This week, the Allahabad High Court has stayed UP Chief Minister Mayawati?s move to destroy Lucknow?s most prestigious sports complex and build a memorial to Ambedkar in its place. Unconfirmed reports say there is a move to build an Ambedkar statue taller than New York?s Statue of Liberty. There are already a record number of Ambedkar statues in UP?in every village and district. There is even a Greek-type pantheon with several dalit leaders, including the late Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram, but also Mayawati herself (armed with a handbag, too).
The intention will, no doubt, be cloaked in the Dalit empowerment argument. The one that asks why Dalits should be deprived of grand memorials while icons of the ?Brahminical? order are so big and many. But perhaps the central point in our treatment of dead leaders is the hope that naming things like roads after them offers the right escape route?to quietly dump what they stood for without having the aam janta find out.
The puzzle of why Sir Connaught?s Circus has been turned into a square (Rajiv Chowk, and a ?chowk? is a square in Hindi) is beyond most of us. A simple desire of the ruling establishment to stamp their leader?s name onto something central to the capital?s architecture? Perhaps.
All cities of India have an MG Road, an odd exception being that statueless ?planned city? of Chandigarh, and one wonders how much effort is made by these name-stampers to have what Mahatma Gandhi stood for remembered well enough to influence the public space as composed of people?s minds rather than represented by objects in the line of sight. The answer, most likely, is a cipher.
Congressmen have gone about indiscriminately calling things ?Nehru?, ?Indira? and ?Rajiv?, at least partly in a bid to ingratiate themselves with the Nehru-Gandhi family leadership of the day. Even the aam janta has caught on to the trick. Slums that come up on illegal land tend to bear the same names. It?s a demolition insurance policy.
The BJP, in its relatively short tenure, also named several streets after Deendayal Upadhyay. Maharashtra was particularly assaulted by the name change syndrome?several Vir Savarkar roads, for example. Left-ruled Kolkata also has its Lenin Sarani and Karl Marx Street. In southern India, the land of giant cutouts, the blasphemy of uttering as much as a word against a dead leader entails the risk of your joining him.
Irreverence towards an Annadurai or MGR in Tamil Nadu is particularly dangerous, a danger heightened ironically by the sentiments of the followers of Periyar, who in his lifetime had more than a word or two to say about such unreasoned adulation.
The motivations of our furious builders of statues, namers of roads and sculptors of public shapes in their leader?s own image need to be decoded. By pledging these places to the memory of someone whom they claim to derive their politics, theory or morals from, do they honour the person? Or do they fashion shields for themselves to deflect any flak as they cast aside those very ideals and forge ahead with their own ambitions?
Not that all symbols are cynical ploys. Names can be inspirational. Imagine naming a children?s park or museum after the first spaceship, or even the person who first spoke of radio waves?but usually, recognising excellence in a way that doesn?t serve a crude political purpose isn?t something our politicians are inclined to waste a moment on. The politics of ?remembering? someone, it seems, has become the most convenient way to ?forget? all that the person stood for. Returning to Mayawati?s stir, what she has forgotten, it seems, is that the structure she wants to pull down is already known as the Ambedkar Sports Complex. But no, nothing less than the Statue of Illiberty would do.