“Secular forces fixate on footnotes, Hindutva gets how Indians deal with history”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfWd25Dv5-8 Manu Pillai  is clear that “#Hindutva has understood and weaponised how Indians deal with history” in a way that the left has not. “#Secular forces are fixated on a footnoted version of history,” he says. This makes it quite unappealing to people looking to history to construct an identity.

Where does that leave the historian? Pillai agrees that he never thought he’d be in such a contentious field when he first started out. But in the end, he sees it as the price of being in the public eye. Historians are people too. The idea that a pure or virtuous history is possible, he suggests, may itself be an idealised position.

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 India deserves better than M-O-D-I: Misinformation, Opacity, Distractions, Incompetence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUoA4kFU3Cg The government’s constant drive for headline management, its pursuit of hype, its industrial-scale disinformation campaigns carried forward by its media and social media armies, and its wall-to-wall projection of Modi as a superhero, are obsessive, fantastical, and delusional', argues TMC MP in Rajya Sabha Sagarika Ghose.

Fifty years after Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency, history is turning a harsher gaze not just on her authoritarian turn but on Jayaprakash Narayan’s fateful alliance with Sangh. Legitimised by JP’s misjudgment, the RSS has wrecked India’s democracy, institutions and political culture.

https://thewire.in/politics/the-emergencys-true-legacy-how-jps-naivety-empowered-the-rss 

Sharada Prasad concluded his letter to Natwar Singh with a penetrating observation: “.. the entire operation was necessary to save our political structure. When we  speak of our political structure or aims, the leftists speak only of socialism, the Anglo-US-European liberals only of pluralistic democracy, neither group gives much importance to secularism. Secularism is the base of Indian democracy. The cardinal mistake of JP and company was to hand over the controls to RSS and no man in his senses can ever say that an RSS-led opposition front can preserve a system based upon religious tolerance and equality.”

History has already dealt a rough hand to Indira Gandhi for embarking on a dangerous road 50 years ago; what she did during those dark days could be rolled back by the masses. History will deal an equally rough, if not  rougher, hand to Jayaprakash Narayan for rehabilitating the RSS as a normal political force. Fifty years later, Indira Gandhi’s excesses pale in comparison to JP’s cardinal sin. The RSS is the only winner of that battle five decades ago.

Harish Khare

25/06/2025