Maharashtra Politics Quotes

His startling career graph took off thanks not only to his uncanny ability to sniff out criminals but also to his connections with the political party that had ruled the state of Maharashtra for many years.

On 14 August, Gandhi met B.R. Ambedkar in Bombay. This was the first meeting between the two men, one for more than a decade the most important political leader in India, the other, younger by twenty-two years, and seeking to represent his own, desperately disadvantaged community of so-called ‘untouchables’. Both men knew of each other, of course; Ambedkar had been inspired by Gandhian ideas during his ‘Mahad Satyagraha’ of 1927, which Gandhi had praised in the columns of Young India. Remarkably, Gandhi did not know that Ambedkar was born in an ‘untouchable’ home. In Maharashtra, people of all castes took surnames after their village of origin, so ‘Ambedkar’ could merely mean ‘from the village of Ambed’. (Indeed, this was not Ambedkar’s original surname; he had been given it by a Brahmin teacher in his school.) Gandhi seems to have thought that—like Gokhale and Tilak before him—B.R. Ambedkar was an upper-caste reformer who took an interest in the uplift of the ‘untouchables’. Having worked for decades for the same cause, Gandhi was patronizing towards someone he saw as a fresh convert, a johnny-come-lately, whereas Ambedkar was in fact an ‘untouchable’ who had experienced acute discrimination himself. Gandhi’s tone offended Ambedkar, souring the relationship at the start.

[M]osques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions of Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors. In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagra, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizeable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, in as much as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.

Arun Shourie argues that although ‘the Mahabharata and the Ramayana describe warring states they are the epics of one people [emphasis mine]’,33 and, indeed, in the Ramayana, Rama goes across the subcontinent, from Ayodhya in the north to Sri Lanka at the very southern tip. Shourie bolsters his reasoning by a fascinating study of many Hindu rituals which clearly indicate this pan-Indian consciousness. ‘Only Namboodiris from Kerala are to be priests at Badrinath, those in the Pashupatinath temple at Kathmandu are always from South Kanara in Karnataka, those at Rameshwaram in the deep south are from Maharashtra. … Every Diwali the sari for the idol of Amba at Kolhapur comes from the Lord at Tirupati. The Sankalpa Mantra with which every puja commends the prayers in the deities, situates the yajyaman (the person organizing the puja) with reference to the salients and sacred rivers of the entire land.’34 Commenting on this, Dr Koenraad Elst says: ‘From hoary antiquity, the Sankalpa locates the Hindu worshipper in time and space, notably in Bharatvarsha, in a decreasing scale of geographical regions down to the city or region where the ritual is performed.’35 The truth is that, although it may be expedient for some people to deny an ancient Hindu civilisation, such a civilisational awareness was millennia old, and has had a lasting and verifiable impact on the evolution and, indeed, the very character of India. To admit this is not to invite ‘xenophobia’ or ‘cultural paranoia’. Nor is it the febrile imagination of Hindu enthusiasts. It is, simply, borne out by the facts of history, and cannot be controverted by superimposing the political attitudes of today on the cultural integrations of the past. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s most respected psychologists—and certainly no Hindutva-vadi—writes: ‘Indian-ness is about similarities produced by an overarching Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilization, that has contributed the lion’s share to what we would call the “cultural gene-pool” of India’s peoples.’36 The fact, or memory or acceptance, of such a civilisation can be devalued, marginalised, forgotten or ignored, but it cannot be erased.