A hunted historian, long dead, saw RSS and BJP rewriting history
2014 was a truly distressing year for many Indian academics.
On May 26 of that year, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister. The BJP had, as a bloc, won a staggering victory and swept to power in record numbers. The scale of state machinery that then became available to them allowed for a "new house" of epic proportions, barring no aspect of governance.
Education was a specific focus, even in the first days of the NDA’s administration - for example, readers will remember that Dinanath Batra’s sanctioned onslaught upon conventional wisdom in the state of Gujarat began just over a month after Modi took office.
On June 30, 2014, some of Batra’s books became part of the official syllabi for schools in that state. Some passages from these books included the concept of "Akhand Bharat", or undivided India - that is, "greater" India, which would also encompass the nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Burma.
On this topic, Batra was of the view that “undivided India is the truth, divided India is a lie. [The] division of India is unnatural and it can be united again". Potent stuff. What a cricket team we’d have, eh?
And who could possibly have a problem with a resurgent India attaining the height of her mythological glory? (That is, leaving aside the Bhutanese, the Nepalese, the Tibetans, the Bangladeshis, the Sri Lankans, the Burmese, the Pakistanis and the Afghanis.)
However, all of this is not to chew old soup, or to single out Batra. As a pracharak, he is well respected in the RSS, and has served as general secretary to their education wing, Vidya Bharati. His activism has, no doubt, endeared him to his colleagues - it was he who crusaded against Wendy Doniger’s books in 2014, resulting in a ban and the destruction of many copies of The Hindus: An Alternative History.
His other exploits are notable as well; in 2008, he petitioned the Delhi High Court to have an essay by AK Ramanujan removed from Delhi University’s (DU’s) history syllabus. The essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation, noted the fact that there are many versions of that epic, suggesting that there is no "original" version.
After much ado - including the trashing of a University department head’s office by ABVP members - the essay was dropped from the syllabus.
What is common to both these events - all three if you include Batra’s books becoming official text for schools in Gujarat - is an evident and long term hypersensitivity to all things Hindu. Also visible is the belief that the RSS alone decides what "Hindu" means, and that its youth associate, ABVP, is to be allowed a certain degree of hooliganism as a matter of course.
The immediate froth and lather that goading of this sort calls forth from the Left is important in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it vents the anger that might otherwise evolve into a more coherent political resistance.
Secondly, the original problems - hooliganism, intellectual cowardice and bad decision making - are lost in the furore. Thirdly, if the furore continues long enough, it elevates the bad decision to the position of status quo.
This is a tactic most familiar to anybody who has been bullied, or has worked in a cut-throat business environment. It allows the anger of the righteous to be channelled by the unrighteous, and has a long, unpleasant history.
"Communalism" is a rather bland word, and for everyday folk, a little difficult to precisely define. "Communal violence" is a more familiar variant, perhaps only because of the many graphic examples in recent and past history.
However, before there is violence, there must be an ideology - some point of common belief around which, in the heat of the moment, people coalesce before suddenly turning murderous toward their neighbours. In our own country, this often occurs on religious lines.
The reason for labouring this point is to point out that this is neither an original concept, nor is it newly discovered. Many champions of academia have spent their careers studying its insidious ways. Bipan Chandra was one such person.
Chandra - a massively well credentialed professor of history, who began teaching at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) soon after it came into existence - was a well enough respected historian to serve as the chairperson for the Centre of Historical Studies.
For many students of the subject, he quite literally wrote the book(s), several of which are still on the required reading list of Delhi University’s history syllabus. The reason for the qualifier in the previous sentence – still - is because Chandra’s books are the latest target of Batra’s "beliefs-are-facts-too" crusade. This is despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that Chandra passed away two years ago, on August 30, 2014.
In May this year, we reported on Batra’s letter to the human resource development ministry, seeking a ban on India’s Struggle for Independence, a book by Chandra, Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, Sucheta Majahan, and KN Panikkar.
The issue at hand was the use of the term "revolutionary terrorist" to describe freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh. Batra’s sending of this letter was not an isolated event; at the same time, some of Bhagat Singh’s descendants met with DU’s vice-chancellor Yogesh Tyagi, demanding that either the book be removed from DU’s reading list, or that the "denigrating" sections be rewritten.
The BJP considered this an important enough issue to be brought up in the Lok Sabha; an MP from Himachal, Anurag Singh Thakur, did just that on April 27. The next day, the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha, PJ Kurien, instructed the government to not only remove all references to the offending term, but also to "inquire how it happened".
He was assured by the minister for parliamentary affairs, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, that this would be communicated to DU via the HRD ministry under Smriti Irani. The day after that, DU’s vice chancellor Tyagi announced that sale and distribution of the Hindi translation of India’s Struggle for Independence had been stopped.
And they say the government can’t move quickly.
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| Delving into the 2002 Gujarat riots, historian Bipan Chandra wrote "the BJP and its parent body, the RSS, recruit their cadres through strong and naked communal ideology". |
Some of the questions raised by Kurien are easy to answer. Aditya Mukherjee, one of the authors of India’s Struggle for Independence, was quite blunt when we asked about it. “The Hindi version of India’s Struggle for Independence was published by Delhi University 27 years ago - on the recommendation of their own faculty. It was they who asked Chandra to give them the Hindi rights - he did not go to them to ask to get the book published,” he said.
And as for how the term "revolutionary terrorist" came to be used, he explained: “The term ‘terrorist’, always used by Chandra with the adjective ‘revolutionary’ - and freely used by Bhagat Singh and his comrades to describe their own methods - had a different meaning in the given historical context.”
He went on to add that Chandra had, in 2007, while commenting on a different matter, made a public statement acknowledging that the meaning of the word "terrorist" had changed significantly since the days of Bhagat Singh, especially after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre. Chandra had also said he would henceforth use different language to describe the acts of freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh.
India’s Struggle for Independence - which was written in 1987 - was one of many books authored or co-authored by Chandra over his lifetime. When the RSS and BJP took note of it in April 2016, the book’s language had not as yet been reviewed. Nonetheless, as the furore began to build, the book’s surviving authors “immediately offered to change the term,” said Mukherjee. “Despite that, the vice-chancellor of Delhi University ordered the book to be prohibited from sale and distribution!”
Even if this were an isolated incident, that would be troubling. There are several reasons why.
First is the pretext upon which the issue was raised; that of hurting the sentiments of Bhagat Singh’s descendants, of denigrating his memory.
If India’s Struggle for Independence had been a work of fiction, that would be one thing; but it is not. It is an academic work - a matter of intellect, not emotion - and one that should be based on facts, not sensibilities.
Look at it the other way; if Dinanath Batra is right, then the British would be quite foolish not to purge their own textbooks of every reference to their racist, slave-trading history.
Second and third are the forum and manner in which the issue was raised and dealt with. An academic work should be reviewed by academics. This should be uncontroversial, unless one is of the opinion that years of study have no effect on academic credibility.
In this case, the review was conducted in the political arena, and dealt with there as well, with scant reference to the academic merits of the arguments themselves. This is a terrible precedent to set if we want our textbooks to educate rather than indoctrinate, and also because it opens the door to more such politically motivated and sanctioned rewriting of history.
Such as the one that took place last month.
On August 9, the National Book Trust (NBT) abruptly cancelled a reprint order for just over 3,000 copies of the Hindi translation of another of Chandra’s books - this one titled Communalism: A Primer.
First published in 2004, the book made the case that communalism is an ideology, one that the RSS and BJP have made extensive use of since Independence. Delving extensively into the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, Chandra wrote that "the BJP and its parent body, the RSS, recruit their cadres through strong and naked communal ideology", and that "it is futile to talk of reforming the BJP in a secular direction... This is to ignore the centrality of communal ideology in a communal party. The BJP minus communalism would not be ‘alright’ ; it would be politically a big zero - and the BJP leaders know it".
While those of a realpolitik-minded perspective might say that the banning of such a book was almost inevitable in the current political climate, the manner in which it happened is nonetheless alarming.
In March last year, a new chairman was appointed for the NBT - Baldev Sharma, a former editor of the RSS publication Panchjanya. (This is a post once held by Chandra himself -between 2004, when Communalism was first published, and 2012.)
The news of the reprint broke in early September this year, just days after Chandra’s second death anniversary. As Mukherjee said, most people learned of this “through the newspapers. Asian Age was probably the first to carry a story, on September 1. [When we learned of it] we made informal enquiries from NBT insiders, and found out that it was true, and that it was being passed off as a routine exercise.”
Much has been made of this story since. The Economic Times quoted Sharma as saying it was a “regular exercise. Some reprints are held back for some time and then at a later stage resumed again. There is no motive behind it. Reprints of several books are revoked and resumed. There is no motive behind any of that too. We don't work like that at all. One of his books was withdrawn by Delhi University also.”
The Hindu quoted a source as saying the NBT “routinely analyse[s] the present status of books to take a call as to whether they be reprinted.”
One wonders what lengths reporters had to go to get even those fragments of lazy bureaucratic doublespeak - our own attempts to speak with officials from the NBT were rather professionally stymied by PA’s who, day after day, spoke of endlessly protracted meetings that prevented officials from coming to the phone or meeting with us.
In either case, what is striking is that nothing in any of the answers offered by NBT officials to the press even remotely resembles a reason for their actions, let alone a justification. This is somewhat understandable; journalists have a rather irritating habit of verifying the things that people say.
For example, the NBT could have said that poor sales resulted in this cost cutting measure - but that would have been easy to prove or disprove with sales numbers. They might have tried saying there was an oversupply in the market, but that would have been equally easy to refute. They could have even come clean and said Chandra’s books had cast an uncomfortable light on the motivations and methods of India’s current administration; but it appears that the NBT’s logic here goes something like this: “Maybe, just maybe if we stay quiet and pretend to be asleep, we won’t have to answer for any of this.”
We asked Mukherjee - who studied under Chandra, as well as wrote India’s Struggle for Independence with him - what he might have thought of all this. “[Chandra] would probably have said, ‘I told you so’,” replied Mukherjee. “Given his deep understanding of communalism as primarily an ideological project, he would have seen it as further proof of his conviction that Hindutva forces cannot tolerate a strong ideological counter-offensive, and will use state power to suppress any challenge. He would of course have been unhappy that the NBT, which he nurtured with great care, had been used as an instrument to subvert the very ideals on which it was based.”
As for his own view, Mukherjee is not quite so hopeless about the future. “Heady with the elixir of power,” he said, “regimes often drive nails into their own coffins, imagining that people are fools and do not understand what is happening around them.”
Sadly, if this decision by the NBT stands, another precedent favouring "injured sentiments" over "objective fact" will have been established. Soon, it might no longer matter what we understand about the things happening around us. They’re going to happen one way or another.