BJP's Mumbo Jumbo and Guru Golwalkar's North Pole

Jawed Naqvi Delhi

It's election time in India and the country's two largest parties know they have run out of ideas to conjure a great future to woo votes. But they know that even in these times of economic distress and bursting financial bubbles they can target the lowest common denominator with the promise of a great past. There is nothing new about this pursuit. The Congress party periodically takes recourse to its romance with Mahatma Gandhi even if it involves two-timing the great sage with its new found taste for neo-liberal romp.

Offering the counterpoint is the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP. Never at a loss for outlandish notions of the past that can be accommodated only with considerable falsification of history, the BJP's election manifesto for the April-May race begins with a virtual Biblical incantation - In The Beginning There Was India - or something to that effect. In fact, the BJP's notion of India is hard to disassociate with early nationalist obscurantism promoted by its ideological founders. Guru Golwalkar, one of the party's greatest icons, posited in a book he published in 1939 that the North Pole was once located in India, somewhere on the borders of today's Bihar state. With passage of time the North Pole shifted to its present location, while the rest of India remained where it is.

An unstated purpose behind fudging what would be otherwise akin to Wagner's theory of continental drift appears to be a need to justify the location of Indo-Aryans as a people that were eternally rooted in India. Golwalkar's theory has not been denied or disowned by his followers. It continues to help rationalise the imagined "son of the soil" claims of a few whereby all other groups who came to India later are projected as invaders. Then there is this other strand of historiographers that have influenced and inspired a range of poets and pamphleteers, not the least the BJP itself. Allama Iqbal was not immune to their influences either when he proclaimed that Iran, Egypt and Rome were lesser civilisations compared to India. It's all a great idea, but little more than that. The Ashokan pillar in Allahabad remains a compelling testimony that blows away the myth of civilisational invincibility. The first inscriptions belonging to Ashoka's empire were in the form of his edicts, inscribed in Prakrit. That was the Buddhist phase in India. Then emperor Samudragupta added a litany of his conquests in Sanskrit and finally Mughal emperor vandalised the pillar - what other word can we use for what was after all royal graffiti - in Persian.

Within this lot of historiographers are those that claim, for example, that the Taj Mahal was a refurbished ancient temple to Lord Shiva. It would be an engaging banter were this genre of myth-making not to have far-reaching consequences, not always peaceful in nature, inflicted on helpless Indians.

Whether the dispossessed Indian voter revels in the BJP's version of his past or not, the party makes sure it is writ large enough to induce him forget the present, thereby also the future.

History, according to the BJP, tells us that India was a land of abundance. The country has been blessed with great natural fertility, abundant water and unlimited sunshine. According to foreigners visiting this country, Indians were regarded as the best agriculturists in the world. Records of these travels from the 4th century BC till early-19th century speak volumes about our agricultural abundance, which dazzled the world. The Thanjaur (900-1200 AD) inscriptions and Ramnathapuram (1325 AD) inscriptions record 15 to 20 tonnes per hectare production of paddy.