Skip to main content

No Golwalkar, Please

 

A page from a Malayalam newspaper of today expressing disagreement to the Centre's decision to rename the institution

The BJP government’s decision to rename the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology in Thiruvananthapuram after M. S. Golwalkar has not found many takers in Kerala. A lot of public figures have come out with strong opposition to the move. Understandably so.

Who was Golwalkar? Does he deserve such a great honour?

Golwalkar was a detestable bigot. In his book We or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar calls all non-Hindus in India “traitors” and “idiots”. Let me quote his entire paragraph:

All those not belonging to the national, i.e. Hindu race, Religion, Culture and Language, naturally fall out of the pale of real 'National' life. We repeat: in Hindustan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation - satisfying all the five essential requirements of the scientific nation concept of the modern world. Consequently only those movements are truly 'National' as aim at re-building, revitalizing and emancipating from its present stupor, the Hindu Nation. Those only are nationalist patriots, who, with the aspiration to glorify the Hindu race and Nation next to their heart, are prompted into activity and strive to achieve that goal. All others are either traitors and enemies to the National cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots.

How miserably narrow is that vision! A man with that sort of parochialism and hatred is fit to be a hero for right wingers. But not for right-thinking people. If you read a few more pages of this man’s above-mentioned book, you may wish to spit on his face.

He goes on to urge the country to indulge in a racial cleansing of the kind that Hitler carried out in Germany. “Hindustan should learn and profit” by Hitler’s example, Golwalkar writes.

He attacked Gandhi vigorously for “sapping all manliness” from Indians. He conspired successfully to assassinate Gandhi. Four days after the Mahatma’s assassination, Golwalkar was arrested as a conspirator and his organisation, RSS, was banned.

Golwalkar lived untouched by even a trace of greatness. Why would anyone want to name an eminent research institution after him?

I wonder why the BJP is so keen to rename institutions built by others instead of building new ones and ensuring the progress of the nation.

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरDecember 9, 2020 at 9:13 AM

    Building new (and useful) institutions need time, energy and resources. That's why the political parties such as the ruling one, take the easier route of renaming the existing ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 9, 2020 at 10:44 AM

      And there are too many people supporting it all knowing that it's all fake. The ancient great civilisation's spillover...

      Delete
    2. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 9, 2020 at 11:00 PM

      Are resources not required for building statues? There was no problem in making one spending crores of rupees :)

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 10, 2020 at 9:49 AM

      Modi could have spent that sum on a Vedic class medical college and named it after himself :Narendra Damodardas Modi Institute of Ancient Vedic Susrusha Parampara 😄

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Raging Waves and Fading Light

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...
7 comments
Read more