Aditya Sinha: Tearing down and rebuilding history

Another statue of General Robert E Lee was taken down at Duke University Chapel in North Carolina, US on Saturday. Pic/AFP; (right) Assam's first BJP government is mulling on pulling down Gandhiji's statue sculpted by Ramkinkar Baig in Guwahati

A statue got pulled down. On August 12, when in Charlottesville, Virginia, White Nationalists held a rally against the pulling down of a Confederate General's statue, a confrontation with counter-protestors led to a neo-Nazi ploughing his car into a crowd (the same terror method used by Islamic State throughout Europe last year, including in Barcelona last week). Soon after, I spoke to my mother in New York, who was rattled by President Donald Trump's siding with the anti-black Klu Klux Klan and the anti-Jew neo-Nazis.

"Trump is no different than Modi," I told her, referring to our Prime Minister.

"Don't say that," she gasped. "Amita (her weekly domestic help) refuses to hear anything against Modi. She thinks he'll solve all of India's problems."

"Then she's no different from the Whites who support Trump," I said.

Indians worship Modi while hypocritically looking down upon Trump. They call Trump a barbarian. However, Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania, even if he wasn't a topper, while Narendra Modi has been to Delhi University.
Trump created businesses, even if some were duplicitous schemes and others went bankrupt; Modi only helps businessmen. Trump loves marriage so much that he married three times; Modi has preferred the Indian tradition of sanyas, to project incorruptibility. Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering and living in America; Modi wants to keep Muslims in line.

Take this statue business. With a White backlash developing in America after a Black man was elected president not once but twice, a backlash to the backlash has developed, in which local governments are pulling down monuments of Confederacy 'heroes', secessionists who lost the 1861-1864 Civil War. (It erupted after the industrial North, which preferred cheap wage labour for its factories, legislated to do away with slavery; the agricultural South was not yet mechanised and preferred to retain slave labour.) General Robert E Lee led the Confederate Army and his statue was removed from Charlottesville's Emancipation Park (itself renamed from Lee Park). Southern Whites remain disgruntled about losing that war 150 years ago; they form the backbone of Trump's electoral legitimacy.

Trump likened the tearing down of statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson (number two in the Confederate Army) to tearing down one of George Washington, the General who fought the British for American independence in 1776 (he was the USA's first president in 1781). This is disingenuous: Lee and Jackson were secessionists, akin to Kashmiris or Nagas, while Washington is akin to Mahatma Gandhi. No wonder American journalists abandoned neutrality and condemned Trump for his remarks; Vox.com went so far as to call Trump "immoral".

A monument is created to commemorate a person or event. (It comes from the Latin moneo, which means 'to remind'.) India is planning statues and monuments to commemorate the past, and none of us can object to Dr BR Ambedkar or Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel or Chhatrapati Shivaji being remembered; they all are critical to our heritage and history. But there are also sporadic lunatic attempts to commemorate Gandhiji's assassin, Nathuram Godse, a right-winger who ought to stay consigned to the dustbin of history. One day, perhaps Yogi Baba (UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath) will take over India and this will happen.

Or take the government's current year-long commemoration of a second-rater like Deen Dayal Upadhyay, who contributed zero to India; possibly the celebration is intended to divert attention from former PM Indira Gandhi's centenary. Upadhyay only wrote only one major piece in his life, and it is polemical: it coined "integral humanism" without any explanation about what this entails other than being in opposition to the communist MN Roy's "radical humanism". This government plans to commemorate other pygmies like Veer Savarkar, who directed his fellow travellers not to join the 1942 Quit India movement.

What if Modi and gang erect statues of Upadhyay, Savarkar, etc, and once the Era of Modi is over, someone else tears them down - then will a future BJP leader say, Trump-like, that tearing down their statues is similar to tearing down Gandhiji's statue? You may think this laughable, except that a trial balloon to tear down Gandhiji, whom BJP president Amit Shah called a chatur baniya, has already been floated.

In Assam, recently, news broke of a proposal to tear down Gandhiji's statue, installed in Guwahati in 1970. The reason? Sculptor Ramkinkar Baij "distorted" the Mahatma. Baij was not a portraitist but an artist, his work interpretational; art historians call the statue a classic. Forty-seven years after the statue was erected, Assam's first BJP government mulled pulling it down. A backlash stopped them. Yet the Modi/Trump era has just begun. The fight for shaping our memory has just gotten underway. In that fight, some statues are bound to get pulled down.

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