Foisting Divisive History

In a widely seen and easily accessible video, India’s home minister, Amit Shah, can be seen and heard saying the following (in Hindi) to the Lok Sabha earlier this month (on December 10): 

“After independence (in 1947), the Prime Minister had to be chosen. The heads of provincial Congress committees voted. Sardar Patel received 28 votes, Nehru received 2. Nehru became PM. That was the first Vote Chori (Vote Theft).” 

The home minister’s statement was part of his reply to repeated allegations by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, that votes in recent elections in India have been stolen on a substantial scale. “Who are you to talk of vote theft when your great-grandfather Nehru became free India’s first prime minister by overturning an overwhelming vote against him and in favor of Patel?” That, in effect, was what Home Minister Shah was saying to Rahul Gandhi. 

Rahul Gandhi’s charges of vote theft are a serious matter. Even more serious is the apparent long-term purpose behind the alleged dishonesty in India’s elections: to end India’s life as a country for all Indians and establish a Hindu state. Here, however, I wish to focus on a narrower point, which is that the home minister’s statement contains a flaw that any citizen with a ticking brain would quickly catch. 

Her ticking brain will tell the citizen that if, at or just before independence, the leadership of the Indian National Congress had overturned such an overwhelming vote, there would have been instantaneous protests. Everyone knows that any election (or even selection) for a position at any level in India can invite noisy controversies if not court cases. In 1947, Sardar Patel’s supporters, if not Patel himself, would surely have raised a hue and cry at such a shocking reversal of an unmistakable vote. Governance would have come to a screeching halt. 

CITIZENS MUST ASK 

As the year 2025 draws to a close, India’s thinking citizens should not swallow Amit Shah’s astonishing claim. They should demand proof. “Please, dear Home Minister, show us a newspaper headline announcing that by 28 votes to 2, the Congress leadership had chosen Patel over Nehru for free India’s first premiership. If you are not able to show such a newspaper headline or story, please show us any newspaper stories from 1947 or 1948 or 1949 or 1950, which is the year when Patel died, of Indians lamenting that the Sardar had been deprived of the premiership for which he had been duly elected. 

“With such evidence, the campaign against Nehru and his descendants and against the Congress will become irresistible. Without such evidence, you, Home Minister Shah would be accused of uttering falsehoods in parliament.” 

In this and similar ways, citizens can initiate fact-checking and thereby perform an essential service. If that duty is neglected, history gets falsified, and a slide towards autocracy is assured. 

Vallabhbhai Patel had, and continues to have, numerous admirers. He also had a son, Dahyabhai, and a daughter, Maniben, who both served in India’s parliament. If anything even remotely corresponding to what Home Minister Shah alleged had happened, these heirs – and numerous other Indians -- would have demanded correction and retribution. Nehru would not have been allowed to remain prime minister for 17 years and his daughter Indira Gandhi could not have become the premier from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1984.

I write these lines not to rectify the home minister’s patently false remark but to underline the citizen’s duty to interrogate defamatory statements from the highest and most powerful quarters. 

Did the home minister knowingly make a false statement? This is a question for him to answer. 

Although I can make a guess, I do not know for sure. What I do know is that in history lies have been pushed with full knowledge that they are lies -- in the confidence that repetition, amplification, and control over media will cause millions to believe that they are getting facts. The history thus produced is an account not of what happened but of what’s bombarded as having happened. 

A SONG’S TRAJECTORY 

Also this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a well-prepared speech in parliament on the historical role of the amazing Vande Mataram poem and song. First written in 1875-76 in two stanzas in a mix of Sanskrit and Bengali (or Bangla, as its speakers call the language) by the poet and novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Vande Mataram was expanded six years later by its author and inserted in his well-known novel, Anandamath. In 1896, Rabindranath Tagore sang Vande Mataram at a session in Kolkata of the Indian National Congress. 

In 1905, when India’s British rulers decided to break what was an immense Bengal province into a Muslim-majority eastern half and a Hindu-majority western part, Vande Mataram became a popular symbol of opposition to that division. Reunited in 1911, the province of Bengal remained one until 1947, when India became free but was also divided, with East Bengal emerging as Pakistan’s eastern wing and Hindu-majority West Bengal remaining with India. 

The Vande Mataram song as well as the two-word cry “Vande Mataram!” (I bow to thee, Mother) were stirring features of India’s successful freedom movement. Many heroes, women as well as men, embraced prison and in some cases death by uttering the words “Vande Mataram!”  

Some of this history was painstakingly and rousingly recalled by Modi before parliament, but he didn’t stop there. He gave an offensive interpretation of the Congress’s decision in 1937 to recommend for popular singing the first two verses of Vande Mataram in preference to the longer song contained in the Anandamath novel, where rich tributes are paid to goddesses Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati. 

Accusing the Congress of breaking Vande Mataram into pieces “under the guise of social harmony,” Modi made an even stronger statement. “Having bowed down before the demand to divide Vande Mataram, the Congress later had to bow down to the demand to divide India,” he said, in Hindi. 

PLAINLY UNFITTING 

Those who know Vande Mataram’s history are aware that it was after consulting Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore that the Congress decided, in 1937, that it would not be appropriate to press India’s Muslims to sing in praise of goddesses Durga, Lakshmi, and Sarasvati. The original two verses expressing loyalty and reverence for the motherland were viewed as being more than adequate, and this two-stanza Vande Mataram was retained as the national song. 

Approval from Gandhi and Tagore for this sound position was not really needed – there was no courtesy or wisdom in asking anyone to chant lines they were not comfortable with. Tagore’s unambiguous thinking on the subject can be found here.

An additional reason for not loading the new verses onto the song was Anandamath’s anti-Muslim thrust. Set against the background of an 18th-century conflict in which newly arriving British forces were opposed in Bengal by ascetic Hindus as also by ascetic Muslims, the novel in some places spoke of Muslims with contempt and anticipated with delight the removal by the British of Muslim rule in Bengal. Asking Bengal’s Muslims to celebrate Anandamath’s focus would place absurd demands on human nature. 

This YouTube discussion (in Hindi) with scholar Jawarimal Parakh throws light on the novel and on the 18th-century conflict. 

Twisting history in order to paint the Congress as an “appeasing” party, the Modi speech in parliament also implied that India’s Muslims were and are anti-national because of their reluctance to sing in praise of Hindu goddesses.  This selective version of history, presented forcefully in parliament and relayed and repeated by a pliant media, is what today’s and perhaps tomorrow’s India will receive. 

The exercise can only be seen as part of a resolute campaign to end pluralism and secularism, strengthen Hindu supremacy, and weaken the ground for minority rights. 

As for the argument that those who yielded in 1937 to the need to abridge the Vande Mataram song were bound in 1947 to yield to the Pakistan demand, it may be pointed out that forcing uniformity on religious, caste, tribal, and linguistic groups is what induces thoughts of political separateness. The nation’s unity has been sustained so far not by physical force or compulsion but by shared goals and joint action. 

The 1947 Partition was caused by Hindu nationalists and Muslim nationalists who both declared, the former in fact before the latter, that the Hindus and Muslims living in undivided India were “two separate nations.” Although they could not prevent Partition, India’s leaders in 1947 fortunately rejected this “two-nation” theory. They created, for the India that remained, a constitution that facilitated liberty, equality and fraternity among all its people. 

BANGLADESH EVENTS 

History’s East Bengal region is today’s Bangladesh, an independent nation from 1971, when it broke away from Pakistan. From 2024, when a massive revolt toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government, Bangladesh has been led by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning microfinance pioneer. Elections have now been announced for February 12. Still led by Hasina’s ancient rival Khaleda Zia, who is said to be ailing, the Bangladesh National Party is the frontrunner, but much may also depend on the student activists who removed Hasina. 

On December 25, Tarique Rahman, Khaleda Zia’s 60-year-old son, is due to return to Dhaka after a prolonged London exile. He will head BNP’s campaign but student activists will want to examine Rahman’s readiness to cope with a Bangladesh that has changed greatly during his long absence. Right now, though, the students’ chief demand is the capture of the killers of their hero, Sharif Osman Hadi, 32, who died in a Singapore hospital after being shot in Dhaka on December 12 by two motorcycle-riding assailants. 

Hadi’s death was followed by massive protests, by a ballooning of anti-India sentiment, and by attacks on the offices of two newspapers in Dhaka, the English-language Daily Star and the Bangla Prothom Alo, which were seen as pro-India, although not long ago the same journals had invited the wrath of supporters of the former pro-India ruler, Sheikh Hasina, currently in exile in New Delhi. 

With or without grounds, Bangladesh’s enraged students have charged that Hadi’s killers have escaped to India. Narendra Modi did well to send Khaleda Zia a message wishing her recovery, but New Delhi’s relations with Dhaka remain fragile at best. 

The belief in influential quarters in India that the Yunus regime has been too friendly to Pakistan does not improve matters. Paralleling that impression is Pakistan’s view that India has been inappropriately warm towards Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which allegedly supports terrorism in Pakistan. 

Many like me are old enough to recall pre-Partition as well as post-Partition times when Indians saw Karachi, Lahore, Dhaka, Chittagong (now called Chattogram), and Kabul as friendly places inhabited by neighbors sharing similar interests and histories. Times when questions like “Who is he for?” or “Who is she against?” didn’t enter our minds. 

Will our children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of our friends in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and in Nepal and Sri Lanka be able to think of one another as friends, not as possible enemies?