Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath caused a lot of heartburn last week when he asked, “How can our heroes be the Mughals?” It suddenly woke up a lot of “public intellectuals”, currently in the retreat, out of their slumber. They saw it as an assault on the idea of India, its liberal ethos, its secular outlook.
Among many, one reaction from an eminent journalist, who has been an intrinsic part of the traditional Lutyens’ setup as very few can claim to be — belonging to a family sharing blood relations with the Nehru-Gandhis in politics, Khushwant Singh in literature, an Army general (who led the country in the 1962 war) in defence, the illustrious Kapoors in Bollywood, and a foremost historian in academia — is particularly interesting. The eminent journalist, in his new book, has bitterly complained about being ignored in the “new, Modified India” where “the vast majority (of BJP ministers), with whom I used to get on extremely well, found reasons or excuses to shun me within a year of Mr Modi becoming prime minister”.
One has sympathies with him but that doesn’t justify his outrage against Adityanath. Looking closely, the eminent journalist seems to be doing the same thing he accuses the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister of. So, what does he write?
The eminent journalist writes, “I want to ask him (Yogi Adityanath) a few questions myself. What gives a chief minister the right to question who our heroes are? He may have the authority to govern us but not to determine our values and shape our ideals. It’s arrogance on his part to presume to tell us who to look up to and which rulers of our past to consider great.” He doesn’t stop there. “Although I don’t know Yogi, I’ll go one step further. I suspect his question reveals either prejudice or ignorance, possibly both. If I’m right, this not only is unfortunate and unbecoming in a chief minister, but compounds his arrogance.”
Indeed, a pertinent and an ideal suggestion, though coming with a lot of moralistic, holier-than-thou overtones. Sadly, in this very article, the eminent journalist himself slips into the same pit he accuses the UP CM of falling into. For, as one goes through the article, he takes the role of a guardian angel — not an unlikely posture from someone hailing from the family of presiding deities of the pretentiously moralistic Nehruvian order — and exhorts us how “the greatest of our rulers is the Mughal emperor Akbar or, to use his full name, Abu’l Fath Jalalud-din Muhammad Akbar”.
He then goes on to claim, quite pompously, “I know many consider the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who ruled 18 centuries earlier, Akbar’s equal or, possibly, heroically superior but I disagree. Akbar was not responsible for 100,000 deaths at Kalinga.” The eminent journalist questioned Yogi Adityanath’s right “to question who our heroes are”. Applying the same parameters, won’t the eminent journalist be accused of imposing his “hero” on us, the lesser mortals?
There’s, however, an interesting subtext to the story: Who has turned Ashoka into “the Great”? In newly independent India, it was a grand Nehruvian project to do so — the same establishment whose intrinsic and entrenched part the eminent journalist’s family has been. So, the well-oiled modus operandi is: First, invent greatness out of Ashoka, saying there was no one like him in the Indic civilisation, and then compare the same with the “great” ruler from the medieval era and pass the verdict. Look, Ashoka was good but he had the Kalinga blemish! The result: There was no great ruler in India before Akbar! Incidentally, in Indic traditions, Ashoka wasn’t regarded as an ideal ruler. He broke the great Sanatani tradition of absolute freedom in matters of faith and imposed a state religion on his people. India never had any tryst with the idea of a state religion before that. No wonder Ashoka was long forgotten before being accidentally discovered by James Prinsep in the early 19th century.
Now, coming to Adityanath’s words, all he said was: “How can our heroes be Mughals?” He didn’t single out Akbar. Did he? But the eminent journalist turned the Mughals into Akbar. Were the two synonymous? Can the Mughals as a whole be our heroes? The Mughals also include Jahangir who killed the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan Dev; Aurangzeb, who mercilessly killed Guru Tegh Bahadur and many others, besides destroying several religious institutions of other faiths; and Babar, who took immense pleasure in claiming in his own memoirs how he would pile up the dead bodies of the kafirs of Hindostan (our sarkari historians would project Babar as a naturalist, a poet and a wonderful father who prayed to Allah to take his life and spare his son’s). The list is long, arduous and violent.
The eminent journalist can also be accused of basing his arguments on “pop history”. For, real history is never written as a black-and-white saga. History never runs in a linear fashion. It’s mostly jugular, sometimes concentric. And personalities are mostly grey.
So, what the eminent journalist forgot in his enthusiastic support for Akbar was that for every Kalinga for Ashoka, there was a Ranthambore for Akbar. This, however, doesn’t deny the fact that Akbar was a great ruler, very practical, sagacious, wise, liberal, and far ahead of the Mughal milieu. He abolished the jiziya, “prohibited the slaughter of cows and the eating of their flesh” and was a vegetarian on weekends. The eminent journalist, quoting my dear friend and Akbar’s biographer Ira Mukhoty, reminds how Akbar “often wore a dhoti” and appeared in the “diwan-e-aam with a tilak on the forehead and a rakhi on the wrist, tied by a Brahmin, as a blessing”, and how in 1582, he had the Mahabharata translated from Sanskrit to Persian, and later commissioned translations of the Ramayana, Rajatarangini and the story of Nala and Damyanti.
Citing these instances of greatness do not mean Yogi has to follow Akbar, let alone the Mughals! Likewise, the eminent journalist doesn’t have to regard Chandragupta Maurya, Samudra Gupta, Raja Raja II, Rajendra Chola, Krishnadevaraya, Rana Pratap, Shivaji, Baji Rao I, et al, great. Pursuing the great Indic tradition, everyone must follow their hearts and let others do the same. By questioning Yogi’s freedom of choice, the eminent journalist, in the name of liberalism, is putting the very noble ideal in the dock.
The eminent journalist ends his polemical article by writing, “Do these views represent Hindu thinking? Do they add lustre to our faith? Do they make Indians feel taller? Or more patriotic?”
Do your views represent Hindu thinking, the eminent journalist? But I am relieved that at least there is no contesting the point that Hindu thinking is liberal. There was a time, in the heydays of Nehruvian liberalism, when the very term Hindu would make people fantasise words like illiberal, fanatic, fundamentalist…