(
Ashok Malik is a columnist and writer living in Delhi.)
How time flies. Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Previous landmark anniversaries - the 10th in 1994, the 20th in 2004, the 25th in 2009 - were embraced and commemorated by Congress governments run by political disciples or family successors of the former prime minister.
Indeed, the Congress that came to office in 2004 reinvented itself as the party of Indira much more than the party of Jawaharlal Nehru or Rajiv Gandhi.
It was very much a family firm, not too concerned with strategic vision or modernist thinking, devoted to showy give-away programmes, niggardly about what authorities would be shared with or devolved upon state governments, and generally unwilling to let India break the shackles of economic and foreign policy shibboleths imposed on the country in the 1970s by Indira.
For some years and in some measure, Manmohan Singh tried to fight the negatives of the Indira legacy even as his political bosses espoused these. Soon enough, he gave up.
In a sense, the election of 2014 was a cathartic moment when India finally voted against not just the UPA government but the groupthink that the Indira years left the Congress with. It stands to reason that October 31 this year will be a more normal anniversary rather than the advertisement-laden day of worship that had been fashioned by the UPA.
It is fitting that the other person associated with October 31 - the day also marks Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's birthday - will finally get his due. As a fitting tribute to India's first Home Minister, who was instrumental in getting some 550 princely states to merge almost seamlessly into free India, October 31 will be celebrated as National Unity Day. A "Run for Unity" in the heart of New Delhi may be joined by the Prime Minister. Whatever the details, the fact is that Patel's birthday will finally be a national commemoration, not just a small sideshow or one limited to his home state of Gujarat.
This is important because it sends a strong message - a message that national icons need to be rescued from the obscurity the Congress has reserved for them. In the Congress' iconography, especially in the Indira years and after, the Nehru-Gandhis were the national leaders - as in they spoke for the nation and were beyond caste, community, class and regional identities. It followed that other leaders needed to be slotted into categories that were decidedly sub-national or regional.
Thus Rajiv Gandhi was commemorated as a national leader but Patel, subtly, was classified as a symbol of Gujarati regional pride. It is telling that both men got the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1991. Rajiv had been dead a few weeks. Patel had been dead four decades! During the 2012 Gujarat election campaign, a Congress-leaning political commentator, appearing on a news television show, said Narendra Modi was extolling Sardar Patel to woo the Patel vote in the state. From national leader to regional leader to caste leader, Patel's diminution was complete.
It isn't just Patel. Subhas Bose is presented as a Bengali symbol, Madan Mohan Malviya as an Uttar Pradesh Brahmin figure, Rajaji as a right-winger who lived in Tamil Nadu, Ambedkar as a Dalit who could swing a few votes in Maharashtra. If one moves down a generation, Charan Singh is a Jat or, to borrow the language of left-leaning scholars patronised by the Congress establishment, a "kulak leader". It is a wonder that such expressions and such semi-disguised pejoration are never deployed for Indira and her family.
This is not to suggest that Indira's wartime leadership in 1971 or Nehru's far greater record in office must not be appreciated and that the first Prime Minister's 125th birth anniversary should not be an occasion for contemporary India to honour him. All of this should happen. Having said that, India is a land that worships and reveres many gods.
The monotheism - perhaps mono-familialism - of the Congress is not a desirable or even natural order. October 31 is a good day to end it.
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