The renewed ruckus in Parliament over Sadhvi Pragya’s untutored remarks about Nathuram Godse yet again underlines the hazard of inducting people in politics who are unfamiliar with political correctness and at the first opportunity tend to speak their mind. The Lok Sabha member from Bhopal is a misfit in politics where the first perquisite is to speak with a forked tongue, to say what one doesn’t believe in, to practise precisely that one rants and raves against. In the current instance, is there anyone who bayed for the blood of Sadhvi Pragya who can claim to follow a fraction of the Mahatma’s teachings? None, of course. Hypocrites all, they shame Gandhi daily while paying mere lip service to him. Gandhi has become a totem, chanting whose name they seek to profit from their unholy deeds. The new Maharashtra troika, we would be told, epitomises the Gandhian thought. What the Shiv Sena founder said about Gandhi and his physical assassin Nathuram Godse is a matter of public record. Meanwhile, history cannot be frozen. Public discourse about leaders, dead or alive, cannot be written in stone and left for posterity to swallow uncritically. The problem with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is that politicians having put him on a pedestal, and anointed him a Mahatma, are loath to assess his role and contribution objectively without any preconceived notions of greatness, nay godliness. That Gandhi was all there in flesh and blood, that he too committed mistakes in his private and public life should not make him less of a Mahatma. His contribution in securing bloodless freedom from the colonial power is unsurpassable. But having said that, Gandhi was no god. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson count among the greatest US presidents. Yet, their contribution to the founding of the American Republic is not diminished when it is pointed that they owned the largest number of slaves of all the US presidents. Godse committed a heinous crime. Even the barbaric rape and murder of lakhs of his countrymen did not mitigate the horrendous enormity of the murder of the apostle of peace. But more than seventy years after the assassination, is there a prohibition on a dispassionate assessment of Gandhi in the right historical context? Every leader of the freedom movement has been analysed threadbare. Why not Gandhi? Remember it is kosher under the Constitution not to believe in god, for that matter, to be an agnostic, to not believe in any religion. Why then insist on a blind, unthinking deification of the Mahatma. No honest assessment would diminish his role in freeing Indians, yet he cannot emerge fully blameless. Meanwhile, it is good Sadhvi Pragya has said the right thing in Parliament to pacify the self-avowed Gandhi bhakts.
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