The tale of three statues: Gandhi, Churchill and Godse

Mohandas Gandhi’s statue was unveiled last week in London's Parliament square by Arun Jaitley, Indian Union's finance minister and senior member of a party that looks up to the RSS for political direction. The Indian Union government banned the RSS in 1948, after Mohandas' assassination. By some viewpoints, Mohandas was a staunch opposer of British imperialism. In the same square, stands the statue of Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain. As a Bengali, I know him as a major conspirator behind Bengal's famine of 1943. Approximately 30 lakh people (5% of Bengal's population) died from famine-related causes. As the famine raged, Sir Winston had exclaimed, “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks.” Madhusree Mukherjee’s phenomenal research book Churchill’s Secret War shows how planned my people's genocide was. It's amusing to see Godse-statue protesters being silent about Mohandas sharing compound-space with the knighted mass-murderer. The British government has never apologised for its role in the famine. Truth and reconciliation, forgiving and forgetting are things that coloured people are supposed to do. White people will and still continue to provide the ‘policy frameworks’ and ‘experts’ to oversee these processes. We have no shame.

By giving prominence to Mohandas’ statue, the British government is signalling that it can accomodate those who were staunchly opposed to the British loot of the subcontinent. Browns are engaged in Godse statue debates. Mohandas isn't a human being anymore, but God number one in the Indian Union's official pantheon. Nathuram’s statue isn't within the realm of officially allowable “dissent”, but is an act of blasphemy for the Nation-state is divine. By driving Nathuram Godse underground superficially, the powers are probably hastening the day when Godse will rise, not in rebellion but to take his place in the pantheon. Amidst this hypocritical anti-Godse posturing, the subcontinental landscape remains peppered with statues of people who have caused the killing of many innocents, directly or indirectly. I'm a small potato without  the guts to name them. But I know and I know that you know. That's what matters.

At the statue unveiling, Jaitley praised the “deep and enduring connections between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest”. There's another bond — between the looter and the looted, murderer and the murdered. The Indian Union government has never pressed for monetary reparations for colonial plunders and massacres of browns from the British government. From this we can judge the character of those to whom the British transferred power in 1947. It was a transfer laced with trust. All Indian Union governments, including the present one, have refused to declassify all files on Subhash Bose saying that it would “prejudicially affect” foreign relations. No Indian Union government has demanded that the British government and its brown collaborators pay for their crimes. Nothing is accidental.

Let's spend more money from this poor subcontinent’s exchequer to remember the ‘sacrifice’ of those brown mercenaries of World War I who swore allegiance to the British monarch and laid down their lives while butchering non-British people in non-British lands in Asia, Africa and Europe, because that suited the taste of the then-British government. Who are the professional generation-next and next-after-next of these armed British loyalists ? Does their treatment of  common brown folks today differ from the British who despised those who protested the unjust policies of the pre-Partition Government of India? Some honourable browns spat at the British crown and joined the Azad Hind Fauj. They weren't accommodated in the Indian or Pakistani Army, even after 1947. Thus we have what we have. Nothing is accidental.

The author comments on politics and culture; @gargac