will be as comic a tragedy as any we have witnessed in recent times.

The last Viceroy and first Governor General of India, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, First Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was the man charged with overseeing the transition of British India into independent India. Two brief encounters with him—one in London, followed by another a few months later in Toronto—have stayed in my mind. At the time I did not have the nerve to put my reactions in print: he was the Lord of Destiny, an awe-inspiring figure about whom singing anything but paeans of praise would have sounded discordant. However, Philip Ziegler’s excellent biography assures me that I wasn’t wrong in suspecting that the emperor had no clothes. Or wore flimsy, see-through raiment.

The first meeting was unscheduled. Lord Mountbatten was the chief guest at a reception in India House. By some error, he turned up fifteen minutes before he was expected and even the host, Krishna Menon, was not present to receive him. I rushed down to greet him, apologized for the misunderstanding and suggested that he relax in my temporary office, which in any case was reserved for his wife and bore the plaque ‘Countess Mountbatten of Burma’. His Lordship was out of countenance. He had come splendidly attired in an admiral’s deep-blue uniform splattered with gold epaulettes, ribbons and a chestful of medals. Instead of making a spectacular entry at a glittering reception as he had planned, he was having to waste time with a nondescript clerical type. I asked him about the Partition and the stormy days that followed; he answered me in bored monosyllables.

I tried to provoke him: ‘Lord Mountbatten, many people feel that if you had not forced the pace the exchange of populations might have been smoother and we might have been spared the enormous bloodshed that took place.’

At this, His Lordship was needled into replying: ‘I don’t give a damn about what my critics say today… I will be judged at the bar of history.’

I was taken aback by Mountbatten’s pomposity. However justified, I did not expect a sophisticated English gentleman of breeding to air assumptions of immortality. It wasn’t pucca.

The next encounter revealed yet another facet of Lord Louis’s character. He was to inaugurate an international trade fair in Toronto, and his speech was punctuated with allusions to his royal connection. ‘My cousin the king’, ‘my cousin the queen’s consort’, ‘my uncle the duke of someplace or the other’, etcetera, etcetera. I remember very little of what else he said.

Was there anything of substance to this man? I am not sure.

As I think on the communal beast that threatens India today, I realize that part of the Sangh Parivar’s success over the years can be attributed to the charm and charisma of many of its leaders. They were men of polite manners, obvious sophistication and intelligence who cloaked their fascist ideas in sweet reasonableness, with impeccable etiquette.

I met Madhavrao Sadasivrao Golwalkar, the then head of the RSS, around forty years ago. Guru Golwalkar had long been at the top of my hate list because I could not forget the RSS’s role in communal riots and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and its attempt to change India from a secular state to a Hindu rashtra. There were passages in his 1939 tract,
We, or Our Nationhood Defined
, that seemed to suggest that Golwalkar shared Hitler’s ideas about racial purity and approved of his methods to purge Germany of Jews. I could thus not resist the chance of meeting him in November 1972 and interviewed him for
The Illustrated Weekly
.

I expected to run into a cordon of uniformed swayam sevaks. There were none. Not even plainclothes CIDs to take down the number of my car. I arrived at what looked like a middle-class apartment. It seemed as though there was a puja going on inside—there were rows of sandals outside, the fragrance of agarbatti, the bustle of women behind the scenes, the tinkle of utensils and crockery. I stepped inside.

It was a small room. In it sat a dozen men in spotless white kurtas and dhotis—all looking newly washed as only Maharashtrian Brahmins can manage. And there was Guru Golwalkar—a frail man in his mid-sixties, black hair curling to his shoulders, a moustache covering his mouth, a wispy grey beard dangling down his chin. He wore an inerasable smile and dark eyes twinkled through his bifocals. He looked like an Indian Ho Chi Minh. For a man who had only recently undergone surgery for breast cancer, he seemed remarkably fit and cheerful. Being a guru, I had imagined that he might expect chela-like obeisance. But he did not give me the chance. As I bent to touch his feet, he grasped my hand with his bony fingers and pulled me down on the seat beside him.

‘I am very glad to meet you,’ he said. ‘I had been wanting to do so for some time.’ His Hindi was very shuddh.

‘Me too,’ I replied clumsily. ‘Ever since I read your
Bunch of Letters
.’

‘
Bunch of Thoughts
,’ he corrected me. He did not want to know my views on it. He took one of my hands in his and patted it. ‘So?’ He looked enquiringly at me.

‘I don’t know where to begin. I am told you shun publicity and your organization is secret.’

‘It is true we do not seek publicity, but there is nothing secret about us. Ask me anything you want to.’

‘I read about your movement in Jack Curran’s
The RSS and Hindu Militarism
. He says…’

‘It is a biased account,’ interrupted Golwalkar. ‘Unfair, inaccurate. He misquoted me and many others. There is no militarism in our movement. We value discipline—which is a different matter.’

I told him that I had read an article describing Curran as the head of CIA operations in Europe and Africa. ‘I would never have suspected it,’ I said naively. ‘I have known him for twenty years.’

Golwalkar beamed a smile at me. ‘This does not surprise me at all.’ I did not know whether his remark was a comment on Curran being part of the CIA or my naiveté.

‘There is one thing that bothers me about the RSS,’ I said to him. ‘If you permit me, I will put it as bluntly as I can.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘It is your attitude towards the minorities, particularly the Christians and the Muslims.’

‘We have nothing against the Christians except their methods of gaining converts,’ said Golwalkar. ‘When they give medicines to the sick or bread to the hungry, they should not exploit the situation by propagating their religion to those people. I am glad there is a move to make the Indian churches autonomous and independent of Rome.’

‘What about the Muslims?’ I said.

‘What about them?’ Golwalkar countered.

‘I have no doubt in my mind that the dual loyalties that many Muslims have towards both India and Pakistan is due to historical reasons, for which Hindus are as much to blame as they. It also stems from a feeling of insecurity that they have been made to suffer since the Partition. In any case, one cannot hold the entire community responsible for the wrongs of a few.’ I had begun to get eloquent. ‘Guruji, there are six crores of Indian Muslims here with us. We cannot eliminate them, we cannot drive them out, we cannot convert them. This is their home. We must reassure them, make them feel wanted. Let us win them over with love…’

‘I would reverse the order,’ Golwalkar interrupted. ‘As a matter of fact, I would say the only right policy towards Muslims is to win their loyalty by love.’

I was startled. Was he playing with words? Or did he really mean what he said?

He qualified his statement: ‘A delegation of Jamat-i-Islami came to see me. I told them that Muslims must forget that they ruled India. They should not look upon foreign Muslim countries as their homelands. They must join the mainstream of Indianism.’

‘How?’

‘We should explain things to them. Sometimes one feels angry with Muslims for what they do, but then Hindu blood never harbours ill-will for very long. Time is a great healer. I am an optimist and feel that Hinduism and Islam will learn to live with each other.’

Tea was served. Guruji’s glass mug provided a diversion. I asked him why he didn’t drink the beverage out of porcelain like the rest of us.

He smiled. ‘I have always taken it in this mug. I take it with me wherever I go.’

Golwalkar’s closest companion, Dr Thatte, who had dedicated his life to the RSS, explained: ‘Porcelain wears off and exposes the clay beneath. Clay can harbour germs.’

I returned to my theme. ‘Why do you pin your faith on religion when most of the world is turning irreligious and agnostic?’

‘Hinduism is on firm ground because it has no dogma. It has had agnostics before; it will survive the wave of irreligiousness better than any other religious system.’

‘How can you say that?’ I argued. ‘The evidence is the other way. The only religions that are standing firm and even increasing their hold on the people are those based on dogma—Catholicism and, more than Catholicism, Islam.’