Tushar Gandhi Courtesy of all images: tushargandhi.in
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‘RSS-BJP are tenacious, not surprised by their growth in Kerala’: Tushar Gandhi interview

In an interview with TNM, Tushar Gandhi speaks about the growth of the Hindutva right wing in Kerala, the Empuraan row, discovering the writings of Kasturba Gandhi, and more.

Written by : Cris

Snippets of the words exchanged between Mahatma Gandhi and Sree Narayana Guru must have scampered through his mind when Tushar Gandhi spoke at the centenary of their famous meeting in Kerala. It was on March 12, 1925, that the Mahatma rode south to Sivagiri Mutt from Vaikom in central Kerala. He had been in Vaikom to join the Satyagraha for freedom of movement of the lowered castes on the roads skirting the famous Mahadeva temple. 

In Sivagiri, Gandhi met the revered social reformer Narayana Guru, and exchanged ideas on religion and caste, both wanting betterment of the oppressed people. 

Tushar, the Mahatma’s great grandson, stood on a stage a hundred years later to commemorate the meeting and unveil the statue of Gandhian P Gopinathan in Thiruvananthapuram. In his speech, he derided the Hindutva powers led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for “inflicting the country with cancer” and “spreading it”. The RSS is poison, he said. 

Outside the venue, RSS workers waited for his car, blocking it and raising slogans demanding that he take back his words. Tushar stoutly refused, and in return raised slogans for Gandhi.

Speaking to TNM two weeks after the event, he admitted that he was quite taken aback by such a reaction in Kerala — the state did not even have an electoral presence of the BJP until recently. 

In 2016, O Rajagopal won them an Assembly seat for the first time, but BJP went back to zero seats in the next election. It was only last year that a BJP candidate managed to win a Lok Sabha seat from Kerala — Suresh Gopi from Thrissur. Currently, the party does not have a single Assembly constituency in the state despite leading the Union government for the third consecutive term. 

Right wing in Kerala and the Empuraan row

“I was aware that the BJP has made inroads in Kerala, becoming quite a formidable force in the state. But I didn't expect them to be this belligerent. They are becoming more and more so, even forcing Mohanlal to publicly apologise. It is worrying, and it needs to be taken note of,” Tushar said.

He was alluding to the note expressing regret that Mohanlal released for the contents of Empuraan, a film that portrayed the Gujarat riots unleashed by the Hindutva forces in 2002. Tushar is amused that Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the new president of the BJP in Kerala, should criticise the film for ‘distorting’ the truth, when his party “owes their existence to fictionalising facts”. He also pointed out the Sangh’s hypocrisy by naming propaganda films like The Kerala Story and Kashmir Files that received ample promotion.

Yet Tushar is not quite surprised by the right wing’s growing presence in Kerala. “That is how they work,” he said. “They are very tenacious, they keep working towards a goal, unmindful of setbacks and defeats. They persevere. I have heard that the political shenanigans that they are famous for elsewhere have been happening in Kerala – secret understandings and all of that. It is a well known RSS-BJP game plan.”

Tushar has extensively studied the growth of the right wing in India, for his book Let’s Kill Gandhi (2007). The Narendra Modi-led BJP government had not yet come into power back then, but enough had already happened to compel him to pen his truths. One can’t help thinking that it must be a quality he inherited from his great grandfather, who famously used truth as a weapon, along with non-violence. 

Writing ‘Let’s Kill Gandhi’

The resurgence of the RSS and the BJP, and the slow building of a pro-right wing narrative dispelling the truth of Gandhi’s murder are what urged Tushar to write. “We have noticed the trend of legitimising the RSS since the late 70s and the 80s. In the post-Emergency coalition government, JP (Jaya Prakash Narayan, founder of Janata Party) allowed the BJP to have a toehold in electoral politics, and [party strongmen] AB Vajpayee and LK Advani were part of the government. Such compromises started happening even then.” 

Tushar in the US

“What the RSS did was to cunningly build up its public image and gain acceptance from the electorate. Then in the 80s, it openly manifested when we saw a spate of coalition governments and finally Vajpayee managing to come into power and form the Union government. By the time I wrote my book, it was very apparent that sooner or later, we were going to suffer the consequences of all those compromises, opportunism, and of turning a blind eye.”

In the introduction to his book, Tushar wrote that the democratic process in the country “has been made a mockery of by opportunistic and exploitative politicians who have fragmented the electorate on the basis of castes and sub castes." 

It is not clairvoyance, he says, but just the fact that so much had happened by then. After the 80s when the right wing crawled their way into governance, there was the Shah Bano case, Advani’s Rath Yatra championing the cause of the Ayodhya Ram Temple, then the dark days leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid – Tushar rattles off the events like the chapters of a textbook he was rushing through. 

Those were also the years when he finally decided to express his thoughts in words, for until then, even with his flair for writing, he had been reluctant to take a pen in hand. “I was bad in grammar and spellings,” he said with a chuckle. But then the computers came, and with it spellcheck, and all his “weaknesses were taken care of”. 

Tushar Gandhi

The late 90s were also the time he became the face of Gandhi’s descendants, his finding an urn that contained part of the Mahatma’s ashes and floating it through Yamuna on the 50th year of India's independence. Whispered campaigns justifying Gandhi’s murder and the worship of Godse [Gandhi’s killer] also became louder, enraging Tushar enough to put in print the truth about his great grandfather’s assassination. 

Speaking truth in this day

The influence of Gandhi seems to have manifested in Tushar’s insistence on truth. “It kept me away from this trend of passing off fiction as fact, which has become a general trend in India.” 

But, Tushar concurred, it takes a lot of courage to say what one truly believes in today, with instances of brave journalists being prosecuted, or electronic media forced to shut down because they were honest enough to speak their mind. As a result, he observed, “A lot of mainstream media has completely surrendered and has become like propaganda machines for the government and the Sangh.”

He allowed the Congress some leeway, for not being able to completely adhere to the principled stands of Gandhi, "because that would have meant they would have to forgo power," which is too much to expect of a political party. "Not surprising that they drifted away from Bapu (Gandhi), Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel, making it easy for the BJP and the RSS to hijack Patel, Netaji (Subhash Chandra Bose), and others." 

Tushar has been supportive of the party, even joining Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. But the Congress, he said, has to act more cohesively and bridge the gap between the leadership and the common worker, “like in the times of Jawaharlal Nehru”. 

Tushar joins Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra

“Even Indira Gandhi would speak directly to the party worker without intermediaries. The party worker also knew that they could talk to the president, if required. Today that is impossible. There are partitions, so many walls in the party that the workers bang their heads against, unable to reach out to the leadership. They should become more cohesive."

Before Modi came to power for a second time in 2019, Tushar released another edition of his book, including chapters about the BJP government’s rule. 

Understanding Kasturba

A few years later, he published a second book, a translation – The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba – of a journal he’d discovered, written by his great grandmother in the 1930s, partly when she was in prison and partly when she joined Gandhi for his Satyagraha. 

Perhaps it was recalling his days of bad spellings that helped him relate to the colloquialism of his great grandmother’s writing. He translated it to English just the way she wrote it, not losing the spokenness and everydayness of her language. Few would believe it was indeed her writing, for she was known to the family as an unlettered woman. “Her whole diary was a slap in our face because even we – her family – had brushed her aside as someone illiterate, who was just there, an insignificant person,” Tushar says.

He says he could prove the diary’s authenticity by comparing the incidents she jotted down to the known record of her life, which tallied to a large extent. The diary also has Kasturba noting down the newspapers or books she had read or the writing she had done in her prison days. But she found the process of writing monotonous, since every day appeared to be the same in prison. 

Tushar also brushed off the idea that she might have dictated it to a scribe, because the language used was of someone who had not been taught to write. “She learnt the alphabet and a few spellings, and wrote the way one spoke. For the first time, I felt as if I was sitting with my great grandmother and chatting with her, that she was talking to me and I was listening to what she had to say.”