AAP has appropriated Bhagat Singh without understanding him

In 1928, while analysing the cause of riots, Bhagat Singh wrote in Kirti magazine, “The leader in India has become politically bankrupt…. there is no dearth of leaders hiding their heads.” After winning elections in Punjab, although the AAP has adopted Bhagat Singh with a lot of fanfare, I’m sure it has not read his scathing criticism of communal riots and communal leaders. Bhagat Singh spared no one. He wrote, “Being a Sikh or Hindu was sufficient reason for a Muslim to kill him. Similarly, it seemed enough for a Hindu or a Sikh to kill a Muslim for being a Muslim alone.”

The AAP borrows ideas without reading the content. There was a time when Mahatma Gandhi was the icon of the party. But Gandhi was replaced by Bhagat Singh and Babasaheb Ambedkar. It seems the AAP has realised that Gandhi no longer fetches votes. Today masculinity is the defining creed; non-violence and tolerance towards other religions are effeminate virtues which the father of masculine nationalism, V D Savarkar, described as “perverted” and the cause of the “slavery” of Hindus in the past.

Due to its lack of a deeper understanding of Bhagat Singh, AAP has only identified him with masculine nationalism, as someone who fearlessly threw bombs at the British and was not scared when going to the gallows. At a time when Gandhi as an idea has become unattractive and the practice of non-violence unfashionable, there is an attempt to build a myth around Bhagat Singh that he advocated violence to get freedom from the British and behind that facade any kind of violence is justified.

It is true that Bhagat Singh prescribed violence, but for virtuous deeds. He wrote, “… when force is used for some good purpose or for the welfare of some people, then it is good and can’t be called violence.” But he also cautioned, “Use of violence is justifiable when resorted to as a matter of terrible necessity.” In the subsequent sentence, his thought process merges with that of Gandhi for whom non-violence was essential: “Non-violence as policy is indispensable for all mass movements.” Thus, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh were on the same page. If they had been alive today, they would have condemned the use of random violence in the name of religion to subjugate the minority.

The AAP started as a party of romantic revolutionaries who claimed to have found solace in Gandhian thought. If Anna Hazare was the face of the India Against Corruption movement then Arvind Kejriwal was the architect of the agitation. When Anna sat on a hunger strike, Gandhi’s picture was the overpowering backdrop and when the movement metamorphosed into a political party, minus Anna, Gandhi remained the icon of the leadership. But the sudden appearance of Bhagat Singh and Babasaheb Ambedkar on the walls of the AAP leaders’ offices, instead of Gandhi, indicates their loss of faith in Gandhian philosophy. Do they realise that Bhagat Singh’s thought process was antithetical to the AAP’s use of religion for electoral purposes?

In the beginning, AAP did not use religion to gather votes. In the 2013 and 2015 Delhi assembly elections, it chose candidates with clean images, irrespective of their religious beliefs. The focus was more on welfare measures. But in 2020, AAP changed its track. Kejriwal was seen reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and visiting a Hanuman temple with TV cameras following him. He ensured that his Diwali puja was live-streamed on different TV channels. He promised free rides to Ayodhya for senior citizens. It was a blatant use of religion to project himself as a Hindu leader and the AAP as a Hindu party.

The AAP leadership does not know that Bhagat Singh did not believe in God. Six years before he was hanged, he had become an atheist. He did not spare the Hindu religion either and mocked the theory of karma. He wrote, “What about the punishment of those who were deliberately kept ignorant by the haughty and egotistical Brahmins and who had to pay the penalty of lead being poured in their ears for having heard a few sentences of your sacred books of learning, the Vedas? … my dear friends, these theories are the inventions of the privileged ones; they justify their usurped power, riches and superiority by the help of these theories.” This shows that Bhagat Singh, unlike Gandhi who was religious to the core and was proud of his Sanatan Hindu identity, had scant regard for religion and found it “tyrannical and exploitative”.

In today’s world when religion, or its perverted form, dominates the socio-political discourse, AAP would have been more comfortable in the company of Gandhi but it has moved towards Bhagat Singh. In this context will it not be pertinent to ask if AAP really believes in Bhagat Singh?If yes, then how come Hanuman and Bhagat Singh are walking together? Or perhaps AAP, in its imagined political laboratory, has created a strange, ideological cocktail which is led more by electoral expediency than ideological purity. In this quest, if calling Muslims Bangladeshis and Rohingyas fetches them more votes, it’s better. Anyway, who is worried about ideology when winning elections? Let’s not forget that opportunism is also an ideology.

The writer is editor, SatyaHindi.com and author of Hindu Rashtra