'Abide with me' and the idea of India

For a country that's been independent for 75 years, a parliamentary democracy held up as a model till a few years ago, why have we become so insecure? What else explains the changes we've made over the last few years, the latest of which include changing the name of Agra's historical localities and dropping the hymn 'Abide With Me' from the closing ceremony of our Republic Day celebrations?

"Symbols of slavery" and "colonial past" are the reasons given for these changes. Surely, 75 years is more than enough for us to have got over our colonial hangover? The majority of Indians are aged between 15 and 50. Does the thought that we were once ruled by the British torment them?

More and more, it seems like the one suffering the most from an inferiority complex about our past is the party making these changes. The reason probably lies in the embarrassing fact that few from its parent organisation participated in the struggle against the British, unlike most of our opposition parties, which have a rich legacy of having fought the British, and hence do not display the same insecurity in accepting the past.

If 'Abide With Me' is to be viewed as a symbol of our colonial past, then the Beating The Retreat ceremony itself should be dropped; its origin is British. Ironically, the man who led the fight against our colonial masters included 'Abide With Me' in the bhajans played every evening in his Sabarmati Ashram. But anything loved by Gandhi has to be rejected by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

As for the other official reason - "a limited few understand its lyrics" - how many understand the lyrics of all 26 tunes played at the ceremony? These "limited few", incidentally, include our Christian minority. Don't they matter? Or is it that a Christian hymn, which has two lines from the Bible, can't be accepted in `new' India's official ceremonies?

Similarly, can Mughal Road, Sultanganji ki Puliya, and Ghatiya Azam Khan (from ghaati, i.e. valley) - each name rich with history - no longer be tolerated, even in a city known across the world for a Mughal emperor's monument?

Uttar Pradesh's chief minister has already said he doesn't consider the Taj Mahal part of his heritage. Given that this `eighth wonder of the world' brings in tons of revenue, his government is forced to tolerate it. But apparently, the same grudging acceptance need not be shown to names seen as "symbols of slavery". Wasn't it Narendra Modi himself who decried, in his first speech in Parliament as PM, our "1200 years of slavery"? If Indians were slaves of the Mughals, were they free and equal citizens under the reign of Chandragupta II, which was taught in school as `the Golden Age of India'? Or under Emperor Harsha Vardhana or Ashoka the Great?

We are free and equal citizens now, whatever our religion, a reality the ruling party just can't accept.

When Pakistan was born, among the first things cities such as Karachi, which was overrun by Muslims fleeing India amid the violence of Partition, did was to change names that linked them to their Hindu past. Since the idea of Pakistan revolved around its Muslim identity, these changes could be understood as a newly formed nation asserting its identity.

But the idea of India never revolved around any religious identity. Hence our leaders didn't feel it necessary to erase India's Muslim heritage, even at a time when Hindu-Muslim killings were at their peak. That the BJP, 75 years after Partition, itches to exclude everything Muslim from spaces that it controls, reveals that more than any other political grouping, it is the Sangh Parivar that believes that Hindus and Muslims constitute two distinct nations that cannot coexist.

The irony is that even till today, this poisonous theory that divided India keeps getting invalidated.

Just last month, Bangladesh celebrated 50 years of its victory over Pakistan, a separation that disproved forever the theory that religious identity makes a nation. This month, two Punjabi brothers, tearfully meeting each other for the first time after Partition made one an Indian and the other a Pakistani, vowed to keep meeting.

Between these two events that negated the meaning of Partition, the BJP reinforced its meaning by renaming Ghatiya Azam Khan after Ashok Singhal, a leading light of the Babri Masjid demolition campaign, who personified the politics of hate that characterises the party. And, to celebrate the adoption of our Constitution, which guarantees equal rights to all faiths, the BJP-ruled Centre excludes an integral part of the celebrations only because it's Christian.

(The writer is a journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.