Pavan K. Varma | Jairam vitriol on Gita Press reeks of liberal illiberalism

The Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021 has been given to the Gita Press. The Press was founded in 1923, and started publication in 1927. Its avowed purpose was to make available at affordable prices seminal texts pertaining to Hinduism. By now, it has published some 160 million copies in 14 languages of the Bhagwat Gita, over a 100 million copies of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas, and other texts including the Mahabharata, Puranas, Upanishads and Surdas. It also has an archive of 3500 Hindu manuscripts. Today, it is the world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious texts.

The announcement of this Prize led Congress media head, Jairam Ramesh, to issue a vitriolic tweet stating that giving the Gandhi Peace Prize to Gita Press was a “travesty and like awarding Savarkar and Godse”.  Frankly, I was taken aback by this ill-informed and trigger-happy response. 

I am against all religious bigotry, and I do not support Hindu majoritarianism, or the outdated and impractical idea of Hindu Rashtra. But I am a proud Hindu, who believes there is a profound grandeur in Hindu philosophy. I have, therefore, great respect for the Gita Press that has enabled Hindu thought to be widely disseminated, not only among Hindus, but beyond. This was particularly necessary after centuries of colonial rule and the earlier Turkic invasion had broken the continuum of Hindu civilisation. 

The Gita Press took the sublime message of the Bhagwat Gita — Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite religious text — to millions of Hindus.  It also put the Ramcharitmanas, which Gandhiji described as “the greatest book in all devotional literature”, in almost every Hindu home, especially in north India. In 1926, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who was one of the co-founders of the Press, and the editor of the magazine Kalyan published by it, accompanied Jamnalal Bajaj to meet Gandhiji and seek his blessings for Kalyan. Gandhiji blessed it, but asked Poddar not to take advertisements and do book reviews. The Gita Press honoured both commitments, and even now has refused to accept the Rs 1 crore prize money accompanying the Prize. 

If religious fundamentalism is irrationally bigoted, shallow liberalism is smugly dogmatic. If one is doctrinaire and prone to violence, the other is culturally rootless and superficially cosmopolitan. In both there is no space for balance or nuance. The ire of Ramesh is based on a book by journalist Akshay Mukul, titled Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, which argues that the Gita Press was silent after the assassination of Gandhiji, and contributed to the growth of Hindu revivalism. Mukul also points out that Poddar and Gandhiji had differences of opinion later on, and that Poddar was arrested in 1948 after Gandhi’s assassination. These facts are true. But Poddar was among 25,000 people arrested after the assassination, released soon thereafter, and never convicted.

As regards differences of opinion, Dr Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru also differed with Gandhi on key issues. Did that automatically make them viscerally opposed to Gandhi? And since when has pride in Hinduism and propagating its texts become a crime comparable to what Godse did? In any case, the Prize has been given to Gita Press as an institution and not to Poddar.

Ramesh conveniently forgets that Congress Prime Minister (PM) P.V. Narasimha Rao issued a postage stamp in 1992 to honour Poddar and the Gita Press. The reflex secularist demonisation of Savarkar, too, is extreme. I emphatically disagree with Savarkar’s espousal of a Hindu Rashtra, but I have no doubt that he was a revolutionary patriot, who greatly suffered for the courage of his convictions, spending over a decade in the horrific Kala Pani jail in the Andamans — most of which in solitary confinement — and was no ‘coward’ begging for pardon from the British. It is the ultra-right in India which has myopically latched on to his argument of Hindu Rashtra, which was a short polemic he wrote while still under house arrest in Ratnagiri, and in response to certain specific developments then, including the support by Gandhiji to the pan-Islamicist Khilafat Movement, the demand by some Muslim League leaders for a separate state for Muslims, and the downplaying by the Congress of the terrible killing of Hindus in the Moplah riots in Kerala. That was in 1923, and it is on record that Savarkar himself subsequently downplayed his earlier ill-thought advocacy. We are now in 2023, a century after what he wrote, and over seven decades after we have adopted our Constitution that guarantees respect for all faiths.  Savarkar’s real contribution — on which he wrote in far more detail — was the need for social reform within Hinduism, something which his blind acolytes have conveniently forgotten. After Gandhiji’s assassination, he did come under suspicion, but was never convicted. In fact, Ramesh and his ilk forget that PM Indira Gandhi herself issued a postage stamp in 1970 to commemorate his contribution as a freedom fighter. All of this has been authentically documented in Vikram Sampath’s majestic two volume biography of Savarkar.

No prize is perfect in every respect. Previous recipients include international luminaries like Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. But in the case of Nyerere, for instance, while he was a staunch freedom fighter, and an inspiration for the struggle against colonialism across Africa, he also ran an authoritarian one-party government in independent Tanzania, which enabled him to remain President for over two decades (1964 to 1985). Was giving him the Gandhi Prize thus equivalent to endorsing dictatorship?

Secularism is an imperative for the plural, multi-religious reality of India. But to be credible it must not automatically conflate recognition of Hindu achievements for communalism. Respect for all faiths, and the right to “freely profess, practice and propagate religion”, as guaranteed by Article 25 of the Fundamental Rights of our Constitution, need to be harmonised. Ramesh should think before he impulsively tweets, and one can only hope that his views are not that of the Congress Party.