Should anybody be worried at all that Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road will be renamed after A.P.J. Abdul Kalam? The former Indian President is credited with crafting the country’s nuclear missiles and warheads programme. To begin with, how does this aspect of Kalam fare with the way Indians saw the destruction of Hiroshima?
An early view of the nuclear threat was captured in a popular film song of the 1950s. “Hum laae hain toofaan se kishti nikaal ke/Is desh ko rakhna mere bachho’n sambhaal ke”. The song reflected a Gandhian sensibility of non-violence, but sample a more direct political message: “Atom bamo’n ke zor pe ainthi hai ye duniya/Baarood ke ik dher pe baithi hai ye duniya/Tum har qadam uthana zara dekh bhaal ke/Is desh ko rakhna mere bachho’n sambhaal ke”. The film Jagriti was a huge success, as were its songs.
Today, given the militarist flavour of our times, one is likely to be slammed as a traitor for holding a Gandhian view about India’s nuclear arsenal. In fact, the Hindutva worldview is based on ritual worship of lethal arms. It is not clear what Kalam’s contribution was to nuclear technology nor do we know if or how it was any different from similar weaponry in the far less resourceful and much smaller North Korea, or for that matter Pakistan.
No news channel discusses how countries such as Germany and Japan, Brazil and South Africa have progressed by forsaking their nuclear weapons capabilities. Threat from China is cited for India’s love of the bomb. By that logic Japan, Vietnam and even the Philippines must acquire nuclear arms.
In any case, where would Kalam’s genius be without the cryogenic engines from Russia? What did appeal to me about him was that he sat on all the files concerning death penalty through his term as President.
An equally creditable quality I admired in Kalam was his love for classical music. He was an accomplished veena player. That one attribute alone could put him a nose ahead of Aurangzeb in my view. The last of the great Mughal emperors, unlike his forebears, was so steeped in the politics of puritan Muslim clergy that he had no time for music.
Of course, Hindu revivalist historiography regards all Muslim rulers of India as anti-Hindu. There is an all too easy belief even among liberal intellectuals that Aurangzeb’s brother Dara Shikoh, who he had killed, was more acceptable if only because he translated the Upanishads into Persian. This is a spurious counterfactual argument. Muslim rulers before Aurangzeb had a running tradition of translating Hindu epics like Mahabharat and Ramayan into Persian, which they distributed to their nobles to understand local culture. The most notable of these rulers was Akbar, but is he any less reviled by Hindutva ideologues?
Historian Prof. Harbans Mukhia quotes two leading historians, Iqtidar Alam Khan and late M. Athar Ali, to show that the religious stance of both Akbar and Aurangzeb was guided by — and fluctuated with — the changing demands of political events during their 50-year-long reigns, and that there were “phases” in which each became “liberal” or “orthodox” depending on the crisis.
Mukhia cites a paper by Athar Ali in which he had tabulated the number of nobles from different groups who sided with the “liberal” Dara Shikoh and dogmatic Aurangzeb during the war of succession in 1658-59.
“It turns out 24 Hindus were on Dara’s side and 21 on Aurangzeb’s, including the two highest-ranked Rajputs, Mirza Raja Jai Singh Kacchwaha of Amber and Raja Jaswant Singh Rathore of Jodhpur, who stayed with him till their end,” Prof. Mukhia quotes Athar Ali’s paper as saying, “It was Raja Jai Singh who defeated Shivaji and brought him to Aurangzeb’s court seeking peace. It was in 1679, 21 years after his accession to the throne, that Aurangzeb reimposed the jaziya tax on Hindus that Akbar had abolished in 1562, and he did this after the death of Jaswant Singh when tension began with the Rathores.”
Something worse could happen to Delhi than the naming of a road. Delhi has seen two of India’s worst incidents of religious violence, and the massacres of 1947 and 1984 make it a worrying candidate for a Gujarat model of zealotry. Remember that the police participated in the Gujarat and Mumbai pogroms. And the police in Delhi are controlled directly by the same Hindutva ideologues, not by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. He applauded the renaming of Aurangzeb Road but would also do well to ensure that the newly named road doesn’t take Delhi to a frightfully familiar rightward journey.
By arrangement with Dawn
