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 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...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...
22 comments
Read more

Why do good to others?

Courtesy: polyp.org.uk “Most people would rather die than think and most people do,” said Bertrand Russell in his characteristic witty way.   Professor of Philosophy and author of many books, A C Grayling, is of the opinion that religion has continued to survive even in today’s scientific world because people don’t want to think.   They would rather accept readymade answers given by religion.   God is the ultimate readymade answer for a whole lot of problems.   And a very easy answer too. If we really think and evolve our own moral systems instead of borrowing them from religion, we will be far better human beings, says Grayling in his latest book, The God Argument.   If we think sensibly (common sense would do if we cared to use that faculty), we will realise that we all have a duty to contribute to the welfare of the entire human species.   The simple logic is that when the species is “flourishing” (Grayling’s word) we too flourish.   ...
33 comments
Read more