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Iconoclasm destroys plurality of thought, is dangerous

Last Updated 21 March 2018, 03:01 IST

Over the past month, it has increasingly looked like India has decided to overcome all her 'demons' in one shot, by indulging in the singular pastime of destroying statues and symbols of ideological 'renegades'.

The string of recent incidents - a statue of Gandhi attacked in the southern state of Kerala, and its wire-rimmed eyeglasses broken; a monument to Lenin broken and pulled down using a hydraulic jackhammer in the north-eastern state of Tripura; a statue of Ambedkar left in pieces in Meerut, about 50 miles north of New Delhi – made 'statue-vandalism' look almost like the latest fad.

The ugly spectacle of a mob in Tripura's Belonia town bulldozing a statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, father of the Russian Revolution, came in the wake of BJP vanquishing the CPI(M) in their citadel of power. And one act of Right-wing vandalism almost automatically begets an act of Left-wing vandalism –- CPI(M) workers vandalised a statue of the founder of the erstwhile Jana Sangh, Syama Prasad Mookerjee – and so on. The governing belief propelling such acts is: 'my ideological mascot is for worship, yours for the hammer'. Demolition of a statue, after all, is akin to the destruction of one's belief system.

Our obsession with statues is showcased by our eagerness to put up statues even at great cost to the exchequer. Two cases in point are the 'Statue of Unity' coming up in Vadodara at a cost of Rs 3,000 crore, and a giant Shivaji statue off Mumbai, said to cost Rs 3,600 crore! Mayawati, immortalised in dozens of statues in sprawling memorials in Uttar Pradesh, also stands as a garish symbol of her extravagance at the cost of the taxpayer and betrayed an extraordinary megalomania for a self-professed champion of Dalits.

Ironically, the statues of Ambedkar have been routinely defiled. One can also find that the Ambedkar statues, while coming to symbolise Dalit aspirations and assertion, have always tended to disturb the equilibrium of caste society. The clandestine attacks on or defilement of Ambedkar statues betray a psychological intimidation, though most of these acts of vandalism are part of the intrigues of political parties, some of which are eager to appropriate him for narrow gains. And statutes of Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda used to be routinely attacked in the 1960s and '70s, apparently by ultra-Left radical foot soldiers.

Iconoclasm is the social belief in the intentional desecration or destruction of icons, monumnets and works of art, especially those containing human figurations, arising out of one's own religious or other beliefs or principles. More general usage of the term signifies either the rejection, aversion or regulation of images and imagery, regardless of the rationale or intent.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists an important secondary definition to the broader concept of iconoclasm and iconoclast as "one who assails or attacks cherished beliefs or venerated institutions on the ground that they are erroneous or pernicious." Therefore, however isolated these incidents may be, there is a distinct method in such acts. India has a time-honoured history of iconoclasm.

A long history

Violent acts of iconoclasm such as the destruction of the temple in Somnath by Mahmud of Ghazna (971–1030 AD) were the results of Muslim invasions in northern India in the 11th century. Such iconoclastic activity was spurred forward by a rigorous monotheism and a hostility to images. Almost a thousand years later, we are still at it: an orchestrated frenzy was stirred up as part of an entrenched plan of mobilisational politics in the demolition of Babri Masjid.  

We can easily rule out the recent acts of vandalism as piffle compared to the enormity of, say, when during the French Revolution (1789–1799), the people revolted and destroyed monuments, paintings, books, and documents in public ceremonies that celebrated their freedom from despotism.

Western civilisation's collective memories of sixth-century vandals sacking Rome, Saracens burning the Alexandrian library, Vikings attacking the Christian monasteries that had sustained learning through the Dark Ages, and the burning of heretics and their texts during the Spanish Inquisition are legion.  

In 1997, police fired upon a crowd of Dalit residents of Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar colony in Mumbai and killed 10 of them while they were protesting the desecration of a statue of  Ambedkar. In 2006, four members of the Bhotmange family, belonging to a Scheduled Caste in a small village called Khairlanji, in Maharashtra's Bhandara district were murdered by members of a politically dominant caste. At the height of the Khairlanji protests, the desecration of a statue of Ambedkar in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, triggered another spasm of suppressed collective anger of Maharashtra's Dalits. The disfigurement - the statue was reportedly beheaded - created tensions across Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Dalits were aghast at the state brutality unleashed against their legitimate protest against a crime. Devoid of any political support, their agitation was ruthlessly suppressed.  

The recent incidents, however small and inconsequential they may be in comparison, point to a simple message: the destruction of India's plurality of thought as expressed in our tributes to ideologues as diverse as Gandhi, Lenin, Ambedkar, Periyar and Syama Prasad Mookerjee is senseless and perilous to society. It is a relief that Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the statue vandalism. Rather than seek to destroy icons and legitimate ideologies, it is better to pick up a fight with all forms of obscurantism that bedevil India and demolish them.

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(Published 20 March 2018, 17:56 IST)

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