RAJESH SINGH
The number of flip-flops Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has done on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh will make even a seasoned acrobat’s head spin. He is now convinced, after being not so convinced days ago, that the RSS was involved in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and, therefore, there cannot be a more hate-filled, communal organisation than the RSS. It is a mystery as to what fresh evidence has come the Congress leader’s way that was missed in the years since a commission set up by Indira Gandhi found no material to link the Sangh with the killing, or discovered since his last intervention in the Supreme Court.
Be that as it may, it will be useful for Rahul Gandhi to remember the less-than-secular conduct of his family’s most distinguished leader and independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in early 1950, when Hindus were being massacred in what was then east Pakistan. Very little has been written by mainstream historians on this episode, and even little about Nehru’s role. This is not surprising given that historical narratives since independence have largely been shaped by Leftists and others whose definition of secularism was limited to the appeasement of the minority community and the demonisation of the Hindus.
But despite the best efforts of such academics to whitewash history, truth has found ways to penetrate the national consciousness. Researchers and writers who refused to toe the old line and insisted on calling a spade a spade, have emerged. That many of them belong to the Right cannot be considered a negative, since Leftist historians had had a field day for far too long. One such author is Tathagata Roy, whose book, The Life and Times of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee: A Complete Biography, details Nehru’s attitude to the 1950 tragedy, which Roy terms as an “anti-Hindu pogrom”.
The desperation on Nehru’s part to downplay the tragedy being faced by Hindus in east Pakistan was evident in his statement after paying a visit to a refugee camp in West Bengal in March 1950. He said, approvingly of the Pakistanis, “I think this (persecution of Hindus) is lessening greatly now. I visited day before yesterday a big camp at Ranaghat where these people are arriving daily…and I had found that many of them have been able to bring a fair quantity of luggage with them… Obviously there has been a relaxation.”
The author writes that some 50,000 Hindus lost their lives in the killings orchestrated by the Pakistani state, and thousands of Hindu women were brutalised. The horror had begun within months of partition and peaked in 1950. When the tragic fate of east Pakistan Hindus was brought to Nehru’s notice, all that he did was to “get in touch with the Pakistanis and perfunctorily sign two ‘Inter-Dominion Agreements’ in April and December 1948 containing pious commitments to protect one’s minorities, naively imagining, one supposes, that Pakistan will honour them”.
The situation had become worse by the early 1950, and Nehru was compelled to speak out. And yet what did he say? According to Roy, the Prime Minister issued a Press statement wherein he virtually washed his hands off the tragedy. “It is obvious that we cannot control the happenings in East Bengal except by consultation with the Central Government of Pakistan and the Government of East Bengal.” He was, thus, placing faith in the very elements that were responsible for the pogrom.
Imagine, if Indira Gandhi had, 21 years later, adopted a similar position with regard to the brutality of the Pakistani forces in the very same east Pakistan. There would have been no Bangladesh. Such was Nehru’s abiding trust in the goodness of Pakistan, despite all evidence to the contrary and advice from senior leaders such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Mookerjee. Both these stalwarts had asked the Indian Prime Minister to take “drastic measures — either to go to war with Pakistan or to declare a policy of exchange of population between the two Bengals on the Punjab model or demand a homeland for East Bengal Hindus”.
Nehru, instead, proceeded to sign a meaningless agreement with his Pakistani counterpart, and which Pakistan had no intention to honour — now famously known as the Liaquat-Nehru pact. Even many leaders of the Congress were shocked at Nehru’s conduct, but they had to hold their tongue. Mookerjee, not bound by the diktat of the Congress party, quit the Cabinet in disgust.
Roy writes in the biography, “It is very difficult for a rational mind to understand the mental process through which Nehru had reached the conclusion that further atrocities on Hindus in Pakistan could be put a stop to by a pact with Liaquat Ali. For a pact to work, a minimum degree of political will to make it work is required. It would be apparent to everyone, including Nehru, that Liaquat Ali’s political will was directed in the opposite direction…” And yet, if Nehru persisted with the plan, it was because he did not want to be seen as siding with the Hindus and castigating the Muslims. That is the true, if blunt, assessment. Mookerjee called it the “secularitis” disease, that had gripped Nehru.
In the context of the Indian Prime Minister’s tendency to live in a world of dreams, the author quotes a little known term that a senior Government official, Benoy Mukhopadhyay, used for Nehru: “Political somnambulist”. He offered this description during an interview he gave to the Bengali fortnightly, Desh.
The desperation on Nehru’s part to downplay the tragedy being faced by Hindus in east Pakistan was evident in his statement after paying a visit to a refugee camp in West Bengal in March 1950. He said, approvingly of the Pakistanis, “I think this (persecution of Hindus) is lessening greatly now. I visited day before yesterday a big camp at Ranaghat where these people are arriving daily…and I had found that many of them have been able to bring a fair quantity of luggage with them… Obviously there has been a relaxation.”
Lakshmi Kanta Maitra, a Congress leader who strongly disapproved of Nehru’s soft approach, had dismissed the optimism, pointing out that the Pakistanis knew of Nehru’s presence in West Bengal and had, therefore, relaxed their persecution for the time-being. But at other entry-points along the border, the Hindus were pouring in with horror stories that Nehru did not get to, or did not wish to, hear.
Nehru’s behaviour in the run-up to and during the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, an outcome of MA Jinnah’s call for Direct Action, was another example of his skewed sense of secularism. It showed him up for what he would be as Prime Minister. But a narrative of that will have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, there is enough in the 1950 incident for Rahul Gandhi to ruminate over — if he finds time from levelling wild allegations against the RSS.
(The writer is editorial director of nationalistonline.com, English)