When Swami Vivekananda was touring North India, a group of young men came to see him. They represented the cause of protecting cows. Swamiji asked them why they were seeking a ban on cow slaughter. They responded that cow was their mother. “That I can see,” was all Vivekananda muttered. The anecdote explains the gulf between an intellectually-oriented Hindu and those who are cadres. Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh belongs to the latter category.
In an article some time ago, historian Ramchandra Guha wrote about the lack of right wing intellectuals in India, saying: “There is a distinction to be drawn between intellectuals and ideologues, who are more interested in promoting their political or religious beliefs than in contributing to the growth of knowledge. The writings of ideologues are rarely based on serious or extended research.”
If Kalyan Singh is now viewed as a BJP ideologue, his utter lack of knowledge on Rabindranath Tagore’s five-stanza poem “Bharata Bidhata” and the context in which it was composed illustrates how idiotic such ideologues are. First, let us go through the poem for the uninitiated ones. Kalyan Singh thinks that the ‘adhinayaka’ mentioned in the song was King George V. Clearly, he never had the occasion to read the whole poem. Had he done so, he would perhaps have read the beginning of the third stanza:
“The way of life is sombre as it moves through ups and downs,
But we, the pilgrims, have followed it through ages.
Oh! Eternal Charioteer, the wheels of your chariot
Echo day and night in the path.”