Last week I was having beer with a few friends. At some point we decided to go to Haridwar. I was bored of drinking at home, wanted to drink in a new setting. Of course I wanted to take a dip in Ganga to absolve myself of all sins that I had committed till then, so that I could start committing new sins.
The point is there was a purpose to that trip. We do things purposefully, even if we don’t acknowledge it. Now what inspired former president Pranab Mukherjee to fly down to Nagpur and attend the RSS convocation ceremony?
There could be many reasons.
Mukherjee says dialogue is the essence of democracy. One should keep the dialogue on. So he wants to have a dialogue with an organisation which couldn’t tolerate a nuanced homage to Muhammed Ali Jinnah by L.K. Advani in Pakistan.
Advani had said, “His (Jinnah’s) address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is really a classic, a forceful espousal of a secular state in which, while every citizen would be free to practise his own religion, the state shall make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of faith.”
The RSS cracked down on Advani and later Jaswant Singh who wrote a book on Jinnah. This is their level of intolerance and Mukherjee wants us to believe he wanted to have a dialogue with the RSS.
Mukherjee probably rates his oratorical skills very highly. He may have thought he can reform, if not the Sangh leadership, the fresh graduates and make them give up their Hindu rashtra dreams. He is probably reassured by the successes he had while playing the role of mediator for the UPA. He had handled Anna Hazare so well his prodigy ended up becoming the CM; he neutralised Ramdev, who became a business tycoon, if not for Pranab the yoga guru could have become the UP CM for all you know.
Don’t let the Pranabda fan club in the media mislead you. Mukherjee didn’t go to the lion’s den and take the bull by its horns.
The speech in itself was mediocre. It could have been any of the speeches he made as President of India after Narendra Modi came to power. He just toned it down a bit, edited out references to gau raksha, lynchings, bigotry. In its place he copied a few lines from his other speeches about the 5,000 year old Indian civilisation, the sone ki chidiya that India was, the glory of Nalanda, all that are music to RSS ears. A Sangh spokesperson on TV channels said as much -- he said pretty much what we say.
Mukherjee quoted Jawahar Lal Nehru from his book Discovery of India, but made only a passing reference to Gandhi. He said, “As Gandhiji explained Indian nationalism was not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive.” Just one line on the Father of the Nation who spearheaded a freedom struggle that was boycotted by the RSS. Gandhi who lost his life to the ideology of RSS almost became a footnote in his speech, though it appeared in the middle somewhere.
The real news came a few hours before the speech. From the memorial of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar. There Mukherjee noted in the visitors’ log, “Today I came here to pay my respect and homage to a great son of Mother India.” Anyone who reads it would think Hedgewar was some big hero who was denied his due by a repressionist regime for decades.
You could argue there is no need to read much into it. It was just an old man writing something about a dead man because he had to do write something. Journalists quoted ‘sources close to him’ as saying “What does one say of a dead man, especially who has been the Organising Committee Chairman of the AICC Session in 1920?”
Anything. He could have written anything. Mukherjee made a career out of writing convoluted, un-understandable resolutions with sentences so long, one would lose count and sight of the commas and semicolons. Anything Mukherjee writes, there is a method to it.
Arun Shourie very famously described the Modi govt as UPA + cow. Mukherjee’s speech was a bit like that -- RSS minus the bigotry.
So what was the purpose behind the speech?
The only good defence in Mukherjee’s favour I can think of is - he was bored, visited RSS headquarters for some sightseeing and went back after a guided tour.
In describing Hedgewar as a great son of Mother India, Mukherjee came off as an opportunist, a backstabber and coward.
The point is there was a purpose to that trip. We do things purposefully, even if we don’t acknowledge it. Now what inspired former president Pranab Mukherjee to fly down to Nagpur and attend the RSS convocation ceremony?
There could be many reasons.
Mukherjee says dialogue is the essence of democracy. One should keep the dialogue on. So he wants to have a dialogue with an organisation which couldn’t tolerate a nuanced homage to Muhammed Ali Jinnah by L.K. Advani in Pakistan.
Advani had said, “His (Jinnah’s) address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is really a classic, a forceful espousal of a secular state in which, while every citizen would be free to practise his own religion, the state shall make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of faith.”
The RSS cracked down on Advani and later Jaswant Singh who wrote a book on Jinnah. This is their level of intolerance and Mukherjee wants us to believe he wanted to have a dialogue with the RSS.
Mukherjee probably rates his oratorical skills very highly. He may have thought he can reform, if not the Sangh leadership, the fresh graduates and make them give up their Hindu rashtra dreams. He is probably reassured by the successes he had while playing the role of mediator for the UPA. He had handled Anna Hazare so well his prodigy ended up becoming the CM; he neutralised Ramdev, who became a business tycoon, if not for Pranab the yoga guru could have become the UP CM for all you know.
Don’t let the Pranabda fan club in the media mislead you. Mukherjee didn’t go to the lion’s den and take the bull by its horns.
The speech in itself was mediocre. It could have been any of the speeches he made as President of India after Narendra Modi came to power. He just toned it down a bit, edited out references to gau raksha, lynchings, bigotry. In its place he copied a few lines from his other speeches about the 5,000 year old Indian civilisation, the sone ki chidiya that India was, the glory of Nalanda, all that are music to RSS ears. A Sangh spokesperson on TV channels said as much -- he said pretty much what we say.
Mukherjee quoted Jawahar Lal Nehru from his book Discovery of India, but made only a passing reference to Gandhi. He said, “As Gandhiji explained Indian nationalism was not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive.” Just one line on the Father of the Nation who spearheaded a freedom struggle that was boycotted by the RSS. Gandhi who lost his life to the ideology of RSS almost became a footnote in his speech, though it appeared in the middle somewhere.
The real news came a few hours before the speech. From the memorial of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar. There Mukherjee noted in the visitors’ log, “Today I came here to pay my respect and homage to a great son of Mother India.” Anyone who reads it would think Hedgewar was some big hero who was denied his due by a repressionist regime for decades.
You could argue there is no need to read much into it. It was just an old man writing something about a dead man because he had to do write something. Journalists quoted ‘sources close to him’ as saying “What does one say of a dead man, especially who has been the Organising Committee Chairman of the AICC Session in 1920?”
Anything. He could have written anything. Mukherjee made a career out of writing convoluted, un-understandable resolutions with sentences so long, one would lose count and sight of the commas and semicolons. Anything Mukherjee writes, there is a method to it.
Arun Shourie very famously described the Modi govt as UPA + cow. Mukherjee’s speech was a bit like that -- RSS minus the bigotry.
So what was the purpose behind the speech?
The only good defence in Mukherjee’s favour I can think of is - he was bored, visited RSS headquarters for some sightseeing and went back after a guided tour.
In describing Hedgewar as a great son of Mother India, Mukherjee came off as an opportunist, a backstabber and coward.
