For three years now, Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah has been praising Raja Suheldev, who is said to be an 11th century ruler of Shrasvati, located in present-day Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district. Shah has often hailed Suheldev as a national hero, and unveiled his statue in Bahraich in February 2016. Two months later, the Indian Railways, perhaps taking a cue from Shah, reversed its policy of not naming trains after personalities and started the Suheldev Express between Ghazipur and Delhi
Last month, the Uttar Pradesh government announced plans to install a statue of Suheldev – to be cast in bronze and measuring 16 feet to 18 feet in height – inside the Ambedkar Memorial in Lucknow. It is as if Suheldev is to the BJP what BR Ambedkar is to the Bahujan Samaj Party.
In a speech last year in which he condemned cow protectionists as “anti-social by night and gau rakshaks by day”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “You must have seen in the olden times a badshah who used to put a herd of cows in front of his army. It put the raja [he was fighting] in a dilemma.”
The raja’s dilemma was that cows would inevitably die in an assault. He…
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