Like staging Hamlet without the Prince

The omission by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) of Jawaharlal Nehru’s picture from the poster published on its website on the occasion of ‘Azaadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’ (75th Independence Day celebrations) shows its pettiness, callousness and subservience to the ruling powers. None of these is an ideal attribute of an organisation devoted to historical research. The poster has been brought out in celebration of freedom and to honour important freedom fighters, and has the pictures of eight leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad and V D Savarkar. Nehru is not the only omission. There is no-one from the south, no woman and no Muslim. The list includes only those whom the BJP accepts and has tried to co-opt into a history and tradition it has tried to create. It includes Savarkar, whose contribution to the freedom struggle is, at best, controversial.

Recording a history of India’s freedom struggle without Nehru is like staging Hamlet without the Prince. He spent nearly 10 years of his life in jail and was a national leader with a charisma that went beyond all classes and categories of people. He also had a vision, rooted in the country’s past, alive to the present and hopeful for its future, which was at once driven by sentiment and reason, and was both realistic and idealistic. It was this vision that shaped the country's policies in the wake of freedom when he was the first Prime Minister and which laid the foundations of the democratic nation. It is this vision that the BJP is at odds with and wants to dismantle, and that is why Nehru is ostracised from history and demonised in memory. The fact that his descendants are at the head of the Congress, the main opposition party, may also be a factor.

History should not be a handmaiden of politics, and the ICHR, which is a professional forum to promote the study of history, has no need to toe the line of the government or the ruling party. It should not try to blacklist or whitewash events and personalities in history in accordance with the government's predilections. It has said there are more posters to be published and Nehru would find a place in them. But by denying Nehru a place among the first and foremost eight leaders of the freedom struggle in its reckoning, a message has already been sent out. It is that the freedom struggle and its leaders would be assessed on the basis of their utility to the ruling party’s politics. This is unfortunate. India’s freedom struggle was a total movement that saw participation by leaders with a wide range ideologies, traditions, attitudes and backgrounds. Celebration of freedom should mean accepting and honouring all of them.