150th anniversary of 1857 "Sepoy Mutiny"

HUM HINDUSTANI: BJP, Ayodhya and 1857 —J Sri Raman
Daily Times, January 5, 2006

Thanks to the futurists in the media, we, the television-watching and newspaper-reading public of India, know what to expect in 2007. We know, for example, that, in the world of films, it will be a riveting year of remakes and, in fashion, one of over-long necklaces. None of the curtain-raisers and crystal-gazers, however, has talked of the coming year as one that will mark a major historical memory for the country.

The year will witness the 150th anniversary of what colonial chroniclers called the Sepoy Mutiny and the subcontinent’s historians prefer to consider the First War of Independence. There are special reasons for us all now to recall 1857 — and for some of us to deny its striking relevance to important issues of today.

A notable feature of the First War of Independence was that the rebels of all classes and all religious communities consciously adopted the last of the Mughals as their common leader, as their counter to the colonial rulers. By proclaiming Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’, the poet-king, as Shahenshah-e-Hind, the Emperor of India, on May 11, 1857, they proclaimed an anti-colonial Hindu-Muslim unity that horrified the British.

Clearly, any serious commemoration of the event runs counter to the campaign and designs of those pursuing politics of communal mobilisation. Memories of 1857 cannot be welcome to those who have consciously adopted the first of the Mughals as a common hate object for their constituency and who presided over Babri Masjid’s demolition in 1992.

Discussing the meaning of that crowning moment of 1857 a century later, Marxian PC Joshi wrote: “It was a stroke of instinctive genius on the part of the insurgent sepoys of Meerut when they crossed the Jamuna and liberated...the...capital of our ancient country and crowned the disinherited heir of Akbar, Bahadur Shah....The revolutionary significance of this event was universally accepted and has been characterised by Charles Ball in the following words: ‘The Meerut sepoys in a moment found a leader, a flag and a cause’.”

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its far-right ‘family’ (‘parivar’), too, thought of the Ayodhya movement, culminating in the demolition, as a stroke of genius. The party and the ‘parivar’ were supposed to have found a promising leader and a politically profitable cause. History, however, did not repeat itself even as a farce this time.

The party did make impressive gains in the next general election, but the utility of the issue proved to be one of diminishing returns. As for the leader thrown up by the movement, Lal Krishna Advani had to yield place to Atal Bihari Vajpayee once the party needed to share power with Ayodhya-unfriendly allies. Ayodhya then became a cross for Advani to carry.

All it did for him was to defeat his attempt to acquire a Vajpayee-like visage of ‘moderation’ after a visit to Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s mausoleum in Pakistan. Lying low for a while, after losing the party president’s post to once far less fancied Rajnath Singh, Advani recently announced a higher political ambition. Talking to a TV channel, he argued that, under India’s Westminster-model democracy, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House of Parliament (like him) was the prime ministerial candidate, and not the president of the main opposition party, if it is returned to power.

This pointed to an inner-party struggle, and Ayodhya was bound to figure in any factional bout in the BJP.

On the eve of the landmark anniversary of 1857 as well as of Assembly elections in India’s most populous State of Uttar Pradesh, the party has raised Ayodha again. It has done so in tones of belligerence abandoned ever since the BJP put it on ‘the back burner’ to keep a Vajpayee-headed coalition in power. At a meeting in December of the party’s national executive in Lucknow, Rajnath Singh donned Advani’s discarded mantle and violated the city’s famed decorum to dare political opponents to rebuild what the most rabid members of the ‘parivar’ have described as a demolished ‘edifice of secularism’.

Singh’s lieutenants, including former Chief Minister Kalyan Singh whose administration looked discreetly away as the demolition squad danced on the mosque’s dome, carried the campaign further. They projected the demolition as a kind of pre-emptive strike against a dangerous Islamic terrorism. Those who waited for wise disapproval of such wild talk from the ‘moderate’ Vajpayee — which usually comes after a lapse of days to let the communal damage be done — are still waiting.

Will 1857 prevail over 1992? The people of India will, hopefully, provide a positive answer in 2007.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’