What’s in a name?
The changing of the name of Aurangzeb Road to Dr A.P.J Abdul Kalam Road is not the first time a road name has been changed in Delhi. The previous Congress government renamed Connaught Place as Rajiv Gandhi Chowk and Connaught Circus as Indira Chowk but this is the first time a historical personage has been removed as a way of ‘correcting’ history.
No doubt it is a clear attempt to appease ring wing sections of society by presenting a simplistic view of history in which Aurangzeb is nothing but a killer of Hindus. From the moment the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC) decided to rename Aurangzeb Road to honour the former President of India in a ‘Good Muslim replaces a Bad Muslim’ exercise, the media have failed to give readers any clarity on the issue or add a few layers to the simple binaries of good and bad that inform the average person’s understanding of history.
The first response of the print and electronic media was to report the decision as a regular story. It took a few days for newspapers, largely through columns, to start asking questions. The TV channels remained occupied with the Sheena Bohra murder or, if they addressed the renaming issue at all, it was only to hold a noisy debate.
To start with India Today, Karan Thapar in his programme “To the Point’ tussled with Swapan Dasgupta over the issue of the guidelines that were disregarded in the renaming while neglecting other important angles in the story.
NDTV raised the important question of denying history but was silent on the political question of how both the BJP and the AAP sided with each other to please right wing sentiments.
Over at News X, the debate revolved around the question of whether the renaming was a fitting tribute to Kalam which involved graphic comparisons between the two men. At CNN IBN, anchor Zacca Jakob repeatedly labeled Aurangzeb a despot and was at pains to understand how historians such as Irfan Habib could support such a tyrant.
Hindi news channels were even worse in their treatment. Aaj Tak and News 24, while clearly terming the renaming as political move, were not comfortable with the idea of anyone in a debate defending Aurangzeb.
But the prize for distasteful coverage must go to Zee News which bluntly supported the decision and lashed out at those who saw a communal angle in it. The channel claimed there was nothing wrong in replacing Aurangzeb, who is celebrated in Pakistani textbooks, with someone like Kalam who used to read the Gita.
Not a single news channel took a stand against the renaming of Aurangzeb Road yet it was the same media which had waxed indignant over ‘love jihad’ and ‘ghar wapsi’ and condemned them as communal. The reason why they were condemned as communal but not the Aurangzeb renaming is that the former lent themselves to sensationalizing in the way they were sold to urban audiences. In a market-driven media where advertising becomes the yardstick for deciding how news should be shaped and packaged, only stories that can generate an impact on audiences are presented.
The renaming of Aurangzeb Road does not fall into that category as it demands an informed debate and a discussion of some depth which the media cannot be bothered with. Far easier to tear up a few chapters from history to fit a new narrative in which only events and people that glorify Hinduism will find space in the media.
History is not about honouring or dishonoring historical figures but an effort to understand them in their social and political contexts. As the great historian E. H. Carr said, history is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.
Some of the facts about Aurangzeb are that he imposed the ‘jizya’ (a tax on non-Muslims), destroyed many Hindu temples, and killed his own brothers to become the king. Other facts are that he patronized many Hindu temples and gave them grants. As to comparing him with Kalam, the effort is not worthy of comment, ridiculous as it is to compare a Mughal with a president who lived in a democracy.
In its determination to reduce everything to child-like terms, the media constructs the Good Muslim vs Bad Muslim binary with Kalam as the Good Muslim who created India’s nuclear programme and Afzal Guru and Yakub Menon as the Bad Muslims. Similarly, the media recently carried news of Muslim youth joining ISIS without bothering to verify the facts. This tendency is amplified manifold by Indian cinema in recent movies such as Phantom and Baby.
In doing this, the media fails in its responsibility to check whether the secular ethos of the nation is intact, scrutinize any efforts to communalize the atmosphere, and highlight the communal agenda of right wing parties. It also fails in the moral role it must play in society by providing space for marginalized groups or views to be expressed.
Maanvender Singh is a Phd Student, in the Department of History, Sikkim University, Gangtok