C Rajagopalachari is not the Hindutva icon the BJP imagines him to be

With the bust of statesman C Rajagopalachari replacing that of English architect Edwin Lutyens in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, an old icon is being recast in a new political form. Rajagopalachari, one of Mohandas Gandhi’s closest confidantes, was independent India’s first governor-general and chief minister of the Madras State. In his twilight years, he challenged the Congress by forming the Swatantra Party – at one point it was the single-largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha.

By appropriating Rajagopalachari, a prominent leader in the Independence struggle and early years of the Republic, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is once again attempting to force-fit a historical figure into its own ideological mould.

President Draupudi Murmi, in her speech at the installation of the bust, said that the event was a sign of “mental decolonisation”. But BJP’s vision of decolonisation has long been clear: it aims to delegitimise the freedom struggle led by the Congress while positioning Hindutva politics as “true decolonisation”.

Over the years, this has meant erasing colonial influences, such as dropping the Christian hymn Abide with Me from the Beating Retreat ceremony at the end of the Republic Day celebration, removing the bust of Lutyens – the architect of the colonial city of New Delhi and the mansion in which the President now lives – and renaming the Prime Minister’s Office “Seva Teerth”. It has also erased “Islamic” influences, as seen in the rechristening of roads and cities with Muslim names.

This variant of decolonisation is based on Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar’s claim that Hindus alone have a civilisational and racial claim to India, a Hindu nation, in which Christians and Muslims are outsiders. In Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, Savarkar claims that Indian civilisation is exclusively a Hindu civilisation, defined by Hindu history, heroes, epics, festivals, and literature.

On the surface, Rajagopalachari would appear like a figure who fits this framework. Unlike the more agnostic Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajagopalachari publicly identified himself as a Hindu. He was also deeply invested in the propagation of Hindu culture, patronising the work of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan educational trust, which was rooted in Hindu philosophical and cultural traditions.

Rajagopalachari also considered his life’s greatest work to be his retellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. His religious outlook influenced his politics. When addressing the Bangalore Municipal Council on August 20, 1948, as India’s Governor General, he invoked Mohandas Gandhi’s vision of “ram rajya”, but went a step further saying that rulers like Rama, who is alive in the hearts of the people of India because of his cultural appeal, was the real Governor-General of India.

The manifesto of the Swatantra Party, which Rajagopalachari founded and led, also refers to dharma, or “God-oriented inner law”. It says that beyond the rule of law, there exists a rule of dharma and that a government led by the Swatantra Party is committed to realising this inner law.

In light of all this, Rajagopalachari may come across as a Hindu nationalist. But there is a distinction between his religiosity and the politicised religiosity advanced by Hindutva advocates. This distinction is most evident in their conception of history.

For Hindutva advocates, the Ramayana is more than a revered religious text: it has historical value as an archival document.

Referring to Rama’s victory in Lanka in his Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar extols the Ramayana as a narration of revolutionary war and violence: “At last the great mission which the Sindhus had undertaken of founding a nation and a country, found and reached its geographical limit when the valorous Prince of Ayodhya made a triumphant entry in Ceylon and actually brought the whole land from the Himalayas to the Seas under one sovereign sway.”

In the Hindutva reading of the text, the Ramayana’s lesson is not that the path of dharma is thorny and rife with uncertainty but that violence is the divinely sanctioned right of Hindus against “aggressors” identified by Hindutva.

Rajagopalachari reads the same text in a different light. He makes it abundantly clear that the epics like the Ramayana are not history. The epic was moral instruction, providing lessons in courage and will that was to save mankind – and not one single community – from “error and extinction”, he says in his introduction to the retelling.

This distinction between religion and history allowed Rajagopalachari to see history as a continuum formed by shared living. His statements about the Partition of India reflect this line of thinking. Commenting on Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s proposal to create an independent state from Muslim-majority regions, Rajagopalachari on March 29, 1940, stated that “Mr Jinnah’s proposition is based on the fundamental conviction that it is impossible to harmonise the inconsistent elements in India.”

He further points out that “not even Tippu Sultan, Hyder Ali, Aurangzeb or Akbar, all of whom lived during the days when differences should have seemed more deep-rooted than now, imagined that India was anything but one and indivisible…”

Urdu is Indian too, said Rajagopalachari. “The very language for which Mr Jinnah stands, that is, Urdu, is born of Hindus and Muslims combining. The poetry, music, and architecture of India are the results of combination and not division,” he states.

In this, Rajagopalachari views Muslim icons as national icons, creators of an inheritance common to all Indians, unlike Hindutva ideologues who reject a pluralist reading of Indian history. For them, history holds no space for a relationship between different communities outside of political animosity. Religion is instead constantly weaponised as a test of Indian identity, citizenship and belonging.

For Rajagopalachari, religion was an institution of public good that had been formed and reformed through centuries of coexistence. In his acceptance of the Islamic elements of Indian history and culture, Rajaji recognised that Muslims too have a right to contribute and belong to India’s national imagination, something that is vehemently denied by Hindutva politics.

Like Rajagopalachari, other founding leaders and thinkers such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Subash Chandra Bose, Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda have been conscripted into making Hindutva ideology more palatable, despite the politics of these figures being distinct from and even opposed to Hindutva politics.

But the case of Rajagopalachari shows how his religiosity is what allowed him to articulate and hold political visions antithetical to Hindutva politics. The renewed interest in Rajaji should not be used to mistake the scholar-statesman as a “decolonised” Hindutva icon but as an invitation to understand the productive ways in which religion and cultural language can shape secular, democratic politics.

Niveditha K Prasad is a final year law student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Views are personal.

Also listen to: Podcast: What does the rise and fall of the Swatantra Party mean in the era of Narendra Modi?