The Congress sees saffron (RSS) everywhere. In the Tuticorin protests, in the lateral entry into administrative services, in governance, in education, in policymaking, in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi etc. So blinded is the party by its distaste for the RSS that it has lost the ability to apply criticism on merit. Even in the large-scale killing of RSS workers in Kerala by Left supporters and the targeting of BJP/RSS men in West Bengal led by the Trinamool Congress, the national party has refused to categorically condemn either the Marxists or West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
There is of course politics in this silence — the Left could be an ally of the Congress to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi nationally, never mind that the Left and the Congress are bitter rivals in Kerala; and Mamata Banerjee’s party counts as an effective instrument to halt the BJP’s march towards a second consecutive win in the Lok Sabha poll, again never mind the fact that the Trinamool Congress is in no mood to either accept the Congress’s leadership in a united opposition or even have it in its grand but still hazy so-called third front. But the Congress, which entertains the fear of saffronisation, had had problems in the Leftists’ establishing their hegemony in the academic field over the decades since independence. Prescribed course materials that were prepared for our academic institutions, right from schools to universities, contained biases in favour of Left-liberals, even as they downplayed the contribution of those events and individuals who were not on the same ideological page as the Left-liberals were. For instance, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was given a place in our history books that was many notches lower than the Left-leaning Jawaharlal Nehru — although the Indian Union as we know it today is primarily the creation of Sardar Patel. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was dealt with as nothing more than a renegade, and those like Bal Gangadhar Tilak branded as “Hindu nationalists”.
The less said about the Left-historians’ commentary on MS Golwalkar who founded the RSS or Syama Prasad Mookerjee, one of the founders of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or leading Hindu ideologue and politician VD Savarkar, the better. For decades since independence, generations grew up consuming and getting infected by these prejudices. An attempt was made to course-correct during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure as Prime Minister, with Murli Manohar Joshi as the Minister for Human Resource Development, and it had run into sever criticism from the lobby that had held sway until then. Now that the Left-liberal strangle-hold has been effectively challenged, laments of ‘saffronisation’ have begun. It’s time the new generation of Indians is made aware of its real past.
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