hindutva's orwellian agenda

HINDUTVA’S

ORWELLIAN AGENDA Manipulation of History in NCERT textbooks under the

BJP-led coalition rule (1998-2004)

SUBMITTED BY

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ROLL NO.

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Vipul Grover

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PGDJ 11148

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the Post Graduate Diploma in

Journalism at the Asian College of Journalism for the Academic Year 2011-12

“Who controls the past controls the future:

Who controls the present controls the past.”

- George Orwell ‘Nineteen-Eighty Four’ (1949)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter I – Introduction…………………………….............................................. 2

Chapter II - BJP Initiates the Agenda……………………………………………… 5

Chapter III - A Brief History……………………………………………………….. 8

Chapter IV - Anti-Socialist Bias…………………………………………………….. 13

Chapter V - Glorification of the Past……………………………………………….. 15

Chapter VI - The Communal Agenda……………………………………………… 17

Chapter VII - The Different Yardsticks……………………………………………. 20

Chapter VIII - Obscuring Gandhi’s Murder….……….………………………… 23

Chapter IX - Conclusion…………………………………………………………….. 25

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………. 28

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank my mentor, Prof. Sreekumar Menon for guiding me and

assuaging my anxieties whenever I encountered a roadblock.

I am equally indebted to Dr. Arvind Sivaramakrishnan whose elective ‘Politics and Ideology’

helped me in understanding the ideological concepts, like fascism and totalitarianism, better.

I would also like to express my gratitude towards the ACJ librarian D. Magesh Kumar who

was always available to help me in searching for the books and other material required for

this dissertation.

However, my special gratitude is reserved for Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950) whose writings,

under his pen name George Orwell, opened my eyes to a new dimension of looking at various

socio-political issues.

Chennai Vipul Grover

March 16, 2012

1 Asian College of Journalism 2011-12

Chapter I INTRODUCTION

Control over the past is “more terrifying than mere torture and death,” writes George Orwell

(2006, p.28) in his dystopian novel, Nineteen-Eighty Four.

Orwell in this novel ridiculed all the ‘totalitarian nightmares’ for manipulating history. He

particularly derided the ruling Party’s slogan: Who controls the past controls the future: Who

controls the present controls the past (Yadav, 2002).

“The monopolistic nation states and ‘powers that be’ do not like plurality as it threatens the

uniform worldview they want citizens/subjects to hold. Totalitarian regimes were the worst

culprits in this regard”. (Ibid.)

According to Heywood (2007, p.217), “totalitarianism is an all-encompassing system of

political rule that is typically established by pervasive ideological manipulation (italics mine)

and open terror and brutality.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) tells the story about Oceania, a society ruled

by the oligarchic dictatorship of the Party. Life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a

world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind

control. This is accomplished with a political system named English Socialism (Ingsoc),

which is administered by privileged Inner Party elite. Yet they too are subordinated to the

totalitarian cult of personality of Big Brother, the deified Party leader. The

protagonist, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of

Truth, which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to re-write

past newspaper articles so that the historical record is congruent with the current party

ideology.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality

This novel popularised the adjective Orwellian, which refers to “official deception, secret

surveillance, and manipulation of the past (italics mine) in service to a totalitarian or

manipulative political agenda” (see Wikipedia, Nineteen-Eighty Four).

Orwell writes “The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is

argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human

memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the

Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it

follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it”. (Orwell, op.cit., p.181)

“[B]y far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard

the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every

kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party

were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever

be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness”.

(Ibid., pp.180-181)

Various regimes have adopted this technique of manipulation of history to strengthen their

hold on the subjects.

So, Napoleon entrusted the administration of history writing to his Minister of Police. He is

also reported to have told this minister that the past be treated in such a manner that anyone

who reads that history heaves a sigh of relief on reaching 'our rule' (Gooch,1956 cited in

Yadav, 2002).

Similarly, Hitler declared that the more urgent goal of history lay not in the 'objective

presentation' of facts but in instilling national pride and in recalling the growth of the united

nation due to the efforts of German heroes like Charlemagne, Luther and Bismarck topped by


Hitler himself. Consequently, Hitler also erased the French Revolution from the curriculum to

prevent the German students from turning into democrats (Southgate, 1996 cited in Yadav,

2002).

Ideologically motivated history was also the norm in USSR. For example, in late 1920s the

role of Trotsky was eliminated from narratives of the Great October Revolution, a historical

manipulation satirized by George Orwell in his famous novella Animal Farm (1945). This

was the result of his questioning the Stalin regime - whether the policy of the Soviet socialist

rule was a dictatorship of the proletariat or a dictatorship over them? (Stern, 1970 cited in

Yadav, 2002)

The educational establishment in India under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition

rule from 1998-2004 also set out on a similar agenda of manipulating history.



Chapter II BJP INITIATES THE AGENDA

“Following the electoral victory of coalition led by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1998 and

1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging

'appropriate' rewritings of Indian history”. (Sen, 2005, p.63)

The Minister of Human Resource Development (HRD), Murali Manohar Joshi, a ‘RSS hard

core swayamsevak’1 convened a meeting of state education ministers in October 1998 to

discuss a new education system for the country. Here, he proposed that the “curriculum from

the primary to the highest level of education should be Indianised, nationalised and

spiritualised.” (Pannikar, 1999, p.73)

The proposal, prepared by a group of experts drawn from a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

(RSS)2 education outfit, Vidya Bharati stated that “The Supreme Court of India has already

defined Hindutva3 as a way of life and not as a religion. In the light of this decision, the

experts recommend that India's valuable heritage of the Vedas and Upanishads should find

due place in the curriculum from primary to the higher level courses, including the vocational

courses.” (Ibid.)

Pannikar (Ibid.) states “The message conveyed by these recommendations is clear: what is

national is Hindu”.

1 Puniyani (2001, p.60) 2 BJP is the political front of RSS

3 The term Hindutva was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his book ‘Hindutva, Who is a Hindu?’. It

subsequently developed into a movement of Hindu Nationalism, led by RSS and its affiliates, together known as

Sangh Parivar.

This was followed by transforming the complexion of important research and educational

planning and cultural institutions and committees by filling them with people associated with

the Hindutva agenda and linked with Sangh Parivar (SAHMAT, 2001, pp.9-10). Following

are few examples -

• The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) – Prof. B.R. Grover (Chairman),

who defended and argued on behalf of the RSS on the Ram Temple shrine. The

council included B.B. Lal, B.P. Sinha and K.S. Lal, with similar credentials.

• Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) – Headed by M.L. Sondhi, a

former Jan Sangh M.P.

• National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) – Dr. J.S. Rajput

(Director), who openly advocated the RSS’s empahasis on ‘Indianization,

Spiritualization, Nationalization’ of school syllabuses and ‘Value’ education.

“The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)

became busy, from shortly after the BJP's assumption of office, not only in producing fresh

textbooks for Indian school children under new National Curriculum Framework 2000, but

also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP

management), written by reputed Indian historians”. (Sen, op.cit.)

J.S. Rajput alleged that authors of particularly the history textbooks furthered their 'narrow

political agenda' and took his institution ‘for a ride’ (Yadav, 2002).

These included eminent historians such as Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra and

Bipan Chandra.


On instructions from the HRD Ministry in 2000, even ICHR withdrew the publication of

books by eminent historians Sumit Sarkar and K N Panikkar which it itself had

commissioned under the 'Towards Freedom' project during the Congress rule (Ibid.).

“The speed of the attempted textbook revision had to be so fast that the newly reconstituted

NCERT had some difficulty in finding historians to do this task who would be both

reasonably distinguished and adequately compliant”. (Sen, op.cit.)

Historians sympathetic to the Hindutva cause, like Makhan Lal, Hari Om, Rajendra Dixit and

Meenakshi Jain, were finally given the task to undo the perceived biases in the NCERT texts.

One of the new textbooks in Modern India for Class XII was written by Satish Chandra

Mittal who retired as a professor of history from Kurukshetra University.

SAHMAT (2003, p.6) notes “In a pamphlet written by him some years ago, this historian had

expressed his unhappiness with what he called too much emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity

and composite culture in history books. While the authorities of NCERT decided to discard

such books, it naturally chose him for his known antipathy to such notions to write a new

book to replace one of the existing ones”.

In doing so, these historians introduced their own anti-socialist and communal biases while

glorifying the Vedic history and hiding those portions of the history, like assassination of

Gandhi, which could be embarrassing to the Hindutva agenda.

However, this Orwellian agenda of BJP has a history of more than three-quarters of a century

which needs to be seen before dwelling on the historical manipulations introduced in the

NCERT books under BJP-led Union Government.


Chapter III A BRIEF HISTORY

“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, better known as the RSS, is the last avatar of a series of

Hindu militant movements ranging from Arya Samaj to the Hindu Mahasabha. Born in 1925,

the RSS has drawn most of its ideological inspiration from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who

was to take over the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937.

“In his book, Hindutva, Who is a Hindu? (1923), Savarkar considers that the Indian national

identity is embodied in the Hindu culture, which encompasses not only Hinduism – as a

religion – but also a language, Sanskrit (and its main vernacular derivative, Hindi), the

worship of Hindustan as a sacred land and the cult of the Vedic Golden Age”. (Jaffrelot,

2005, p.1)

The RSS was founded by one of Savarkar’s admirers, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Hedgewar,

and his successor, M.S. Golwalkar who took over from him in 1940, both looked at the

Hindus as weak and vulnerable vis-à-vis the Muslims. They were also apprehensive of the

new militancy of the lower castes and feared the growing appeal of Gandhi’s brand of

Hinduism which emphasized non-violence. They aspired, on the contrary, to restore - and

even create - a martial brand of Hinduism and to reshape the mind (italics mine) and the body

of the Hindus in order to make them warrior like (Ibid., p.2).

Rewriting history is an important tool for reshaping the mind as has been done by various

regimes (as well as private organisations) as enumerated in the Chapter I.

As early as 1939, the RSS mentor Golwalkar had written in We or Our Nationhood Defined,

“It is high time that we studied, understood and wrote out history ourselves and discarded…

designed or undesigned distortions.”



The first new venture that the RSS developed after independence was to found a primary

school at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1952. Designated Saraswati Shishu Mandir, it was

inaugurated by the RSS supreme Guruji Golwalkar (Sarkar, 2005, p.197).

These ‘Mandirs’ were federated and put under an umbrella organisation called Vidya Bharati

in 1977 with its headquarters in Delhi. At that time, Vidya Bharati ran 700 schools. In the

early 1990s, the organisation was responsible for managing 5000 schools with 1.2 million

pupils enrolled and 40,000 teachers employed. In 2003 it had 14,000 schools, 73,000 teachers

and 1.7 million pupils (Jaffrelot, 2005, p.6).

The organisation's promotional material says: “Vidya Bharati caters to the educational needs

of students of pre-primary, primary, secondary & senior secondary schools, colleges and

post-graduates training colleges. Vidya Bharati conducts and promotes research in education

and has its own publication division which brings out books, magazines and research studies.

The organisation is part of the Sangh Parivar and is understood to be integral to promote

Hindutva nationalism by targeting areas with limited facilities.” It goes on to add that one of

the ultimate objectives of the organisation is to “develop a National System of Education

which would help to build a generation of young men and women that is committed to

Hindutva and infused with patriotic fervour” (Ramakrishnan, 2012).

However, in the name of infusing patriotic fervour, these schools promoted ‘totally blind

bigotry and fanaticism’, according to the 1993 report of National Steering Committee on

Textbook Evaluation (Mukherjee, Mukherjee and Mahajan, 2008, p.21).

In an article in Hindustan Times4, Ganguli (2002) states that, “For years, the schools run by

the RSS have been teaching a load of rubbish to their students. Among the gems that are

4 Dated 18 Nov. 2002


taught is that the ‘lamp of culture’ in China was lit by Indians, that India was partitioned

because of the ‘conspiratorial’ policies pursued by the followers of Christianity and that

‘even today, Christian missionaries are engaged in fostering anti-national tendencies’ in the

North-east and other parts of the country. Not surprisingly, the students are also informed that

the RSS has arisen to defend the greatness of Bharatiya sanskriti… Books published by the

RSS claim that Indians discovered America because there are images of Indian art in the

Aztec temples, that the theory of Pythagoras finds mention in ancient Indian texts, that houses

coated with cow dung can withstand atomic radiation and that the ‘concept of binary numbers

used by computers... existed in the Hindu scriptures’. How? Because ‘a number in the binary

format is either 1 (it exists) or 0 (it does not exist). All numbers are combinations of 1 and 0.

Our Upanishads say that all creation is a combination of existence (1) or non-existence (0)’.”

The report of National Steering Committee on Textbook Evaluation, which consisted of

eminent scholars5, considered reports prepared by NCERT on textbooks in use in various

states and those brought out by the RSS-run Saraswati Shishu Mandir Prakashan and Vidya

Bharati Publications.

“The first clutch of biases mentioned in the report pertains to the identification of the

outsider, or the foreigner, very early in Indian history, and the resistance to them shown by

the people of India (obviously Hindus). Thus, the Aryans were the original inhabitants of

India, they built the Harappan civilisation, and the achievements of ancient Indian civilisation

surpassed all others. (For example, in High School Itihas Bhag 1, one of the sentences

changed reads thus: ‘With the finds of bones of horses, their toys and yagna altars, scholars

are beginning to believe that the people of the Harappa and Vedic civilisations were the

same.’ There is, of course, no historical basis for this”. (Menon and Rajalakshmi, 1998). 5 The committee consisted of Prof. Bipan Chandra, Prof. Ravinder Kumar, Prof. Nemai Sadhan Bose, Prof. S.S. Bal, Prof. R.S. Sharma, Prof. Sita Ram Singh, Prof. Sarojini Regani, Shri. V.I. Subramaniam as members and Prof. Arjun Dev, Dean NCERT, as Member Secretary.

“The inclusion of references to RSS and its founder in chapters dealing with the history of the

freedom movement are meant to provide respectability to and legitimise the role of Hindu

communal organisations and their leaders,” the report notes (Ibid.).

In the light of the ‘extremely virulent communal view of Indian history’ present in these

books, the committee recommended that these history books be withdrawn.

Earlier in late-1970s, the Janata Party also made similar attempts of manipulating history.

Bharatiya Jana Sangh, RSS’s political arm and the precursor of BJP, was a major constituent

of this amalgam of Indian political parties which came to power after the end of state of

emergency in 1977.

“Eminent secular historian R S Sharma's ‘Ancient India’ was done the honour of being

'withdrawn' by fiat in 1978. In 1978-79, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) coup in

Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) resulted in the translation of the series ‘The

History and Culture of Indian People’ (published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan under the

general editorship of R C Majumdar). These books (particularly Volume VII) had a

‘frighteningly outspoken communal approach’ to medieval history that was untenable,

according to established scholars of the time”. (Yadav, 2002)

With BJP-led coalition forming the government at the Center in 1998, the control of bodies

like NCERT and ICHR shifted back into the hands of Hindutva forces, as noted earlier, and a

new wave of historical manipulations started.

The idea was to indoctrinate the minds of young students. Indoctrination (or brainwashing) of

children was also an important means by which the Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen-

Eighty Four kept a check on dissenters.


Orwell writes “Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by

means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable

little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the

discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with

it”. (Orwell, 2006, p.20)

In the following chapters, we will see the historical manipulations done in NCERT books for

secondary and higher secondary schools affiliated to Central Board of Secondary Education

(CBSE) in the cause of Hindutva’s Orwellian agenda.


Chapter IV ANTI-SOCIALIST BIAS

Murli Manohar Joshi, the HRD Minister under BJP-led National Democratic Alliance,

claimed that the discipline of history has become controversial because the left intelligentsia

has enslaved it. Not only this, J.S. Rajput, his protégé and the director of NCERT, was

foolhardy enough to suggest that the authors are “elements out to destabilise the nation”

(Yadav, 2002).

Therefore, immediately after taking over the reins of NCERT, Rajput took upon himself the

onerous responsibility of undoing ‘the damage perpetrated through the past 30-35 years of

Marxist domination of this academic discipline’, that is history. According to him, because of

this domination, ‘Generations of Indians had been cheated of the right knowledge about their

9,000-year history’ (Dev, 2003, p.73).

This alleged general ‘leftist’ bias was not demonstrated in any detail. But certain portions of

these books were found to be so objectionable on other counts that the NCERT ordered their

immediate deletion. Through a circular issued in October 2001, the Central Board of

Secondary Education (CBSE) banned any discussion of these sections as a part of classroom

instruction. These portions include the exposition of Brahminical hostility towards Ashoka

despite his policy of religious tolerance and reference to the exploitative and ideological

aspects of the caste system. The ‘leftist’ brand of history was thus identified ex-silentio with

irreverence towards Brahmins and the caste system (Jha, 2003a).

“In the new texts that were brought out in 2002 by NCERT, the word ‘socialism’ was

regarded such a dirty word that despite the praise of Bhagat Singh, the renaming of his

organization as Hindustan Socialist Republican Association was suppressed in the Class IX

Social Science Textbook. One of the very few instances where the word did get mentioned


was where Nazi ideology was described as a sort of fusion of German nationalism and

socialism”. (Sarkar, 2002)

However, the most absurd manipulation was done with regards to USSR and communism.

The anti-communist hysteria and the spy scare of the McCarthy period, long since denounced

in the US, found support in NCERT’s new history. NCERT historians write, “Stalin told his

secret agents all over the world to steal the US’ secrets. The western countries had many

people with communist leanings who viewed the USSR as their true nation. Their treasonable

activities helped Stalin get hold of the blueprints for making an Atom Bomb. He then housed

his top nuclear scientists in a secret location in remote Kazakhstan and coerced them to

develop a bomb.” (SAHMAT, 2003, p.10)

Soviet Union and Communism were stated to be equally responsible, along with Hitler and

Nazi Germany, for the Second World War (Ibid.).

Therefore, under the garb of upgrading the outdated knowledge in old textbooks, NCERT

introduced an anti-socialist bias in the curriculum.



Chapter V GLORIFICATION OF THE PAST

As seen in the last chapter, certain portions from the existing NCERT textbooks were found

objectionable and hence censored because they were at odds with Hindutva's Brahminical

version of history.

For instance, the paragraphs deleted from Professor Romila Thapar's textbooks say, “beef

was served as a mark of honour to special guests” in ancient India, but that “in later centuries,

Brahmans were forbidden” from eating it (Bidwai, 2001).

It was in order to restore this Brahminical version of history which glorifies India's past and

presents it as a series of “Hindu” achievements, unmatched anywhere else, that the new

textbooks were brought out (Ibid.).

Shrimali (2002) states that, “The history component (most probably authored by Makkhan

Lal) in the textbook India and the World for Class VI, released by the NCERT… [is] a brazen

attempt to glorify “Hinduism” and treat other religions in an extremely cavalier manner.

“That the people of the Harappan civilisation worshipped ‘mother goddess’, ‘Shiva

Pashupati’ and ‘Shiva-lingas’ is a thoroughly outdated point of view dating back to the

Thirties. It has been incessantly questioned since then. But such alternative constructions do

not suit the interests of ‘glorious Hinduism’.”

In this context, The Hindu Editorial6 (2002) stated that in the new texts ‘there are also ideas

that defy historical logic and are not backed by facts, conveying faulty notions of the past, in

the new texts. An illustration of this is the glorification of the Vedic age when the text states

that the Vedic people were familiar with the use of “zero”, that “they also knew that the earth

6 Dated 14. Oct. 2002

moved on its own axis and around the sun” and that “they also knew that the moon revolved

around the sun”.’

Another such exaggeration in the Class VI textbook includes “In Hinduism, philosophy has

always occupied a very high position… The Upanishads are the greatest works of philosophy

in the history of humankind” (Shrimali, 2002).

Makkhan Lal's Ancient India for Class XI told the students that “education was imparted free

with clothes, food and lodging” and that “the ancient Indian education system was thought to

be unique by foreign travellers because every village had a school and every individual

participated in its maintenance. As a result, India had the highest literacy rate in comparison

to other countries of the world till the time up to the nineteenth century” (Jha, 2003a).

Shrimali (2002) states “The textbooks are completely silent on the arrival of Christianity in

India. Class VI students deserve to be told that Christianity had reached Kerala in the early

centuries of the Christian era, long before the emergence of Puranic Hinduism, and that both

Christianity and Islam had some role in shaping the present form of Hinduism”.

Far from apprising the learner of any interconnection or exchange of ideas, Lal's Class VI

history textbook initiated him or her into - and his Class XI Ancient India confirmed the

student in - the belief that all that was great and noble in world history, including the Aryans,

emanated from India and spread to the rest of the world (Jha, op.cit.).

This idea that that the Vedic civilisation was a ‘superior’ one is inherent to the Sangh

Parivar's view of history (as seen in the Chapter III) and the new NCERT textbooks promoted

this idea at the national level through schools affiliated to CBSE.


Chapter VI THE COMMUNAL AGENDA

“Communal ideology constitutes the core of the Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva agenda. Once

society has been converted to a communal way of thinking by spreading communal ideology,

the communalisation of state institutions such as the legislature, bureaucracy, police and

educational institutions follow and so does communal violence characterised by riots and

even genocide. The RSS recognises this fact and therefore gives its ideological work the

utmost importance”. (Chandra, 2008, p.9)

Manipulating history is the most convenient way of carrying out this ideological work.

According to eminent historian R S Sharma, “If [Hindu communalists] have their way in

history… They will emphasise that all temples were demolished by the Muslims who are

foreigners in this country. They will teach that all social evils in Hindu society have been

introduced by the Muslims. They will give special attention to beef eating and hold the

Muslims responsible for the introduction of the practice. .. They will teach that the Hindus are

the descendants of the Aryans who were the indigenous inhabitants of India and all the others

are foreigners.” (SAHMAT, 2002, p.7)

This is exactly what was done by the NCERT historians in 2002. Professor Hari Om’s

Contemporary India for Class IX made no attempt to bring out the common element of anti-

colonialism among the various sections of the Indian people despite the syllabus’s stated

purpose of enabling “the learners to appreciate the fact that people of India irrespective of

religion, caste, gender, and region participated in the struggle for freedom”. On the contrary,

it succeeded in conveying an impression that freedom was obtained despite the presence of

Dalits, Christians, Communists, and, above all, Muslims (Jha, 2003b).


It was not just in the texts on contemporary India that vilification of Islam was introduced by

NCERT. In a textbook on Ancient India, the section dealing with the last of the Maurya

kings, Brihadratha, who was killed by his own army chief, Pushyamitra Sunga (in 187 B.C.),

states that “this is the only incident in the history of India till the Twelfth Century A.D.”

(Hindu Editorial, 2002).

“Ancient texts, the Rajatharangini for example, show a succession of patricides across the

ancient kingdoms even before the Mauryan era. The intention is to convey that sons killing

fathers (to capture the throne) was witnessed in the Indian kingdoms only after the invasion

of Mohammed Ghazni. Such untruths have been the staple diet upon which the cadre of the

Sangh Parivar has been brought up”. (Ibid.)

Upon being questioned about the inclusion of a reference to a ‘Masjid being built on the

debris of 37 Hindu and Jain temples’ next to Qutb Minar, R.K. Dixit, convener of the

Curriculum Group, gave the justification that, “Anyone who visits the Qutb Minar is tempted

to know what it is. But at the other side of the Minar you have the Quwwat ul Islam mosque.

There is also a question about that…. This is immediate history. I don't think we should

ignore this.” (Rajalakshmi, 2001)

In the Class IX Social Science Textbook, an anti-Christian note also surfaced repeatedly.

Sarkar (2002, pp.75-76) states that, “At the beginning of the era of geographical discoveries,

we are told, the Pope had authorised Portugal and Spain “to explore alternative all-water

routes to India”… at that time (i.e. around the 1450s) Spain did not even exist as a single

country… The Portuguese in Goa “indulged in large-scale conversion of Hindus to

Christianity”: actually Muslims as the traditional enemy of Christianity were sometimes

persecuted, Hindus were seldom, and good relations were maintained with Vijaynagar’.”


Just like the term ‘socialism’, the word ‘secularism’ was also treated like a cuss word by the

new textbooks. For example, there was no reference even to the principle of secularism in

Contemporary India for Class IX (Jha, op.cit.).

Moreover, in the controversial Class XII textbook on world history, in one of the many cases

of plagiarism, while a complete paragraph was lifted from an American text, the word

‘secular’ was simply dropped (Bhattacharya, 2003, p.15).

Original text from World Civilizations, Their History and Culture (1955) -

Consequently, Italy produced a large number of secular (italics mine) educators, many of

whom not only taught students but demonstrated their learned attainments in the

production of political and ethical treatises and works of literature.

The non-attributed text from Class XII textbook ‘Contemporary World History’ -

Consequently, Italy produced a large number of educators, many of whom not only

taught students but also demonstrated their learning in the production of political and

ethical treaties (sic) and works of literature.

In the novel Nineteen-Eighty Four, George Orwell introduces a deliberately impoverished

language promoted by the totalitarian state of Oceania. This language known as Newspeak is

closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar.

Hindutva movement’s attempt of making the words like socialism and secularism obsolete

through their deletion from the NCERT texts is similar in nature. It is an integral part of the

movement’s Orwellian agenda.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar

Chapter VII THE DIFFERENT YARDSTICKS

It is important for the Hindutva movement to show its own leaders and organisations in good

light while vilifying the ‘enemy’. It is similar to the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ conducted by the

Party in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four where every day the Party members are shown a film

depicting Party’s enemies and their anti-Oceanian activities. The purpose of this exercise is to

re-direct their subconscious feelings of angst away from the Oceanian government and

towards the external enemies. In doing so, the Party minimizes subversive thought and

behaviour.

Orwell explains the impact of this exercise on Winston Smith, the protagonist who secretly

hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother, in the following words: “At those

moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed

to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the [enemies]”.

(Orwell, 2006, p.12).

Jha (2003b) notes that on reading the new textbook ‘Contemporary India’ for Class IX,

“[S]tudents will have a fairly graphic idea of how Muslim communalists stayed away from

the freedom movement all through and remained loyal to the British. They will get to know

the antecedents of the formation of the Muslim League on December 30, 1906, which

included the ideas of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who ‘tried to establish friendship between the

British and the Muslims’ and was ‘opposed to the Congress and Muslim participation in it’.

What they will not learn at all is that a fortnight before the founding of the Muslim League,

the Punjab Hindu Sabha had been founded at Lahore, with Lala Lajpat Rai as one of its

leading members. Just as some ‘Muslim leaders viewed the Congress as a party of the


Hindus’, some of the Sabha leaders argued that the Congress was not a party of the Hindus

and therefore Hindu Sabhas be substituted for Congress Committees”.

Hence, the new NCERT textbooks use different yardsticks to evaluate the contributions of

communal leaders and organisations during the freedom struggle.

The bias goes back to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Thus while “Muslims… participated in a

big way” in 1857 in order to regain the ground lost and restore the Mughal empire to its

pristine glory”: no similar motive of wanting back Peshwa authority is attributed to Nana

Saheb, and it is assumed, quite unhistorically, that appreciation for the Mughal heritage could

have been only a Muslim phenomenon (Sarkar, 2002, pp.75-76).

When in August 1942, Gandhi was exhorting Indians to “do or die”, Savarkar in his message

entitled “Stick to your post” warned all the members of the Hindu Mahasabha holding any

post or position of vantage in the Government services to “stick to them and continue to

perform their regular duties in their various capacities” (Jha, 2003b).

However, knowing that such an anti-Gandhi stand of Savarkar, the ideological guru of the

movement, would not be well received by the students; it was toned down by the historian

S.C. Mittal in the new textbook on Modern India for Class XII.

“While there is almost a whole page on Communists’ ‘opposition’ to the Quit India

Movement, Savarkar only ‘directed his followers not to take part in the movement’”.

(SAHMAT, 2003, pp.6-9)

Moreover, while this book contains quite a bit about Muslim League and Muslim

communalism, there is only a short box on Hindu communalism. According to it, Hindu


Mahasabha’s objective was only ‘revival of social and cultural consciousness among the

Hindu’ (Ibid.).

In this context, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan who pioneered modern education for the Muslim

community in India is totally left out of the chapter on social and cultural awakening, and his

activities in the area of social reform and education (Aligarh Movement) are described under

‘Muslim Politics’. To describe his point of view, the author quotes from a book on the

movement to say that ‘Sayyid Ahmad Khan was first and foremost a Muslim and a Muslim

point of view was essentially different from an Indian point of view’ (Ibid., pp.53-54).

Thus, by vilifying the leaders and activities of the non-Hindutva movements and establishing

them as anti-Indian, these textbooks try to put in a bad light the whole community or the

ideological movement that they belonged to.


Chapter VIII OBSCURING GANDHI’S MURDER

“In the first edition of Hari Om’s Contemporary India for Class X, a book dealing with the

20th Century, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination was not even mentioned”. (Mukherjee,

Mukherjee and Mahajan, 2008, p.43)

Dev (2002, p.22) states “Is it possible to imagine that it is possible to write a book on

contemporary India dealing with the freedom movement and subsequent developments, as the

liberation of Dadra and Nagra Haveli with the backing of ‘Jana Singh’ and the BJP

‘unfortunately’ not winning the vote of confidence in 1996, not to refer to the assassination of

Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu fanatic?

“That the omission was the result of a deliberate decision became clear from the statements

of the NCERT Director and the historian author. ‘Everything can’t be included’ and ‘too

many biographical details can’t be given’ was their response.”

Dev (Ibid.) further states “The problem is that the murder of Gandhiji cannot be mentioned

without at least an oblique reference to Hindu communalism and that is something which is

highly undesirable.”

When there was a national furore on this question a reprint edition was brought out, which

had this bare sentence:

Gandhiji’s efforts to bring peace and harmony in society came to a sudden and tragic end

due to his assassination by Nathuram Godse on January 30 1948, in Delhi while Gandhiji

was on his way to attend a prayer meeting.



“No mention was still made of who Godse was and of his strong links with the RSS and the

Hindu Mahasabha, particularly with its leader Savarkar7”. (Mukherjee, Mukherjee and

Mahajan, op.cit., pp.43-44)

Tainted by its link with Gandhiji’s murder, the Hindu Mahasabha beat a tactical retreat and

Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Hindu Mahasabha leader, with the collaboration of the RSS,

founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. This was the main political vehicle of the Hindu

movement till it gave way to BJP in 1980 (Ibid., p.49).

“The silence in the historical record is at one with the attempt of all-Hindu communal parties

to hide their link with Gandhi’s murder by any means possible – dissociating, disowning,

dissolving and reinventing”. (Ibid., p.48)

With such historical manipulations, the Hindutva forces tried to conceal those portions of

history which were embarrassing to their cause.

7 There is a consensus that it was an extreme wing of the Hindu Mahasabha led by Savarkar that was behind Gandhiji’s murder. In January 1948, after Gandhiji was assassinated, Savarkar was arrested as he was suspected of being the mastermind behind the conspiracy. He was eventually exonerated in the Gandhi murder trial for lack of evidence to corroborate the testimony of the approver, a technical point in criminal law (Mukherjee, Mukherjee and Mahajan, 2008, p.50).


Chapter IX CONCLUSION

The NDA was defeated in the elections of 2004 and the new UPA government pledged to

“de-saffronize” textbooks and curricula nationwide and restore the secular character of

education. In March, the UPA Government released new NCERT textbooks, based on the

texts used prior to the controversial 2002 updates (Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights,

And Labor, 2005).

“Even though this adventure of inventing a past is no longer ‘official’, that highly charged

episode [was] worth recollecting both because of what it tells us about the abuse of temporal

power and also because of the light it throws on the intellectual underpinning of the Hindutva

movement”. (Sen, 2005, p.63)

All the historical manipulations enumerated in the previous chapters also show the fascist

character8 of this movement. Its Orwellian agenda might be a far-fetched idea in the

democratic set-up of the Indian State but it is nonetheless dangerous.

Bidwai (2002) saw the NCERT controversy separating “those who see history as a truthful

account of reality, which demands continual reinterpretation, from those who yoke history to

narrow “nation-building” agendas inculcating irrational national “pride”. The latter will make

whole generations ignorant (italics mine). They will breed hatred and hubris - as Hitler did

with his Master Race myth. Under the BJP's “leadership”, India seems headed that way - and

at least towards the destruction of secularism and pluralism. Nothing could be more

dangerous”.

8 “In the 1930s Hindu nationalism borrowed from European fascism to transform ‘different’ people into ‘enemies’ (italics mine). Leaders of militant Hinduism repeatedly expressed their admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler and for the fascist model of society. This influence continues to the present day”. (Casolari, 2000)

Ignorance is Strength was one of the three major slogans of the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen-

Eighty Four which helped it to subjugate the individual and strengthen its own domain.

According to Sen (op.cit.) ‘the rewriting of history serves the dual purpose of playing a role

in providing a common basis for the diverse membership of the Sangh Parivar, and of helping

to get fresh recruits to Hindu political activism’.

Such ignorant recruits have been used by the Hindutva movement to create havoc in

Ayodhya (1992), Bombay (1992-93), Gujarat (2002) and Kandhamal, Orissa (2008) to

strengthen its own agenda.

BJP might be out of power at the Centre but Sangh Parivar continues to spread such

ignorance through its massive parallel education machinery which is growing steadily.

Today, Vidya Bharati runs 28,000 educational institutions with approximately 32,50,000

students on their rolls. The organisation employs approximately 1,60,000 teachers. These

schools are run in all States except Mizoram (Ramakrishnan, 2012).

Moreover, RSS continues to forward the Hindutva agenda in the states governed by BJP.

“In November 2011, the BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka introduced

lessons and discourses on the Bhagvad Gita in schools. They sought to make the teaching of

the Gita compulsory. But following widespread opposition from political parties,

educationists and even Education Department officials, the governments in both the States

were forced to make Gita studies optional”. (Ibid.)

Similarly, in Gujarat, though the highly objectionable anti-minority content of various

textbooks introduced in 2001 has reportedly been withdrawn, but these portions are still

brought into discussion in classrooms across the State. One such portion introduced in the


social studies textbook of class IX, under the chapter titled “Problems of the country and their

solutions” lists “minority communities” as the foremost problem, followed by the Scheduled

Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, smuggling, corruption and bribery. The chapter also termed

Muslims, Christians and Parsis as “foreigners” (Ibid.).

Yadav (2002) states “history has been only as much enmeshed in the power/ knowledge

nexus as any other discipline in the social sciences. Yet whenever (and indeed wherever) BJP

is in power, only history has been singled out for interference; projects get commissioned to

distort, delete and redo history”.

With general elections to be held in another couple of years in 2014 (or even earlier seeing

the dismal performance of Congress in January-March 2012 state assembly elections), it’s

important for the secular forces to prepare themselves to counter any such potential onslaught

on history if BJP comes back to power at the Centre.


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hindutva's orwellian agenda

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