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State-centric life and nation-builders

State-centric life and nation-builders

Author: Rakesh Sinha
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: February 20, 2003

Recently one of my friends directed my heed to television news. He was disgusted by a capsule which displayed the traffic jam due to the movement of Prime Minister Vajpayee. He was on his way to the RSS headquarter in New Delhi to pay his homage to a person known as Chaman Lal, but the correspondent did not mention even the name of the departed person. None of the news channels (except Zee news), which are otherwise busy ferreting out news items, found it necessary to even mention his name. Chaman Lal neither held any office in his life nor did he bag any award from the Government. His name hardly ever appeared in newspapers in his life time. So how did he qualify to be mentioned after his departure?
 
However, what led the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Vice President, and a host of dignitaries to rush to mourn the death of a homeless bachelor? Chaman Lal had not enjoyed position for authoritative allocation of resources. Yet thousands of people thronged his final journey towards cremation ghat at a short notice. Chaman Lal had played a brave role during Partition and tirelessly worked to rehabilitate refugees from Pakistan. The following decades of his "public" life had been without home and hearth, a state without wants. Public life does not necessarily mean visibility and publicity for those who renounce their family life and material pleasure.

Such people enjoy a distinct power, a certain moral authority and capacity to inspire hundreds of people to live as simply as one can. To make them spare time for contemplation and do something for society and nation - apart from their own family and relatives. Such has been the tradition in this country which has made India immortal and its culture indestructible, which once found expression even in a poem of Iqbal. Nation is not made through statecraft but the people who inherit culture and tradition and associate themselves with the motherland as a holy land. It is this association with the land and the culture that led a saint to challenge the authority of a Greek king who invaded India. Mission once chronographed in the mind becomes more effective than opium.

Chaman Lal was not a singular person but there number are in thousands - in known and unknown tradition, movements, social-cultural streams of the land. A few years ago a Hindi writer who produced dozens of serious books on culture, historic traditions, language and philosophies died. He remained unsung in the predominant English media. The pen-pushers have been taught about pre- and post-Victorian ages, European modernists and post-modernists, wherein a certain Ram Vilas Sharma did not get any value. Had he been in Europe, his works would have debated. My opponents may say that enough discussion, for instance, on Harivansh Rai Bachchan has been held. But I may be wrong when I would say he was fortunate to be the father of Amitabh Bachchan.

Ideology does not exist in a vacuum. It derives its power and resilience from idealism. They are unique but rare partners. Parting from either becomes fatal for any movement. Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated this uniqueness. His life was a wonder for westerners. He met Queen Victoria in his own attire, on his own terms and tradition. The pride he had, the values he cherished and the life he lived made him great. But he could not produce Gandhis - that perhaps is the reason we see the destiny Gandhism has met with. Here, Dr KB Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, makes a difference. He was the epitome of a public worker. He shunned publicity all his life and lived in society and worked to organise it, while himself remaining unknown, uncelebrated in his life to the extent that in his time many believed that the founder of the RSS was not Hedgewar but BS Moonje.

When Hedgewar died, Nagpur witnessed traffic jam not due to the heavy rain on June 21, 1940, but because thousands of people had gathered to pay him their last homage. Many obituaries appeared and his popularity has been increasing everyday. That is why I believe that his final obituary is yet to be written. The future historians would decide his place in the modern Indian history. His unique contribution had been that he produced Hedgewars, which is the key for the success of the ideological movement, which has been tried by great Indian philosophers and organisers with different ways and forms but all efforts proved ephemeral. The elision of Chaman Lals from the the state and club centric media (a happy combination of the first page and the third page) in thus not farfetched. Don't blame it on westernisation. It is a good way to safeguard ourselves for our conscious and willing deterioration.
 


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