Years ago when I began teaching Indian political thought, I was as much a student as a teacher of this course. As famously said by Paolo Freire, “whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching ”. I learnt to understand that a thinker’s agenda is largely set by the pressing political issues of the day, and that developments in knowledge, ethics and politics may alter our assumptions about history, ideas and people. But I also learnt that these altered assumptions cannot become bases for judgements and aspersions. I learnt that it is important to read history with compassion, without taking sides and, also, without forsaking critical reading.
As many disciplines in Delhi University (DU) undergo chop and change under the aegis, umbrella and sanction of the new National Education Policy (NEP), it’s important to assess this pedagogical exercise – the discipline of political science being a point in case. Three thinkers from DU political science syllabus – Savarkar, Iqbal, Gandhi – and three reasons to be dismayed as regards their inclusion, exclusion and “punishment posting” respectively.
First relates to the inclusion of Savarkar, purportedly for the first time in DU political science syllabus. As someone who knows the course intimately, I was unsurprised yet dismayed by the multiple headlines, across various newspapers, news portals and magazines, that stated, to quote one: “DU includes VD Savarkar in political science syllabus for the first time…”. To quote another leading newspaper: “Savarkar added in Delhi University Political Science Syllabus”. It is only when you read the fine print that you get to know that Savarkar has been introduced as an elective course. Almost no newspapers reveal or clarify that Savarkar was already being taught as a section in the paper titled Indian Political Thought (IPT) –II in the sixth semester under the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) curriculum.
This is not an accidental act of omission. People in the business of deception know the power of half-truths in politics. Savarkar has been part of the political science syllabus for more than a decade, much before the history-correctors came into power. By ignoring this and by not getting the basics of journalistic reporting right, these headlines deliberately and maliciously fuel the narrative that there have been deliberate acts of exclusion of certain ideologies and ideologues.
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Should Savarkar be taught as an elective paper to students of Indian political thought? Why not? He is an ideologue who has clearly articulated views on Hindutva, history, nationalism, religion, citizenship, violence and has a distinct contribution to Indian political thought.
He brings together ideologies of Mazzini, Mussolini, draws from experiences of fascist Italy, reimagines Indian history in terms of “Six Glorious Epochs”, trenchantly critiques Gandhi’s ahimsa and the liberal idea of secular nationhood, to fashion an ideology that defines who a potentially loyal citizen of India is. His oeuvre may not be as intellectually and richly complex as Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s (subjects of the two other electives), and I would have thought that Vivekananda had a stronger claim to be an elective course, but these are matters of democratic disagreement and par for the course.
By the same logic of democratic disagreement, the section on Iqbal which has been deleted from the IPT syllabus, should not have been. And my argument is not based on how he was the same poet who wrote the patriotic lines of Tarana-e-Hind – saare jahan se acchha Hindustaan hamara.
No thinker should be made to prove his nationalist credentials before he or she makes the pedagogical cut. There are better reasons.
Iqbal’s non individualistic idea of ‘self’ (khudi), non-territorial idea of a political community (ummat, millat; notably, not quam) – qualify as one of the most significant non-Western engagement with ideas of nationalism, self, community and political life. In the contestation of ideas, particularly against those bequeathed by both Islam and the West, Iqbal played a uniquely important role, philosophically recasting many key tenets. Teaching Iqbal is not endorsing him. It is furthering an understanding of the spectrum of non-Western ideas that Indian thinkers like Iqbal fashioned.
A third matter of contention is Gandhi. Gandhi, more than was, is hard to box and harder to appropriate. He’s one thinker who the ruling regime wants to befriend but is not quite sure if the befriending works in its interest. The root problem is that Gandhi is not traditional in a modern sort of way. Being a “modern-traditionalist” requires that the symbols you visibly adhere to, are drawn from your religio-cultural tradition. But you’re also modern because the business of your living and the substance of your politics is “modern”.
Unlike Gandhi, you like technology, you do not abhor violence, you support capitalist enterprise, like profit, and unlike Gandhi, you may have no love lost for Muslims. It would have been easy to shelve Gandhi but for the fact that it is hard to “enemify” Gandhi. For two main reasons: Gandhi was deeply religious and a proud Hindu, and secondly, Gandhi’s stature is so big, his legacy so encompassing, that its political hara-kiri to dent or deprecate it.
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So what does one do with the father of the nation? You take him out of the electives’ pool of third and fourth semester and relegate him to the seventh. To remind, in the new four-year undergraduate programme, there’s an exit option after third year (i.e. sixth semester), which means that there’ll be a good many students (if not the majority) who will not do courses assigned for the seventh semester, including Gandhi. Hence the earlier reference to Gandhi’s “punishment posting”.
Traditions of political thought are expectedly varied as each attempt builds a connection between ideas, imagination and world of facts. The legacy that they bequeath to us is seldom consistent across their own evolving visions and changing times. It is the same Iqbal who sang paeans in praise of his beloved Hindustan who critiqued territorial nationalism, and who eventually submitted to the idea of Pakistan as a separate Islamic territorial state. Pandita Ramabai, who was born a Brahman, converted to Christianity; Tagore called nationalism evil and poisonous; Savarkar supported an alliance with Muslim League to form a government in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in 1943, the same NWFP region that had been proposed by Iqbal as the locus of separate, autonomous Muslim region within or without British India.
Appropriating one, negating the other, relegating a third is a deeply political exercise and one which calls for more justification than a majority sanction in the Academic and Executive Council of DU. Culling out a thinker because he “played a crucial role in the division of India”, shifting another because of political discomfort is not a pedagogical exercise but a political move. At its root lies a conceit – that history can be produced by politics.
Rajshree Chandra teaches Political Science at Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi University.
