[Reader-list] Dilip D'Souza: Hitler’s Strange Afterlife in India

[Patrice Riemens]

(bwo GoaNet)


> Hitler’s Strange Afterlife in India
> Nov 30, 2012 4:45 AM EST
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/30/hitler-s-strange-afterlife-in-india.html
>
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> For ten years in the US, DD was a computer scientist. After returning
> to India he started writing for his suppers, winning awards (most
> recently the Newsweek/Daily Beast Award for South Asia Commentary) and
> publishing books (most recently "Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in
> America" and "The Curious Case of Binayak Sen"). He lives in Bombay
> with his wife, two children, and two cats.
>
> For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at
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>