Aditya Sinha: Tearing down and rebuilding history

Another statue of General Robert E Lee was taken down at Duke University Chapel in North Carolina US on Saturday PicAFP right Assams first BJP government is mulling on pulling down Gandhijis statue sculpted by Ramkinkar Baig in GuwahatiA statue got pulled down On August 12 when in Charlottesville Virginia White Nationalists held a rally against the pulling down of a Confederate Generals statue a confrontation with counterprotestors led to a neoNazi ploughing his car into a crowd the same terror method used by Islamic State throughout Europe last year including in Barcelona last week Soon after I spoke to my mother in New York who was rattled by President Donald Trumps siding with the antiblack Klu Klux Klan and the antiJew neoNazisTrump is no different than Modi I told her referring to our Prime MinisterDont say that she gasped Amita her weekly domestic help refuses to hear anything against Modi She thinks hell solve all of Indias problemsThen shes no different from the Whites who support Trump I saidIndians worship Modi while hypocritically looking down upon Trump They call Trump a barbarian However Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania even if he wasnt a topper while Narendra Modi has been to Delhi UniversityTrump created businesses even if some were duplicitous schemes and others went bankrupt Modi only helps businessmen Trump loves marriage so much that he married three times Modi has preferred the Indian tradition of sanyas to project incorruptibility Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering and living in America Modi wants to keep Muslims in lineTake this statue business With a White backlash developing in America after a Black man was elected president not once but twice a backlash to the backlash has developed in which local governments are pulling down monuments of Confederacy heroes secessionists who lost the 18611864 Civil War It erupted after the industrial North which preferred cheap wage labour for its factories legislated to do away with slavery the agricultural South was not yet mechanised and preferred to retain slave labour General Robert E Lee led the Confederate Army and his statue was removed from Charlottesvilles Emancipation Park itself renamed from Lee Park Southern Whites remain disgruntled about losing that war 150 years ago they form the backbone of Trumps electoral legitimacyTrump likened the tearing down of statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson number two in the Confederate Army to tearing down one of George Washington the General who fought the British for American independence in 1776 he was the USAs first president in 1781 This is disingenuous Lee and Jackson were secessionists akin to Kashmiris or Nagas while Washington is akin to Mahatma Gandhi No wonder American journalists abandoned neutrality and condemned Trump for his remarks Voxcom went so far as to call Trump immoralA monument is created to commemorate a person or event It comes from the Latin moneo which means to remind India is planning statues and monuments to commemorate the past and none of us can object to Dr BR Ambedkar or Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel or Chhatrapati Shivaji being remembered they all are critical to our heritage and history But there are also sporadic lunatic attempts to commemorate Gandhijis assassin Nathuram Godse a rightwinger who ought to stay consigned to the dustbin of history One day perhaps Yogi Baba UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will take over India and this will happenOr take the governments current yearlong commemoration of a secondrater like Deen Dayal Upadhyay who contributed zero to India possibly the celebration is intended to divert attention from former PM Indira Gandhis centenary Upadhyay only wrote only one major piece in his life and it is polemical it coined integral humanism without any explanation about what this entails other than being in opposition to the communist MN Roys radical humanism This government plans to commemorate other pygmies like Veer Savarkar who directed his fellow travellers not to join the 1942 Quit India movementWhat if Modi and gang erect statues of Upadhyay Savarkar etc and once the Era of Modi is over someone else tears them down then will a future BJP leader say Trumplike that tearing down their statues is similar to tearing down Gandhijis statue You may think this laughable except that a trial balloon to tear down Gandhiji whom BJP president Amit Shah called a chatur baniya has already been floatedIn Assam recently news broke of a proposal to tear down Gandhijis statue installed in Guwahati in 1970 The reason Sculptor Ramkinkar Baij distorted the Mahatma Baij was not a portraitist but an artist his work interpretational art historians call the statue a classic Fortyseven years after the statue was erected Assams first BJP government mulled pulling it down A backlash stopped them Yet the ModiTrump era has just begun The fight for shaping our memory has just gotten underway In that fight some statues are bound to get pulled downAditya Sinhas crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head is available now He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom