Aditya Sinha: It's not anti-national to insult Bapu?

BJP chief Amit Shah showers flowers on freedom fighter Veer Narayan Singh's memorial in Sonakhan, Chhattisgarh on Saturday, a day after he called Mahatma Gandhi a "chatur baniya". Pic/PTI

Not long after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government's three-year mark, his party chief Amit Shah called the nation's only opposition party, the Indian National Congress, a Special Purpose Vehicle. To support his own argument, he claimed that even Gandhiji recognised this in the Congress party because Gandhiji was a "chatur baniya". Calling the Congress an SPV is likening the 132-year-old party to a limited company created to fulfil specific or temporary objectives. Amit Shah is implying that the Congress party's specific objective was to secure independence for India, and with the objective long fulfilled, this limited company is no longer needed.

Amit Shah's argument is characteristically flimsy. The Congress party has evolved over the decades - its latest incarnation being the party of economic liberalisation, an idea to which Modi and Shah have not been able to make a single new contribution - it is not some shell company or financial instrument, but a living organic being.

It might be better argued that the BJP is actually the rigid, limited SPV. The BJP and its Sangh parivar have not budged from the irredentist idea of Akhand Bharat, and from asserting the 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan' ideology that Savarkar put forth nearly 100 years ago. The Congress party, for all its flaws and faults and its reliance on a single family to steer it ahead, has moved with the times. When we lost the 1962 war to China, subsequent Congress governments focused on national security and a stronger integration of states; when voters rejected the Emergency, subsequent Congress governments began opening up the economy, which culminated in Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao's landmark liberalisation; and when communism fell, Congress governments began warming to America, a friendship cemented by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's nuclear deal with the US.

Besides his mischaracterisation of the Congress as an SPV, Amit Shah was no doubt also trying to absolve his ideological legacy from the sin committed when the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS abstained from participation in India's independence movement. Some of these organisations, who nowadays propound a muscular modern nationalism, ordered their cadre to steer clear of the 1942 Quit India movement. This was an emotional moment in our nation's life. My mother's late chacha ran away from home in Muzaffarpur (Bihar) to Patna and then to Lahore because his dad wouldn't let him get involved, arrested and imprisoned (he became a journalist in Lahore and returned to India just before Partition). The Quit India movement caught the nation's imagination and I have no hesitation in saying that those who didn't participate, lacked imagination. Calling the Congress an SPV for independence is a justification for that historical cowardice.

More shocking was the chatur baniya swipe at Gandhiji. Gopal Krishna Gandhi has described it as "mischief"; BJP apologists shrug and say the man was cunning and the man was a baniya (notice they can't get themselves to utter "Gandhiji"). That is disingenuous. First, on an emotional level, I would never dare to describe my aforementioned granduncle as a chatur kayastha, even if he had become India's most successful politician. It is disrespectful and sounds vulgar. On another level, this name-calling is a long-standing right-wing project: to cut Gandhiji down to size.

True, Gandhiji was never part of the Congress hierarchy, because he felt he was more effective guiding it from outside. Also true, Gandhiji deliberately sought an ascetic image, ready to renounce the world - as is clear from his autobiography My Experiments With Truth, structured to show him already having passed through life's four stages - so that he could use cultural symbols to mobilise the masses across the length and breadth of India. This is a feat no one else has since repeated. The intellectual triad of Hedgewar, Golwalkar and Savarkar are intellectual and political pygmies; they are more like Gandhiji ke teen bandar. True, Gandhiji was flawed - he failed to stitch up Hindu-Muslim unity, and he failed to include Dalits in power sharing. But I suppose that made him only more human.

Yet, so long as Gandhiji remains unchallenged - and the BJP still hasn't the intellectual apparatus to challenge him, just a bunch of noisy leaders and abusive followers - the Akhand Bharat or the 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan' project remains without the endorsement of Indian legitimacy. So long as Gandhiji remains the Father of the Nation, the Congress, despite all its organisational woes and its still confused agenda, remains an immovable obstacle to the BJP fantasy of totally dominating India.

Presumably, the chatur baniya remark is part of a 'death by a thousand cuts' against Gandhiji. Ironically, you know who adopted a 'death by a thousand cuts' approach against India? That's right, Pakistan's ISI. Not surprising that the right-wing's methods are indistinguishable from those externally fighting against the very idea of India.

Aditya Sinha's crime novel, The CEO Who Lost His Head, is available now. He tweets @autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com