Rewriting History, not Always a Bad Thing

When anyone comes up with a new narrative of historical events or paints a new picture of an important character, some look at it as a genuine attempt at revisiting the facts. Others wonder if it is just another attempt to rewrite history to suit an agenda. With events that are very old, one can never be sure what really happened. Even with more recent, better documented events, one never knows the motives behind actions: Malice? Incompetence? Greed? Ambition? Miscalculation? Or something else?

Three recent incidents got me thinking about all this. The first was this Shekhar Gupta talk on some of the long-reaching and/or courageous decisions made by India’s short-term PM’s like VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar, IK Gujral and Deve Gowda. That was an eye-opener for me, because (a) I had dismissed them as inconsequential due to their short tenures, plus they felt opportunistic PM’s, and (b) “official” history only talks of the Nehru-Gandhi scions (Even PV Narasimha Rao who wasn’t “short-term”, is ignored altogether, but more on him in a bit). This talk, by the way, is the only one on my list which is overwhelmingly factual.

The second piece was the opposite: entirely agenda-driven. It was Manmohan Singh blaming the then Home Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, for the 1984 riots that killed 3,000 Sikhs. How? Because he didn’t call in the Army. Yeah, right. Like the Army can be called in without the Cabinet agreeing, and guess who presided over the Cabinet? Good old Rajiv, he of the “when a big tree falls (aka mama Indira), the ground will shake” infamy. The Congress and Sonia’s lap dog, Manmohan, apparently still believe they can absolve Rajiv Gandhi of 1984. As the BJP wondered, if Manmohan held Rao responsible for the massacre, why did he agree to serve as Finance Minister under Rao?

The last piece was on Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. No, this wasn’t nonsense of the Godse-was-innocent variety. Rather, it went into the self-proclaimed motives behind the act. First, this wasn’t murder; it was an assassination. The difference? An assassination, at least in this case, is because of  total disagreement with the policies of the person in power. Of course, that doesn’t make it right, but it makes you think:
1)      After all, Gandhi didn’t hold any official post in government: Yes, but he wielded an inordinate amount of power and influence. Can one really say this was different than Bal Thackeray and Sonia decades later?
2)     What were the policies that Godse opposed enough to kill over? Godse considered Gandhi a mass-murderer. What?! He felt Gandhi’s blackmail-by-fasting forced the government to obey him, some of which contributed to the horrors of Partition.
3)   Saint or politician? Both of the above lead to the question: was Gandhi the anti-Spiderman? As in, power without responsibility?
Don’t get me wrong: Gandhi was not the Bad Guy. But shouldn’t history be about acknowledging the black and the grey aspects of the man as well? After all, isn’t history about real people, most of whom are neither pure evil nor pure good?

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