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As India marks 75 years of independence, Mahatma Gandhi is cast aside

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HYDERABAD, India — When Indian screenwriter Vijayendra Prasad set out 5 years in the past to write down an motion movie, he wished to inform a fictional story however pay tribute to the “real warriors” of India’s freedom wrestle.

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The outcome was “RRR,” a three-hour, visual-effects spectacle that was launched this spring and immediately broke records on the Indian field workplace. In the movie’s climax, a muscle-bound protagonist retrieves a bow from a shrine to the Hindu god Ram and cuts down hapless British troopers with a hail of arrows. Then he arms Indian villagers with weapons to combat their colonial oppressors earlier than launching right into a lavish song-and-dance quantity that eulogizes an inventory of real-life revolutionaries from Indian historical past.

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Absent from the names? Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian pacifist who has been celebrated by many — together with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — as an inspiration and an icon of nonviolent resistance.

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“The time has come to let Indians know the truth, the real warriors who should be honored,” Prasad mentioned just lately in his workplace in Hyderabad, a hub of the fast-growing south Indian movie business. “The real reason why we got independence was not because of Mr. Gandhi. That’s the fact.”

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As India celebrates 75 years of independence on Monday, the legacy of the “father of the nation” who advocated nonviolence and secularism is being debated, downplayed and derided as by no means earlier than. Instead, Indians are embracing a pantheon of different twentieth century heroes, significantly leaders who favored armed wrestle or overtly championed Hindus, in a mirrored image of the nation’s temper and its shifting politics.

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Today, at rallies of Hindu nationalist hard-liners, Gandhi is routinely vilified as feeble in his ways in opposition to the British and overly conciliatory to India’s Muslims, who broke off and fashioned their very own state, Pakistan, on Aug. 14, 1947. On social media and on-line boards, exaggerations and falsehoods abound about Gandhi’s alleged betrayal of Hindus. And in well-liked movies and the political mainstream, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru — the primary prime minister — are sidelined, whereas nationalists who advocated the power of arms have been elevated.

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India is basically rethinking whether or not Gandhi may have delivered freedom out of colonialism with out the specter of bloodshed — which so clearly contributed to the British loss of urge for food for empire — and whether or not his beliefs ought to be the nation’s bedrock rules.

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“The current government has been trying to project itself as a government that is macho, defiant, strong, and won’t take nonsense from anybody,” mentioned Tushar A. Gandhi, an writer and the independence chief’s great-grandson. “There is an ongoing campaign to eradicate Gandhi from the psyche of the Indian people, or at least reduce his qualities to the point it is trivial and meaningless.”

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Personifying the cultural shift is Narendra Modi, the favored prime minister who is portrayed by his allies as a residing counterpoint to Gandhi and Nehru: powerful on Islamic separatists, steeped in Hindu nationalism, formidable on the world stage and — if his marketing campaign speeches are to be taken actually — bodily imposing, with a 56-inch chest.

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Since 2018, Modi has introduced new statues of two freedom fighters: Subhash Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who cut up with Gandhi, fashioned a military in opposition to the British and sought assist from Nazi Germany and imperial Japan; and Vallabhbhai Patel, a former residence minister who effectively consolidated India’s territory with the use of navy power and professed issues about Indian Muslims’ loyalty. While each males are revered by Indians throughout the political spectrum, they’ve been significantly embraced by the proper.

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When the Ministry of Culture launched a video this month to encourage residents to watch the independence anniversary, it featured cameos from Bollywood stars and confirmed statues of Bose and Patel. Gandhi and Nehru didn’t make the reduce.

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Nor did they seem in “RRR.” Prasad ended his summer time blockbuster with tributes to Bose, Patel and Bhagat Singh, a people hero who shot a British policeman and bombed the parliament constructing in Delhi earlier than being hanged in 1931. They have been the type of heroes who compelled the British to go residence, Prasad defined.

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“You cannot preach nonviolence when facing brutes and killers,” mentioned the author, who was nominated by Modi to the higher home of parliament in June for his contributions to tradition. “Mr. Gandhi was not a bad man, but the praise that built up around him over the decades? Today’s younger generation are questioning it, because so many historical facts are coming out.”

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Since his dying, Gandhi’s accomplishments and failings have been vigorously debated by Indian historians and writers. Many argue that Gandhi was excessively valorized — and the contributions of militant leaders neglected — within the a long time after 1947, when his celebration, the Indian National Congress, dominated politics and formed the nation’s mythmaking. More just lately, students have criticized Gandhi’s views on race and gender, including wrinkles to his legacy.

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But the wave of revisionism has accelerated and grown mainstream in current a long time, particularly with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the decline of the Congress. The BJP has roots within the Hindu nationalist motion that opposed Gandhi’s secular ideology throughout his lifetime and favored a imaginative and prescient of India as a Hindu state. Nathuram Godse, the person who shot Gandhi 3 times within the chest in 1948, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS), an influential Hindu nationalist group that Modi would take part 1978 as a younger cadet.

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“Criticism of Gandhi isn’t new, but what is interesting is it is taking root once again at this moment when you have a new nationalist ideology of the BJP trying to assert its hegemony,” mentioned Srinath Raghavan, a historian at Ashoka University. Because organizations just like the RSS stayed away from the Gandhi-led independence motion, Raghavan added, their “search for historical legitimacy has required a search for alternative nationalist icons.”

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Brutal killing in India stirs fears of escalating religious violence

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To make sure, Modi, 71, has repeatedly paid respect to Gandhi at public ceremonies and in speeches. When fellow BJP lawmakers have praised Godse as a patriot, Modi has scolded them. In 2011, when Modi, then serving because the chief of Gujarat state, banned a biography by an American journalist that prompt Gandhi had a same-sex relationship and racist views, Modi mentioned the e book defamed an “an idol not only in India but in the entire world.”

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But he additionally stayed silent previously 12 months, because the Hindu far proper gathered for a collection of spiritual assemblies through which audio system referred to as for violence in opposition to Muslims — and hatred of Gandhi turned a working theme. At a December rally, a Hindu cleric saluted Godse and argued that India can be stronger than America in the present day had Patel, not Nehru, been its first prime minister.

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One of the high-profile activists on the rallies, Pooja Shakun Pandey, mentioned she believed Modi privately shared the far proper’s disdain for Gandhi. “He is bound by the circumstances of his secular chair, but I believe in his heart of his hearts, he has the same feelings,” Pandey mentioned. “His upbringing was in the RSS, and the RSS teaches in its classrooms: ‘Who is the real hero, Godse or Gandhi?’”

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On the anniversary of Gandhi’s dying in 2019, Pandey made headlines when she picked up an airsoft gun and fired three pictures into an effigy of him, which spurted pretend blood. What was wanted in India, she mentioned, was nationwide energy, larger militarization, extra coaching for India’s younger males to combat in opposition to what she referred to as the risk of Islamic jihad.

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“You have to become spiritually and physically strong,” she mentioned.

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In 1998, the federal government underneath the BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee banned a Mumbai theater manufacturing that featured Gandhi’s killer because the protagonist. But for the reason that 2000s, extra movies have emerged to discover the lives of lesser-known nationalists, radicals and Gandhi’s rivals. In 2004, the acclaimed director Shyam Benegal launched a biopic about Bose, the militant nationalist, with the subtitle, “The Forgotten Hero.”

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Today, extra mass-market movies are being made that “anticipate” the nation’s rightward shift, mentioned Srinivas S.V., a professor at Azim Premji University who research Indian cinema. “We see a preference for a more muscular nationalism and a rewriting of the kind of nationalist who we should be respecting,” he mentioned. But, he cautioned, some well-liked narratives are derived “from internet re-tellings of history, which are not evidence-based.”

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Mahesh Manjrekar, a filmmaker and actor who starred within the 2008 British drama “Slumdog Millionaire,” plans to launch an image this 12 months about Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a forefather of Hindu-nationalist thought who was charged as a co-conspirator in Gandhi’s killing. Manjrekar additionally has an upcoming venture about Godse, which he plugged on Instagram as “a story no one dared to tell before!”

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How bulldozers in India became a symbol of Hindu nationalism

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Prasad, the “RRR” author, says he, too, has undergone a change in current years.

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Born right into a rich Telugu-speaking household in southern India in 1941, Prasad had an extended and profitable writing profession earlier than “RRR” and regularly collaborated along with his son, the director S. S. Rajamouli. The plots he conjured up typically turned hits. They included “Baahubali,” an motion epic set in historic India, and “Bajrangi Bhaijaan,” a drama a few religious Hindu (performed by the famous person Salman Khan) who befriends a mute Pakistani Muslim lady.

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Five years in the past, Prasad mentioned, his buddies despatched him on-line posts about Gandhi and the historical past of independence, which upended the orthodoxy he discovered in class.

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Prasad started digging on-line and concluded that Gandhi was undemocratic, and the partition of India “unfortunate.” And whereas Nehru failed to guard Hindu ladies from being violated by Muslims in Prasad’s residence metropolis of Hyderabad within the early days of the republic, Patel despatched within the navy, he mentioned.

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These days, Prasad has grown a bushy white beard, turned vegetarian and expounds on the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings to guests. But he referred to as on Hindus to embrace spiritual pluralism and condemned the Hindu nationalist fringe that worships Gandhi’s killer. “No person is perfect,” he mentioned. “But no person deserved to be killed.”

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When “RRR” lastly hit theaters this 12 months after a prolonged manufacturing that price $70 million — essentially the most in Indian movie historical past — it got here loaded not simply with political but in addition spiritual undertones.

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Prasad’s story was loosely primarily based on the story of Alluri Sitarama Raju, a real-life, southern Indian guerrilla. In the movie, Alluri devises an elaborate plot to acquire weapons for the Indian resistance. After quite a few explosions, fistfights and a jailbreak, he finds himself hunted by British troopers in a forest. Wounded and determined, Alluri out of the blue morphs into a personality who bears a hanging resemblance to the Hindu god Ram himself. The transformation scene was so well-liked that when “RRR” premiered, some Indian theaters burst into spontaneous cheers and cries of “Hail, Lord Ram,” a chant favored by Hindu nationalists.

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Reinvigorated and clad in a saffron dhoti, Ram exacts revenge on the despotic British governor with the assistance of his burly good friend Bheem, who bears a resemblance to the Hindu god Hanuman.

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Ultimately, Prasad mentioned, “RRR” was fictional, however the underlying message for Indians was actual.

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“We created an alternate history,” he mentioned. “But the inherent themes — patriotism, honor, commitment to country — it’s all there.”

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Anant Gupta contributed to this report

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