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THE prescription of textbooks for students in schools and colleges, which offended the religious feelings of Muslims or were blatantly biased has been a long-standing grievance of the Muslims in India.
As far back as on Dec 2, 1968 a National Board of School Textbooks was set up by the government of India. One of its functions was to scrutinise textbooks “to ensure that they are in conformity with the objectives of national integration”.
This old ailment was overtaken by a vile disease that reared its head when the Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power at the centre. There began an energetic programme of revision of textbooks. The BJP was a senior partner in a coalition. Now freed from all shackles, thanks to its large majority in parliament the BJP government has made impressive strides in that direction in the six months that it has been in power.
The agenda was driven by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Because the element of religious bias is common to both, the earlier ailment and the virulent disease, it has been assumed that the disease is just an aggravated form of the ailment. In truth, the two are fundamentally different.
Even at the best of times there existed within the Congress and some other secular parties a pro-Hindu faction. Vallabhbhai Patel was their icon. But it operated within the system and sought to give it a soft saffron hue.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its progeny, the Jan Sangh (1951) and its successor, the BJP (1980), have a radically different objective and agenda. They want to recast the polity and make it a Hindu state.
The attempt is to make Indian nationalism identical to Hindu nationalism.
They are the political descendants of leaders of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha who did not participate in the struggle for freedom from British rule.
The Hindu Mahasabha leader V.D. Savarkar was anti-British but discarded his commitment in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans and began writing one abject apology after another to the British rulers. His essay Hindutva (1924) was published after his release which was conditional.
Acquitted by the sessions court in 1949 on a technicality, on the charge of conspiracy to murder Gandhi on January 30, 1948, he was indicted by a commission of inquiry for the same offence.
After his death aides who did not testify at the trial felt free to spill the beans before the commission which was headed by a judge of the Supreme Court, Jivan Lal Kapur of the Lahore Bar before 1947.
The BJP leader L.K. Advani had Savarkar’s portrait installed in the central hall of Parliament — facing the portrait of the very man whom Savarkar had conspired to kill though his protégé. N.V. Godse never wavered in his devotion to the master even during the trial in which both stood in the dock. If L.K. Advani could go to such lengths, Narendra Modi can be confidently expected to go further still.
The attempt, of course, is to redefine Indian nationalism in order to make it identical to Hindu nationalism. Revision of history is indispensable to the task. A nation defines its identity by the heroes it lauds and the historical truths — or myths — it accepts.
Prime Minister Modi himself set the tune early enough. In his maiden speech to Lok Sabha as prime minister he spoke of India’s “1,200 years of slavery” and complained that “this slave mentality of 1,200 years is troubling”. It was clearly no slip of the tongue. Since British rule lasted 200 years, it is not difficult to identify the object of Modi’s wrath.
The human resource development (education) minister, Smriti Irani, and a few other ministers held a series of meetings with RSS functionaries in October to initiate the process of framing a new education policy. They asked the ministers to ‘correct’ the history taught in schools in order to highlight ‘Indian’ heroes and “the role played by Hindu culture and its leaders in shaping the country”.
Modi said, on Oct 31, that a “country that forgets its history can never create history”. His own history is somewhat odd. He claimed, on Oct 25 at the inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, that genetic science and plastic surgery were known in the times of the Mahabharata.
To cap it all, the RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra, who has led a campaign for banning scholarly works, has been asked by the RSS-dominated Haryana government to advise it on education.
This is not a promising beginning in the first six months in office of the Modi government. The only silver lining to the cloud is widespread criticism in the media about these moves.
The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.
Published in Dawn, November 22th , 2014
