In India, Gandhi, Nehru, Bhagat Singh and a host of other leaders, many of them communists, have attained great status in people’s hearts. Not one among those whom the Indian people have revered does one find a communalist, a religious fanatic. This has been the frustration of right wingers for the last three quarters of a century.
Despite claiming to be the truly and only nationalists in the entire political spectrum the Indian rightist are unable to produce a single name that is recognizably and acceptably of a national leader or freedom fighter. By turns they have tried to appropriate Bhagat Singh, Tagore, even Ambedkar, and approvingly eulogized some aspects of thoughts or actions of Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sardar Patel, Malviya and so on, but they never had a name they could say was theirs, of the RSS or Hindu Mahasabha, who possessed at any point of time a national stature. Even having murdered Gandhi, they could not kill Gandhi, and they had no Gandhi to show off as father of the nation. |
