The revanchist government of the day was clearly canny enough to understand that removing Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the rural employment guarantee scheme (MGNREGA) which was an enforceable right-to-work budgeted endowment would be seen as an egregious enormity, a veritable red line even for compliant Hindu followers.

So, they pressed into service the only entity that could be considered a higher-up in the spiritual pecking order, namely, Lord Ram.

The calculation clearly has been that opposition to this gauche displacement would not but be amenable to propagation as doing dirt on Bharatiyata, now interchangeable with denominational majoritarianism.

That many Indians in the Hindi belt are by now readied to giving assent to this gimmick is of course a tragic testament to the success of the mercantile, transactional, and however unscrupulous state-politics of the last decade or so; as also to the collapse of secular-democratic forces who espouse constitutional rule.

The “rising” middle classes sold out on the vacuous slogan of “development” could not c are less: their pilgrimages continue to be undertaken in tandem with a canny eye on the main chance.

But the vast majority of genuine Ram bakhtas (devotees) may well be asking themselves, however silently, whether a greater sacrilege could be committed than peddling Lord Ram as a cleverly fashioned acronym for entirely mercenary purposes.

There is that verse in Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas which instructs us how the god Ram is most to be found where live the deen (destitute) of the land.

Thus, what sin may be more unforgivable than to use his name cunningly to rob the destitute of what morsels have thus far been promised to them in the hinterlands as a legally obtainable constitutional right.

That this act of pilferage should be sought to be sold as a greater benevolence than obtained before must indeed compound that sin beyond redemption.

But then, as the honourable numero uno’s office comes to be christened a tirth (a sanctum wherein the gods are worshipped for redress), Lord Ram may have come to play second fiddle to the Deus-Ex-Official-Machina ergo, God-in-the-Official-Machine.

Another matter, rather a comical side-show, that a venerable Shankaracharya – authorised apex of Sanatan belief system – should have made bold to express doctrinal chagrin at the official gumption.

We have in recent times seen saffron-clad satraps of the empowered right-wing shoot symbolic blanks into Gandhi’s effigy on the day the nation commemorates his birth. These are unpunished occurrences which show the lies in the honour that the lords of the day still feel they need to accord to the father of the nation on politic occasions.

Often in history, great enormities are followed by great forgetting; it remains to be seen how soon the popular imagination of Ram bakhtas may persuade them to put behind themselves this reduction of their faith to commercial kitsch.

Nor is it certain that the political opposition led by Gandhi’s erstwhile party, even if for a brief interregnum, will know how to turn the crass moment on its head, add the force of Lord Ram to a most devoted bakhta, Gandhi, and unleash a mass refusal of what the Modi regime has done, promising a satyagraha puissant enough to defeat those who dishonour both Ram and Gandhi, and who seek to dupe millions of credulous citizens with politic contempt for their intelligence.

One virtue greatly lauded in Hindu thought, as it is in some forms of Christianity and in Budhism and Jainism, is renunciation.

But the caveat is often left out of this text: it is not those that have who are meant to renounce, but those that haven’t.

Thus, ask not what an employment guarantee scheme can do for you, ask what it is you can do to fatten coffers which announce our greatness to the world.

Tailpiece

The final coup de grâce in the dethronement of the father of the nation may be yet to come.

In January of 2017, an illustrious minister in the then BJP-ruled Haryana cabinet had shared his finding that the Indian currency was undergoing loss of value owing to the fact that the inauspicious and meek figure of the non-combative Gandhi is printed on our rupee notes.

Well, the time may not be too far when this cause of our unstopping currency devaluation (the rupee now having plunged to the historic nadir of 91 to the dollar, the mighty Modi notwithstanding) may finally need to be taken head on.

The meek Gandhi may require to be replaced by a muscular facsimilie, be it of Modi or Savarkar, the latter more appropriate as a self-confessed militant “other” to Gandhi’s “effeminate” Hinduism.

Given that Anil Vij had made his ingenious finding public at the time when Gandhi was replaced by Modi as the emblem for Khadi – that prime logo of a freedom struggle of which the Modi-Vij forces were no part – why may Bapu now not be dislodged from the rupee?

Trump and the dollar had better be on their guard.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

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