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The legacies of the freedom struggle are precious for those who strived hard against British colonialism. Modern independent India was built around a consensus of core values evolved out of the experiences of our freedom movement. All those who cherish and respect this consensus may find its vandalisation outrageous. However, this may sound trivial or even irrelevant to those who kept away from this experiment or were even antithetical to most of those values.
When we talk of Nehruvian legacy, we do not really mean that Nehru alone 'bequeathed the architecture and conventions of the modern Indian state to us'.1 There were many others, like Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, B.R. Ambedkar, Sarojini Naidu, Homi Bhabha, Meghnad Saha, Vikram Sarabhai - and the list can go on. All of them got together under the Nehruvian gaze and active participation to imagine a modern Indian nation committed to scientific development as well as thinking, and to the pluralist ethos of Indian civilisation. This consensus also articulated a framework of democracy, which encapsulated modernist thinking and respect for cultural, religious and linguistic diversity.
To properly comprehend the present majoritarian political and cultural upsurge, we need to go back to three crucial decades starting with the 1920s. The legacy we are talking about was challenged then by these forces while it was in its very formative stages. The idea of a secular, forward-looking India was anathema to all those who conceived a nation around communitarian and regressive values - both Hindu and Muslim.2 It politically succeeded in dividing India, preceded by a huge loss of life and property. Pakistan declared itself an Islamic nation, falsely collapsing nation and religion into one. It got a rude shock in 1971 when language and culture took precedence over religion with the creation of Bangladesh. In India, all those who wanted to go the Pakistan way generated huge pressure to declare India a Hindu nation. They failed in their attempts. However, their backward-looking and divisive agenda continued to torment all those who were struggling to knit together a new independent India under Nehru's stewardship as Prime Minister.
Before coming to our main concern here, let me digress a bit to explain who these people or organisations were, who consistently countered the ethos...