Kalicharan Maharaj, a seer who was a part of the Chhattisgarh Dharma Sansad has been arrested from Khajurao, Madhya Pradesh by the Chhattisgarh police. The MP police on its part said that the Chhattisgarh police violated interstate protocol by arresting him without informing the local police. The legality of the arrest aside, that the Chhattisgarh police sprung into action and almost desperately arrested Kalicharan Maharaj for “hate speech” without even informing the local police, perhaps shows the sort of pressure they must have been under from their political masters.

Let’s face it. In India, such alacrity by the policy is only shown when the political ruling class takes special interest in a case. In this particular case, one is hardly surprised that the ruling class of Chhattisgarh had an insurmountable urge to see Kalicharan Maharaj behind bars.

In Chhattisgarh Dharma Sansad, Kalicharan had made certain statements against “Mahatma” Gandhi.

During his speech at Dharma Sansad, Kalicharan Maharaj said, “India was cut into two parts in front of our eyes. Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan were already separated. Bangladesh and Pakistan got separated in front of our eyes by them. They used politics to separate these parts from India. That Har*mi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi destroyed India. I bow down to Nathuram Godse Ji, who assassinated the Har*mi.”

He further added, “These ulcers of the society need to be surgically removed else they become cancer. I am not telling you to start riots. There is no need. You are not even ready. Muslims are prepared, you are not. If the Police were not there, we would have already been finished. There are saviours of religion among them.”

Kalicharan said far more. He spoke about Nehru becoming the Prime Minister even though Sardar Vallabhai Patel had more votes for the post, how the Police are controlled by leaders and are inherently against Hindus because of the leaders that control them, that there are several other competent leaders like Jyotiraditya Scindia, the partition and Gandhi’s role in it and most pertinently, how nobody can become the “father of the nation” since India has existed even before it became a nation-state.

For his statements, Kalicharan Maharaj was arrested under sections 505(2) and 294. Essentially, the police thought that his statements were “creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes and that he recited obscene words in public”.

The merits of the rest of the arguments made by Kalicharan were sidelined. The FIRs filed are primarily because he used the word “harami” for MK Gandhi and also hailed Nathuram Godse, who had assassinated the man popularly revered as a “Mahatma” by the politically illiterate class of the country.

Political correctness requires one to hail the arrest and take a moral high ground saying that abusive language has to be condemned, and since the language was used for a Mahatma like Gandhi, the arrest is justified. In fact, many, from the non-left itself, have gone as far as to condemn in unequivocal terms the Dharma Sansads held in Chhattisgarh and Haridwar, not even talking about why such words were uttered in the first place – unbridled aggression by sections of the Muslim community and an outburst owing to decades of suppressed history.

For the sake of this article, let’s do something radical – say it as it is.

For starters, let’s not pretend that we are adverse, as a society, to abusive language or aggressive speeches. When the champagne glass is empty and we sit in a group of friends, most Indians are as loose with their tongue as Kalicharan Maharaj was in public. We might not admit it because modern society requires us to wear masks as an extension of ourselves, but we are trying to be as honest as we possibly can here.

Kalicharan Maharaj is being hunted not because he used the word “har*mi” but because he dared to use it against the “Mahatma”. Fair enough. Let me play the part and admit that abusive language for leaders should not be condoned in any way, manner or form. Any debate about leaders, past or present, must adhere to linguistic purity that has become the societal norm.

In fact, hailing the assassination of a leader is something that absolutely cannot be condoned.

Had Nathuram Godse not done what he did, MK Gandhi would have been alive to answer for his sins. Tell the world why he was branded a racist in South Africa, why his “experiments with chastity” bordered on paedophilic, why he asked Gopal Patha to lay down his arms and not defend Hindus, why he told Hindus to “maintain brotherhood” while the Moplah Muslims massacred Hindus, why BR Ambedkar thought that Gandhi turned a blind eye to the massacre of Hindus, so on and so forth.

The assassination of Gandhi forced Hindus to deal with the legacy of the assassination, which meant forever defending Hindus from the “Hindu terrorism” trope furthered and branded with hot iron on the heads of unsuspecting Hindus.

However, while we can disown the assassination, there must also be space to discuss why Nathuram Godse, who was himself a “bhakt” of Gandhi, chose to assassinate his idol. Does the assassination itself take away Godse’s nationalism? Does the crime of the assassination take away from the fact Godse had legitimate concerns about Gandhi’s conduct towards Hindus and during the partition of India?

The fundamental and internalised-Abrahamic need of Indians to create demi-Gods makes any honest discussion on Gandhi and his follies redundant, almost taboo and the deification of Gandhi has relegated many significant events, significant for Indians at large and Hindus specifically, to historical obscurity.

Mark 7:9 in the Bible says, “And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”. While Jesus called upon humans to reject Pagan Gods in an attempt to “establish their own tradition” and follow the word of Jesus, the only true God, a similar Jesus-Allah-fication is a norm for Indians, especially with leaders eulogised as a political project.

Just like the Bible calls the quest of pagans to establish their own tradition blasphemous, the political class has Jesus-Allah-fied Gandhi, to a point where the heathens are jailed if they dare to question the Demi-God. No leader, past or present, is beyond criticism, least of all MK Gandhi who can arguably be called a genocide enabler – standing by and letting Hindus be mercilessly massacred. When even Gods are questioned, false Gods have no right to be above scrutiny.

The apotheosis of Gandhi had political motivations. After 1947, Congress systematically propagandized the narrative that it was solely the Congress party that won India its freedom and it was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi with his enigmatic leadership who magically bestowed India with freedom through the sheer power of non-violence alone. Nehru’s Congress furthered this narrative because they chose to gain from it. Stalwarts like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose needed to be pushed aside, the memory of Veer Savarkar needed to be tarnished, the contributions of various other freedom fighters needed to be sidelined so that the Congress party with Gandhi as its face and Nehru as his ever-faithful disciple came to be regarded as the saviour of Indians.

Nehru and Gandhi committed many unfortunate errors and harboured many problematic notions. And Nehru sought to bury all of them under the deification of Gandhi.

If India and Hindus do not consciously decide to terminate the deification of Gandhi, India will see history repeated, mercilessly so, because there exists no honest evaluation of the sins of Gandhi that led India to decades of unrest that continues to this day.

One may not like Kalicharan Maharaj and the words he used for Gandhi. One may not like the overt aggression displayed by Hindus in the Dharma Sansads. One might even feel that such speeches must be made in private and that “hate speech” cannot be condoned even if it limits itself to calls for self-defence. In fact, we might also feel that such elements are political pawns unleashed right before elections. However, making allowances for the state to arrest those who espouse political opinions that are converse to the popular narrative is a dangerous slope that can only lead to the society slipping down a dark abyss.

The edifice of our moral grandstanding might stand on the shoulders of Kalicharan Maharaj today, but when a society closes its eyes and refuses to evaluate history honestly, it is doomed to repeat it. The endorsement of imprisonment for a problematic political speech about the past is not the hill Hindus should choose to die on.