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Narendra Modi © AP
Some
Swampians may not know what being “ratioed” on Twitter means — and are
probably leading full and happy lives as a result. Put simply, it means
that the number of critical comments in response to your tweet greatly
exceeds your approving retweets. That happened to me a few days ago. I
was responding to a tweet by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who
announced that a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the country’s most
controversial independence leader, would be given pride of place in New
Delhi’s India Gate.
“Latest
exhibit of Modi’s fascist ideology,” I tweeted. “Bose was an admirer of
Hitler and a pawn of the Axis powers.” Those who want a glimpse of
Hindu nationalism’s darkest id should read the welter of enraged comments underneath. Here is my sanitised summary: “Adolf Hitler was a far greater friend of India than Winston Churchill.”
Now,
in fairness, Bose, or “Netaji” as his admirers call him, was a more
nuanced figure than my comment implied. Yet Bose fought with the Axis
powers and spent a year in wartime Berlin as a guest of Hitler. His Free
India Legion, which was formed in Germany from 3,000 Indian prisoners
of war who had fought with the British, swore an oath of allegiance both
to Hitler and to India. Bose was then taken by U-boat to Tokyo where he
headed the more enduring Indian National Army — recruited mostly after
the fall of Singapore — that fought with the Japanese Imperial Army in
the jungles of Burma.
It
is certainly fair to say that Bose was more of an expedient ally of
Hitler — on the principle of the enemy of my enemy being my friend —
than he was an admirer. It is also fair to say that Churchill had only
slightly less racist views of Indians than Hitler (who made his racial
contempt for Indians plain in Mein Kampf). Churchill also
presided over the wartime Bengal famine that claimed 3m Indian lives. It
is rare to meet an Indian who feels anything other than hatred for
Churchill. I fully understand that (and my tweet never mentioned him).
Why
am I raising this now? Because Modi’s choice of Bose to fill that
central spot sends a powerful signal. The plinth has been empty since
King George V’s bust was removed in the 1960s. Some wanted to
erect Mohandas Gandhi’s statue there. Others preferred to put up
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Bose was alone among the
Indian independence movement in seeing the Nazis as a lesser evil than
the British Raj in its waning days.
It is worth reading this excerpt from Nehru’s mellifluous Discovery of India
about how he was opposed both to Italy’s Benito Mussolini and to Nazism
— and indeed to the appeasement of Hitler in Munich — long before that
stance became mainstream in Britain. Nehru was a principled and
clear-sighted figure who had no difficulty in spotting the
world-historic barbaric threat posed by fascism. Modi’s choice of Bose,
rather than Gandhi or Nehru, to fill that place is part of an ongoing
attempt to rewrite and erase the noble legacy of the India’s freedom
movement. Given the atrocities the Japanese Imperial Army visited on the
people of other Asian nations it occupied — think of the 1937 Rape of
Nanjing, or the “comfort women” of Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere —
it is preposterous to think an Axis victory would have been pleasant
for India.
None
of this is academic. Politicians only rewrite history with contemporary
purposes in mind. It is worth noting that there has been a boom in
sales of Mein Kampf since Modi came to power in 2014. Hitler’s
diabolic memoir has been translated into several Indian languages,
including Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Marathi. Nowhere else in the world,
aside from neo-Nazi pockets in the west, is Hitler’s name invoked so
frequently and positively. In some state curricula, Hitler is invoked as
an “inspiring leader”. Mein Kampf is used as a textbook to teach leadership skills in some Indian business courses.
It is also worth stressing that Modi’s greatest hero — MS Golwalkar, former head of the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the
parent organisation to Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP — was an overt fan
of Hitler. The RSS, which was formed in the 1920s, was consciously
modelled on Mussolini’s blackshirts. Here is what Golwalkar, who
frequently praised Nazi Germany’s “race identity”, wrote in 1939 about
the choice facing India’s non-Hindu population (chiefly Muslims and
Christians):
“Either
to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to
live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so
and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race.”
I have little doubt that Golwalkar’s is the statue Modi would most dearly love to give pride of place.
I
am not forecasting a Holocaust in India. What I am saying is that the
country’s prime minister is a textbook fascist — a word I do not throw
around lightly. The warning lights for India’s 200m Muslims are flashing
steadily redder and we cannot ignore what is happening. |