Golwalkar and Muslim Appeasement

 There is before us that famous instance of Maulana Mohammed Ali, once known as the ‘right hand’ of Mahatma Gandhi and a devout Muslim. He was the President-elect at the Kakinada session of Congress in 1923. The renowned songster-patriot Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar had come there to sing the national anthem Vande Mataram. Just as the session was about to commence, when he came forward to sing Vande Mataram, Maulana Saheb stopped him saying, “No, you cannot sing that song. It revolts against the spirit of our religion.” But the stout-heated Paluskar refused to be cowed down. He said that he had come expressly for that purpose and he would discharge his duty. In anger Maulana Saheb left the place and stayed away when the national anthem was being sung! There was not a single courageous soul among the whole crowd of leaders assembled there that had the guts to tell him, “Janab, this is our national anthem. Being the President of the National Congress, you should not object to its singing. You should not allow other considerations to come in the way of patriotism.” On the contrary, portions of Vande Mataram were thereafter dropped to appease Muslim fanaticism.

Thus, it was due to the utter lack of will and conviction on the part of our leaders to face the Muslim intransigence squarely from the standpoint of undiluted nationalism, that the seeds of appeasement of Muslims were sown. In their phantom chase of achieving a new unity and a new nationality, our leaders raised the slogan of ‘Hindu-Muslim unity’ and declared that anything that stood in its way should be forgotten. As they dared not tell the Muslim to forget his separatism, they pitched upon the docile Hindu for all their preachings. The first thing they preached was, that our nationality could not be called Hindu, that even our land could not be called by its traditional name Hindusthan, as that would offend the Muslim. The name ‘India’ given by the British was accepted. Taking that name, the ‘new nation’ was called the ‘Indian Nation.’ And the Hindu was asked to rename himself as ‘Indian’.