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The New York Times, Opinion, December 30,
2002
Hijacking India's History
By KAI FRIESE
NEW DELHI
While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who
run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will
only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of
the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat.
The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since
1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with
history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient
texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic
"Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the
dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent
of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that
the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And
they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like
the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a
mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.
Last month the National Council of Educational Research and
Training, the central government body that sets the national
curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th
grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social
sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly.
The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward
facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu
nationalist in 1948.
The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to
the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they
have added several novel chapters to Indian history.
Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati
civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley
civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around
4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The
all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river
central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley
civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a
chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest
recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally
acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. —
that appears without a single date.
The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or
"Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students in addition to
their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the
council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says
only that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented
and the gifted will have to be devised."
More recent history, of course, is not covered in school
textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might
treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the
wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which
more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more
lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who
is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this
atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on
a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu
pilgrims lost their lives.
The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted
against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident:
painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered
Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their
pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the
campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great
success.
The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed
rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the
15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution
of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The
B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S.
(Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu
Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The
R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social
service organizations" that have served as springboards to
power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of
Gujarat.)
In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the
uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn
that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and
the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the
Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of
the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and
Muslims are "foreigners."
But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at
the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show
humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian
river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious
Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script:
they are of Vedic origin.
After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of
young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a
sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted
to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And
what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion?
About Hinduism, Christianity?
They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher
nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into
houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating
them."
He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it
were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it
was.
Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.
Asia Times, October 30, 1999
COMMENT: Rewriting history with a
Hindu message
By Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI - Barely two weeks after being sworn in as part of
India's new coalition government, Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has begun to unfold its
Hindu sectarian agenda. Changes are being made in education and
pressure is increasing upon other religious groups.
Education Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, a Hindu hardliner, is
restructuring educational institutions, rewriting curricula and
making major personnel changes.
His latest target is Marxism in political science courses in
schools. The education board has dropped Marxism from the
curriculum without explanation, leaving only Fascism, Liberalism,
Gandhism and Socialism. Many in the BJP are admirers of Fascism
and doctrines of ''racial purity''. The change appears to dismiss
a major influence on Indian independence movements and the
formation of a national intelligentsia.
The BJP is also committed - and Minister Joshi has reiterated
this - to rewriting school textbooks so that they reflect the
''glory and greatness'' of ancient Hindu civilization and present
Hindus as victims of repeated invasion by outsiders. The BJP and
other Hindu fundamentalist organizations like Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have
made unsupported claims about Indian achievements - from calculus
to nuclear physics and from advanced chemistry to aeronautics.
Says distinguished historian Sumit Sarkar: ''The basic thrust of
the BJP is to construct an enemy. Rhetorically, they might have
succeeded in achieving this, but it also needs to be concretized.
For this, rewriting history, especially school textbooks, becomes
very important. The BJP's main fight is more with history than
with political parties.''
To accomplish this mission, which has been called the BJP's
''Long March Through the Institutions'', Joshi has filled
educational institutions with BJP or RSS sympathizers and
activists. These include the University Grants Commission, the
secondary school board, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
and the councils of social sciences and historical research,
which run virtually all of India's specialized social science
research institutes outside the university system.
Although the BJP might wish to appear to be a relatively
''moderate'' party, its agenda is complex, as reflected in the
vitriolic campaign launched by the BJP's affiliates against Pope
John Paul II who is due to visit India early next month.
The VHP and RSS are demanding an apology from the Catholic Church
for having ''forcibly converted'' a large number of Hindus to
Christianity during the colonial period despite little historical
evidence of such an event. Many Indian Christians, especially in
the south, willingly converted to escape the humiliation of the
Hindu caste hierarchy. Other, non-Catholic, Christians trace
their churches back to the first century, before Europe was
Christian.
Although the VHP and RSS have attacked church properties and
personnel and maligned other faiths, Prime Minister Vajpayee has
not uttered a word against the anti-Christian campaign. Nor has
the government once invoked the principle of secularism, which is
part of the unalterable structure of India's Constitution.
(Inter Press Service)