sm is new. In his book Worshipping False Gods, for example, Arun Shourie castigates Ambedkar for working with the British government. Contextually, Ambedkar was clear that in trying to emancipate Dalits, he was fine with working with the colonial government. But he was not the only one. Almost every political movement in colonial India worked with the British at one time or the other. The Congress formed provincial governments in 1939 under a British scheme, a decision that was sharply criticised by the party’s own leftist leaders such as Subhash Chandra Bose, who wanted to oppose the Raj and not work with it. Even Mohandas Gandhi thought the British Empire good enough to want to recruit Indians to fight for it in World War I. And, of course, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, opposed the Quit India movement of 1942 as a minister in the Bengal government.
The debate is further confused by the fact that the modern Indian Army – and the Pakistan Army – is the same that served the British right until 1947. Delhi’s India Gate was built to commemorate the Indian soldiers who died fighting for the British Empire in World War I. While Bhima Koregaon is loaded with a powerful narrative of the Dalits battling caste oppression that runs parallel to the uncomfortable fact of it being a victory for colonialism, Indians fighting in World War I had no such emancipatory goal. Yet, the role of the Indian Army in World War I is widely celebrated with little controversy.
This differentiation might seem problematic but it really is not. Holding multiple perspectives of the past is quite normal. The Indian peoples are a variegated lot and so are their histories. It is, therefore, possible to both mourn Bhima Koregaon as a victory for British colonialism and celebrate it for helping destroy a terrible system of caste apartheid.
Indians, in fact, have mostly been comfortable with this complexity. Until now, that is. Remember, Bhima Koregaon had been celebrated without incident for 90 years until this year. What has changed now is the emergence of the BJP’s strict European-style nationalism, where anything other than the nationalist narrative is sought to be airbrushed. But given India’s fantastic diversity and long record of resistance to one-size-fits-all narratives, this mono-nationalism might take some time to take shape, if, that is, the BJP manages to make it happen at all.