Living in the past.

2025 was a year of living in the past. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the Ramnath Goenka lecture in Delhi, accused the Congress of advancing the ideas of Thomas Babington Macaulay and perpetuating a 'colonial mindset' in India." ABP. Macaulay served on the Supreme Council in India from 1834 to 1838 and died in 1859 at the age of 59 years. wikipedia. Mr Modi first came to power by winning the 2014 general election, with 282 seats, giving his party the BJP absolute majority. wikipedia. Mr Modi has held absolute power for over 11 years, yet he blames Macaulay who was in India for only 4 years. The other boogeyman used by Mr Modi to terrify his followers is India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, repeatedly attacking him and members of his family for all the ills of India. The Print. A few days ago, Mr Modi "launched a fierce attack on Jawaharlal Nehru and Congress during the Parliamentary discussion on Vande Mataram, accusing the party of yielding to the Muslim League and weakening national sentiment." TOI. In an unnecessary waste of time, Mr Modi accused the Congress of removing "important stanzas" from the original song during its 1937 Faizabad session. TOI. Vande Mataram was written by Bengali poet and writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894) and set to music by Rabindranath Tagore. wikipedia. In his speech Mr Modi referred to "Bankim Da" (Da means elder brother), to which TMC MP Saugata Roy objected, "You are saying Bankim Da? You should say Bankim Babu." India Today. Bengalis are proud of their culture. "By misapplying the suffix, he didn't just make a linguistic mistake, he validated TMC's accusation that he is 'grotesquely alien' to Bengal's cultural consciousness," wrote Aparna Bhattacharya. While Mr Modi is trying to appropriate Bengali icons to win Bengali votes in next year's election to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly to be held between April and May 2026 (wikipedia), the BJP's Karimganj unit in Assam accused a Bengali Congress leader of treason for humming two lines from "Amar Sonar Bangla, Ami To May Bhalobashi" (My Golden Bengal, thee I love) written by another Bengali icon Rabindranath Tagore (HT) and appropriated by Bangladesh as its national anthem. "The Assam government...has asked Assam police to slap a case of sedition on the senior Congress leaders singing Bangladesh's national anthem." ET. In delicious irony, the sedition law was drafted by Thomas Macaulay in 1837 and adopted into the Indian Penal Code in 1860. wikipedia. To add insult to injury, BJP MP from Karnataka asserted that India's national anthem 'Jana Gana Mana', also by Tagore, "was originally written to honor the British. HT. In fierce opposition to Mr Modi's three languages formula in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin wrote in English, "Tamil Nadu will not tolerate Hindi colonialism replacing British colonialism." TOI. Nehru will always be remembered as creating a Constitution for India, establishing higher educational institutions, engineering factories, keeping the army separate from politics  (HT) and establishing democracy. What will Mr Modi legacy be? A saviour of Hindus or just a "name-changer" megalomaniac, obsessed with staying in power forever? The past has passed. Let it rest.