Chatur Baniya, de-legitimization of Mahatma

BJP President Amit Shah de-legitimizing Gandhi as 'Chatur Baniya'

• Jamnalal Bajaj once told Gandhi that he was a foolish Baniya, always maintaining the accounts. 
• Modi & BJP re-writing books and history to edit Jawaharlal Nehru out of public memory using social media spreading wonderfully inventive and salacious stories about him is an errant nonsense. 
• Now BJP & Modi are trying to bring Gandhi down in national imagination, cheapening him as a Baniya — all because they want to get at the Congress Party. 
• These chelas of  Sardar Patel are loudly claiming for pitting him against Jawaharlal Nehru, with all their wonderful fictionalized accounts of how Gandhi cheated Patel out of the Prime Ministership of free India. 
• But they still go to Rajghat every year. They try to imitate charkha-spinning. When it suits them, some of them go as far as observing a ‘fast’.
• Gandhi has been abused all his life and much more after his death. Gandhi had been a beneficiary of some of the choicest abuses from many quarters — the Tories, the Communists, all those Hindu Mahasabhaites, at times even Ambedkar was unsparing. But they all argued with Gandhi's ideas, questioned his actions and programmes, but nobody called him a Baniya, leave alone a chatur Baniya. 
• What BJP is doing is to de-legitimise all those institutions, ideas, ideologies, individuals who were associated with the freedom struggle, nationalist movement and transformation of India into a modern state. 
• Gandhi's desire that the Congress should convert itself into a non-political Lok Seva Sangh, for reconstruction of India,was one of the most misunderstood and cited out of context. Ironically, Congress Party didn’t dissolve, its social and political programmes geared for electoral politics, static government and it has for the six decades come to symbolize the establishment to the Indian people.
• Gandhi knew very well that after the British left, the Congressmen were not going to retire to the jungle and leave the political field open for the Hindu Mahasabhaites or the Communists to take over the arena. The Congressmen were not so unworldly as to leave the field for all those forces which had opposed freedom struggle, sided with the colonial authorities. Congressmen's Political life cannot simply be brought to an end! Congress now has to govern, not to oppose government. So it will have to function in a new way, staying within politics.
• BJP are getting good at twisting and distorting. Their insinuation that somehow a power-hungry Congress disregarded Gandhi's ideas about the Lok Seva Sangh is totally bogus. Gandhi knew about organisation, control, order, and power; never in his wildest of dreams he could countenance a situation where the most formidable organisation — the Indian National Congress — would have vacated the commanding heights of Indian politics and left the field for the Savarkarites and Mahasabhaites to take over the store. 
• This cherry-picking from history to denigrate national leaders and inject poison in people’s minds cannot be the basis of any national progress.
• BJP is firing shots at Nehru and now at Gandhi. Watch out, they may reduce Sardar Patel to just a Patidar. BJP may be good at counting votes and notes, but Congress cannot keep quiet in the face of the creeping institutionalized shoddiness in India’s political life and public space. 
• Finally the quality and content of our nationalism cannot be dictated by a demagogue.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, 

to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind ...  George Orwell