Asia Times: India sanitizing its past


	December 8, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India sanitizing its past
By Sultan Shahin

NEW DELHI - The Taliban are dead, long live Talibanism! This slogan seems to characterize the Indian government's attitude to education, particularly history.

Leading figures from India's recently united opposition have characterized the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government's recent order to delete tales of Hindu atrocities and their food habits from history books as the "Talibanization of education".

At a time when the world is learning to remember past follies and teach these mistakes to its children so that future generations do not repeat them, the Indian government's efforts to change and rewrite history does seem to be retrograde. A number of newspaper editorials and intellectuals have denounced these attempts in recent weeks. But first: What are the changes or deletions proposed?

The objectionable texts consist of only 16 pages in three history textbooks for Classes VI, VII and XI. But so objectionable are they to the Hindu fundamentalists running the government that all Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools have been directed to "delete" them "with immediate effect" and ensure that "they not be taught or even discussed in the respective classes". Some samples:

"The rigid bind of the caste system which started out as division of labor but was then 'made hereditary by law and religion'. The lower castes worked and toiled in the belief that they 'would deserve a better life in the next world or birth ... What was done by slaves and other producing sections in Greece and Rome under the threat of whip was done by vaishyas and shudras out of conviction formed through Brahminical indoctrination and the varna system."

"For special guests, beef was served as a mark of honor [although in later centuries, Brahmans were forbidden from eating beef]. A man's life was valued as equal to that of a hundred cows. If a man killed another man, he had to give 100 cows to the family of the dead man as a punishment." - Class VI book written by renowned historian Romila Thapar.

"Cattle wealth slowly decimated because cows and bullocks were killed in numerous Vedic sacrifices." - Class XI, R S Sharma.

"Jats [a Hindu caste] founded their state at Bharatpur from where they conducted plundering raids in the regions around." - Class VIII, Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev.

"In 1675, Guru Tegh Bahadur was arrested and executed. The official explanation for this ... is that after his return from Assam, the Guru, in association with one Hafiz Adam, resorted to plunder and rapine, laying waste the whole province of Punjab." - Class XI, Satish Chandra.

"Archaeological evidence should be considered far more important than long family trees given in the Puranas [Hindu scriptures]. The Puranic tradition could be used to date Rama of Ayodhya around 2000 BC, but extensive excavations in Ayodhya do not show any settlements around that date. Similarly, although Lord Krishna plays an important role in the Mahabharat, the earliest inscriptions and sculpture pieces found in Mathura between 200 BC and AD 300 do not attest his presence." - Class XI, R S Sharma.

"The Brahmanical reaction [against Buddhists] began as a result of the policy of Ashoka [The violent Hindu Emperor who converted to the non-violent creed of Buddhism after the great massacre at Kalinga]. He ... derided superfluous rituals performed by women. This naturally affected the income of the Brahmanas." - Class XI, R S Sharma.

Historians might as well pack their bags and take up gardening, says North India's largest circulated newspaper Hindustan Times, (December 6) if the Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has his way, "religious leaders will weed out all the 'bias' from textbooks and present a story that will hurt no sensibility, confuse no soul. So while Hindu sentiments were unknowingly being battered all these years when readers came across passages telling us that beef was consumed by our ancestors, or that a caste system was constructed to prohibit social mobility of those lower down in the pecking order, there was no way in which to protest against these unpalatable bits. Until now."

India's second largest-circulated newspaper, Indian Express, comments (December 6), "If history visits us, first as tragedy and then as farce, the writing of history under the present political dispensation seems to be following a similar trajectory. The redoubtable Murli Manohar Joshi, Union minister of HRD - which should now rightfully stand for the Historical Reverse-engineering Department - has now made it known that any historical account that hurts 'the feelings of people of any caste, religion, region or language' will be removed summarily from school textbooks.

"To ensure that this is done, Joshi wants all history books to be first vetted and cleared by religious heads of various communities before they are introduced in schools. In fact, he would like these tomes to be prepared in consultation with the religious heads of various communities. He wants this done, he explains, for the express purpose of sparing the impressionable minds of children, which are unable to digest ugly and controversial facts. Imagine then, for a moment, a blemish-free, deodorized, sanitized and, above all, Joshi-ized past," continues the angry Indian Express editorial.

"A past which no-one can quarrel with because it has been rendered devoid of every uncomfortable detail, purged of every disturbing fact, made 100 percent pure like desi ghee [local butter]. A past where no one ate wicked substances like beef thousands of years ago because that would have upset the 'sentiments' of schoolchildren in the year AD 2001. A past purged of ugly institutions like caste, because that would have meant diminishing a great culture - in any case, what is caste but a convenient invention that nasty folk like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav use to garner OBC [Other Backward Castes] votes? A past where nobody looted because that would have spoilt the image of a particular community hundreds of years later."

Though Joshi is the main instigator of this move and hence the butt of most criticism, the biggest loser has been the assiduously built secular image of the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A day after the government defended its decision to delete "anti-Brahmin" references in history textbooks, claiming that it was only fixing "factual errors and coloration", the premier himself justified the move. And rejecting the opposition charge of Talibanization of education by his government, he said, "If history is one-sided, we should change it."

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Forum for Education and Culture has strongly "condemned the communalization of education".

Historians themselves have reacted very strongly to the government's move. The Times of India published the comments of some of them whose books are being tampered with.

Bipin Chandra: "A communal interpretation of history is the basis of the RSS's [Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh's] ideology. Communalism - minority as well as majority - is all about creating fear of domination by the other. How does a communalist party like the RSS go about creating this fear in 80 percent of the population? The easiest way is to create the bogey of Muslim domination. So whatever good happened in history was during the ancient period and the Muslim period was one in which all this greatness was undermined - this is what they want taught in schools. It is a sinister effort to communalize young minds. The NCERT [National Council of Educational Research and Training] wants history textbooks to be written by nationalist historians. I'm a nationalist historian in my own right but if that should prompt me to say that we created the atom bomb, sorry, I'm not nationalist enough."

Harbans Mukhia: "It is criminal to tamper with any discipline like this. History cannot be written as fiction for it is all about facts. Clearly, this is part of the Hindutva [Hindu domination of South Asia] agenda."

Arjun Dev: "The CBSE decision is incomprehensible and unprecedented. Such things can only happen in fascist regimes. In any case, how are they going to ensure the 'objectionable' portions are not discussed? Are they going to recruit an educational police force and post them in classrooms? As Arjun Singh [former HRD minister] rightly pointed out in the Rajya Sabha [Upper House of Parliament] it amounts to the Talibanization of education. The aim of education is to promote open-mindedness and rational thinking. But the NCERT obviously thinks otherwise and is opposed to free discussion. Even if it wanted to review these books it should have been done by a panel of reputed historians."

R S Sharma: "This is the second attack on my book. The first was in January 2001 when they dropped portions from my book relating to Jainism. The NCERT entered into an agreement with me in 1980 according to which no adaptation or modification can be made in the book without the approval of the author. They have violated the agreement. But it's not unexpected from NCERT - an organization whose general policy is that anything which questions the historical authenticity of Hindu gods and Hindu values will not be tolerated. Unfortunately it does not know that history is about facts, not suppressions and beliefs."

Romila Thapar: "I came to know about the circular from media reports. The CBSE or NCERT did not inform me. If there is anything objectionable in a book, you have to take the author's permission to make changes. In the past too, when state education agencies wished to make changes, the agreement was that the author had to be informed before making any changes and he has agree with the changes.

"None of that happened this time. These books are being used for nearly 35 years, if something was objectionable, it would have come up earlier. The action was politically motivated. It is extremely dangerous that the CBSE should send a directive to schools that a particular subject is not to be discussed in class."

South India's largest-circulated newspaper, The Hindu, seems to feel (November 24) that the BJP government is not merely trying to sanitize the past but also attempting to justify caste oppression. By issuing a circular ordering schools to delete portions from the text books, the newspaper says, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has sought to reduce the study of history into a string of court chronicles. Such a method of history writing was indeed followed by emperors in ancient and medieval times.

"This was because a critical approach to the social realities of the times were inimical to their vested interest. The only difference here is that while the rulers of the past indulged in issuing edicts only where it involved recording their own present, the mandarins in the CBSE (and also those in the NCERT) have decided to go back into the past and distort history to suit the designs of the HRD Minister and his masters in the RSS headquarters. And in order to achieve the objective of distorting history and to ensure that a whole new generation is brought up as bigots, the CBSE officials resorted to an unprecedented step and ordered the heads of those schools affiliated to the board to ensure that specific portions in the text books were neither taught nor even discussed in the classes."

The Hindu goes on: "The circular also contains a stern warning to students who may internalize the arguments or the contents from these portions in their answer scripts; there is an instruction to the teachers 'not to evaluate the students' understanding of the 'content of the portions'. By implication, students of history, in Class XI, are bound to be penalized if they choose to even mention in their answer scripts that the varna [caste] system, which started out as a division of labor, was then made hereditary by law and religion. For, this portion which had remained in the textbook since 1977, is among the paragraphs in the 11-odd pages that the CBSE has now ordered to be deleted from its history text.

"The motive behind the deletion is far too clear. While these historical truths were included by Prof R S Sharma (an authority that he is on the socio-economic history of the Vedic times that qualified him so eminently to be commissioned by the NCERT to write the text book) in the text only in order to explain the inequity that was perpetrated during the times, the deletion ordered now is clearly aimed at ensuring that a whole new generation is brought up in a way to celebrate the odious caste-based oppression in vogue during the Vedic ages. This, after all, is the only means by which the various forms of assertion by the oppressed caste groups can be painted as social crimes."

That BJP wants to cleanse Indian history books of embarrassing facts is nothing new. As The Hindu pointed out in another write-up (December 2), in the states where it held power in the early 1990s - Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat - "the BJP took over the state education boards and very quickly changed the history textbooks, producing material that replaced history with mythology, justified caste, the low status of women, and denigrated Muslims and Islam. The remarkable thing is that despite being part of an eclectic coalition the BJP has, since it came to power at the Center, utilized institutions such as the NCERT to do much the same."

The charges The Hindu newspaper levels are quite serious. "The fact is the Sangh Parivar [the extended Hindu fundamentalist family], and its political arm the BJP, are driven by an idea that can only succeed by destroying the modern Indian nation and the principle of plurality which underlines it. They believe in the superiority of Hindus and their superior claim, over people of other faiths, to being Indians. Re-writing school history textbooks to fit this idea of the Hindu Rashtra [Nation] has always been top priority."

Joshi, however, doesn't think there is anything wrong in re-writing history to suit sensibilities. The self described "man with a mission" indeed compares himself to Jesus Christ being crucified for his beliefs. Asked to justify his move, he replied, "Certain complaints were received from Jains, Sikhs and Jats and other communities that there are certain passages in NCERT textbooks that are not in religious tenets and are not even facts of history. We examined them and the NCERT made a decision to delete them. We did not do this in an underhand manner like the Left and Congress. We were completely above-board. I really don't know why they are making a controversy."

In reply to another question by journalist Swati Charurvedi, he said, "The reason is that you are dealing with impressionable young minds. The students of class one are young and you are teaching them things that are highly controversial. That creates a bias in their minds. If a child is told, in the books, that Jats were looteras [robbers], how will he like a Jat classmate after that, he will have certain reservations. If a normal Hindu family believes that eating beef is wrong and you teach that this was done [many centuries ago], when actually this is a matter of debate. This will create a conflict in the mind of a small child. If there are some unpalatable historical facts, let children learn them when they are mature. Anything that creates a bias, hatred or suspicion should not be there."

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