Hitler’s Strange Afterlife in India.
By Dilip D'Souza
Hated and mocked in much of the world, the Nazi leader has developed a
strange following among schoolchildren and readers of Mein Kampf in
India. Dilip D’Souza on how political leader Bal Thackeray influenced Indians to
admire Hitler and despise Gandhi.
My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in
Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids
to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure
they most admired.
Adolf Hitler speaks in 1936. (AP
Photo)
To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”
In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a
hero.
Still, why Hitler? “He was a fantastic orator,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He
loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of
pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles,” they said.
"And what about the millions he murdered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was
bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were
traitors.”
Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the
easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the
characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years,
Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame
and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot
profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of
patriotism.
But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this
is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of
admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.
Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in
the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As
a recent paper in the journal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have
editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition
in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years.
(Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Roadrunner, has
sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these
are significant numbers.
And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is available for sale on flipkart.com, India’s Amazon. As I write
this, 51 customers have rated the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rating.
What’s more, there’s a steady trickle of reports that say it has become a must-read for
business-school students; a management guide much like Spencer Johnson’s
Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. If this
undistinguished artist could take an entire country with him, I imagine the
reasoning goes, surely his book has some lessons for future captains of
industry?
Much of Hitler’s Indian afterlife is the legacy of Bal Thackeray, chief of
the Shiv Sena party who died
on Nov. 17.
Thackeray freely, openly, and often admitted his admiration for Hitler, his
book, the Nazis, and their methods. In 1993, for example, he gave an interview
to Time magazine. “There is nothing wrong,” he said then, “if [Indian]
Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.”
It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he ‘loved’ his country.
This interview came only months after the December 1992 and January 1993
riots in Mumbai, which left about a thousand Indians slaughtered, the majority
of them Muslim. Thackeray was active right through those weeks, writing
editorial after editorial in his party mouthpiece, “Saamna” (“Confrontation”)
about how to “treat” Muslims.
On Dec. 9, 1992, for example, his editorial contained these lines: “Pakistan
need not cross the borders and attack India. 250 million Muslims in India will
stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Pakistan’s seven atomic
bombs.”
A month later, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Muslims of Bhendi Bazar,
Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas [of Mumbai] we call Mini Pakistan …
must be shot on the spot.”
There was plenty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupted, Thackeray said this about the führer’s famous autobiography: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”
With rhetoric like that, it’s no wonder the streets of my city saw the slaughter of 1992-93. It’s no wonder kids come to admire a mass-murderer, to rationalize away his massacres. It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he “loved” his country.
In his acclaimed 1997 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen writes: “Hitler, in possession of great oratorical skills, was the [Nazi] Party’s most forceful public speaker. Like Hitler, the party from its earliest days was devoted to the destruction of … democracy [and to] most especially and relentlessly, anti-Semitism. … The Nazi Party became Hitler’s Party, obsessively anti-Semitic and apocalyptic in its rhetoric about its enemies.”
Do some substitutions in those sentences along the lines Thackeray wanted to do with Mein Kampf. Indeed, what you get is a more than adequate description of … no surprise, Thackeray himself.
Yes, it’s no wonder. Thackeray too was revered as an orator. Cremated, on Nov. 18, as a patriot.
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