The takeover of a Gandhian institute in Varanasi by the Uttar Pradesh government is an attack on everything the Mahatma stood for, members of the Sarva Seva Sangh said in Calcutta on Monday.
“The Seva Sangh is just a pretext. Mahatma Gandhi’s values and his beliefs are the real targets of the saffron ecosystem,” said Chandan Pal, 78, president of the Sarva Seva Sangh, the national apex body of all Gandhian institutes in the country.
On July 22, Uttar Pradesh police barged into the Varanasi branch of the Sangh, marking a takeover of the six-decade-old Gandhian institute that the government allegedly plans to demolish.
The government claims the institute stands on 13 acres of encroached-on railway land. The Sangh denies the charge, alleging a ploy by the BJP government to “erase every symbol of Gandhi”.
An Uttar Pradesh court will hear the matter on August 3, said Pal.
Pal, president of the Sarva Seva Sangh that is headquartered in Wardha, Maharashtra; Ram Dhiraj, head of the Seva Sangh’s Varanasi branch; and six other Gandhian protesters were arrested in the police crackdown. They are out on bail.
“Mahatma Gandhi died in 1948. But even today, he is the biggest force against the RSS ideology. So, the current regime is determined to target institutions that are true to his legacy,” said Pal.
He said history repeated itself on July 22. “Around 130 years ago, a young Gandhi was forced out of a train in South Africa. On July 22, his followers were also driven out of their rightful place,” he said.
The Sangh houses the Gandhi Vidya Sansthan, an institute that holds classes on Gandhian philosophy and was co-founded by Jayprakash Narayan to propagate the non-violent ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave.
Over 100 children, mostly from families of ragpickers and boatmen, received non-formal education at the institute. With the takeover, their future is in jeopardy.
Pal and fellow Gandhians said they had tried to reach out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the local MP, but the efforts did not bear fruit.
“We wanted to meet the Prime Minister during his trip to Varanasi. We also wanted to submit a memorandum. But we did not get a chance. So, we floated a copy of the memorandum in the Ganga. Modi claims he is the son of Ganga. So, we hoped he would get to know our grievances from his mother,” said Pal.
The Varanasi unit has about 50 members, mostly elderly Gandhians who pay a membership fee and are associated with the Seva Sangh’s work. Some of them also taught at its school.
The news conference by the Bengal unit of the Seva Sangh, which was hosted by the Calcutta Press Club on Monday, was also marked by the presence of many elderly Gandhians.
One of them was 91-year-old Kajal Sen, associated with the Majhihira Ashram. The ashram was established in 1940 by a group of freedom fighters in a remote village in Purulia (erstwhile Manbhum district of Bihar), with the objective of spreading basic education as enunciated by the Mahatma.
Sen walks with a slight lean and is short of hearing. But he spoke with a spontaneity that belied his age. When this newspaper asked him about the state of affairs in the country, he replied with a few lines from an old Hindi poem. “Andheri nagri, chaupat raja; take ser bhaji take ser khaja,” said Sen.
He interpreted the meaning. “The land plunges into darkness under an incompetent ruler. There is no distinction between one thing from another. The subjects have no value. Everything seems the same for the ruler.”
The late nineteenth-century Hindi poem by Bhartendu Harishchandra is interpreted as a satire on colonial India.
Sen is the grandson of Nibaran Chandra Dasgupta, who led the freedom struggle in erstwhile Manbhum and a close friend of Atul Chandra Ghosh, fondly called the Gandhi of Manbhum.
He acknowledged that Gandhian values were under an “institutionalised attack”.
“But Gandhi will fight back when the back is against the wall. His values will stage a comeback,” he said.
On Monday, the members highlighted the Seva Sangh’s association with some of the stalwarts of Indian history, like Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Kripalani, Vinoba Bhave, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Zakir Hussain, Jayaprakash Narayan and Lalbahadur Shastri.
“In a lawsuit, the railways have alleged that all the land purchased by the Sangh... have been prepared in a fraudulent manner. Therefore, to call it fabricated is to target personalities like Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan,
Lalbahadur Shastri, Jagjivan Ram, Radhakrishna Bajaj and Rajendra Prasad. This is an insult to the great
freedom fighters,” the Bengal unit of the Sangh said in a statement.
Manabendra Mandal, 83, the chairman of the West Bengal Gandhi Peace Foundation, on Monday, spoke on the RSS bid to “distort history”.
“They are changing history books in a bid to change history,” he said.
Left Front chairman Biman Bose and Trinamul leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay and rights activist Sujato Bhadra sent solidarity messages that were read out from the dais.