People's Democracy

FOR those who thought better not wake the sleeping lion, better deal with the less fierce opponents first, it is a lesson that lions wake when they want to, not when you want them to. It should have been realised much earlier that the so-called NCERT sponsored National Curriculum Framework for school education (NCF) is nothing but the Vidya Bharti syllabus in a slightly more civilised language and tone. It is wishful thinking to imagine that one can prevent the subversion of the national education policy through academic protests and by an insistence on procedures and rational argumentation with the newly revamped academic bodies, or by challenging the NCF without challenging the Vidya Bharti enterprise and confronting the RSS.

The RSS agenda on education and culture is not new. Communal historiography is older than the Indian state, and the RSS schools have been around throughout the Nehruvian era of politics, growing even while the RSS was banned. There is a case then for the argument, which is being made from many quarters, that there has been a neglect of the goings on in the Vidya Bharti schools and in the textbooks of the country at large by the previous governments and by the secular intelligentsia. The RSS view of history particularly, was quite rampant in the school system in the country, and there was much complementarity between them and the propaganda at the RSS shakhas. Yet the Indian state maintained a position of secularism, and it was not possible to characterize the communal world view as national, or to inject Hindutva as state policy in education.

This situation has now dramatically altered. It is important to see that the BJP government in power has given a big fillip to the RSS and its affiliated organisations.

The subversion of the state system of education has been attempted whenever the RSS has had a foothold in the government. And it has been attempted yet again now for various reasons, not least the fact that if it has a government in power then why should access to all government source and government sponsored resources not be under its control? There is no better way to manage that in the field of education than by simply making the government and autonomous education system its own, through change in syllabi, for as long as the government continues to finance or subsidise schools and other academic institutions. The government resources at the command of the RSS have been significant injects into the programme of Hindutva, and the Indian state and capital are more fiercely and openly in the service of RSS politics than ever before.

The RSS sponsored content in education - particularly history - is a development that is complementary to this process as it immediately and effectively prioritises the right wing, sectarian agenda for the country of achieving the twin goals of communalised consciousness and demobilisation of people from democratic politics.

Also, such a subversion of the secular and state owned educational system carries the communal discourse of majoritarianism and Hindutva as ‘nationalism’ right into the heart of the nation’s ideological pool of resources. Therefore there is a need to achieve the status of a national education policy for what is essentially a sectarian and divisive policy of education. This can be done only through changing the basic policy document, apart from the texts in the BJP ruled states. This underlines the significance of the defense of the NCF by the government and the NCERT, and the attack on the NCERT books. These books after all derive their significance for the state by their link with the national educational policy and framework document, and also the premier national organisation for effecting the national education policy. The RSS simply cannot have, texts that are contrary to its worldview, if the new NCF is to have any meaning.

A related question is why this ferocious and intemperate attack on history and historians who have penned the NCERT textbooks? As historian Bipan Chandra puts it, the terrain of history is central to right wing political projects. Remove communalism from the BJP, and it would become any other party. For example, liberalisation and globalisation policies find favour with a larger spectrum of political opinion in India, and within the Sangh Parivar there is a stream that espouses radical right wing concerns. But it is their view of Indian society and culture that binds all strands of the right wing and separates them from other parties and political groups.

The attack on history and on secular historians is sharp for the simple reason that secular historiography directly interferes with the RSS version of Indian tradition and nationhood, and the right wing has willy nilly brought history into the ambit of contemporary political discourse.

History is central to creating the fascist citizen and for the completion of the right wing fascist project in India. No other kind of social engineering can prepare the grounds for such a takeover as an alteration of people’s memory of themselves and their collective historical experience. Fascism could never have succeeded in Europe without its anti semitism and superiority of the Aryan race theories. Similarly, Hindutva is empty without its myth of the Aryan as original inhabitant and the Muslim as foreigner, or without the tyrannical image of the Muslim kings, or Brahmanism as foundation of Indian culture.

Moreover it is not only a question of control over economy, polity and society. It is also a question of establishing hegemony. The instrument of communal, chauvinistic history is important for achieving this hegemony. It is therefore, not merely control, but hegemony that the right wing seeks.

A study of Indian history through a secular prism gives a lie to many of the RSS’s claims, not least its claim of the Hindutva leaders as freedom fighters. History is the crucible for constructing not merely the nation’s past and the heritage of its people; it is as much the crucible for building the nation’s future. The ‘Golden Age’ of the ancient period ruled by Hindu kings is crucial for the future projection of the Hindu Rashtra. A denial of the composite and pluralistic character of peoples’ heritage is necessitated by the justifications of second-class citizenship for the minorities that the Hindu Rashtra stands for.

The picture of cruel Moghul kings and marauding Muslims creates the ‘inspiration’ for anti-minority pogroms, the chauvinist sectarian nationalism is complementary to the anti-Christian attacks, and swadeshi a cover for the outright selling out of the country’s assets. More than that, such a sectarian and violent depiction of history, accompanied with calls for revenge and ‘justice’ for Hindus is eminently suited for the nurturing of fascist idealism that could attract the young and the innocent. The victims of this design would not even be aware of the diabolical scheme of which they are a part and necessary instrument. History writing and history teaching is, for the right wing Hindutvavadis, a means for creating a factory for lies that can be made part of a Goebbelsian propaganda.

Let us not be complacent that universities will remain immune from the right wing tampering of the history syllabi, and that when we have defeated the BJP in the next round of elections, which we well might succeed in, the secular historiography preserved in our University departments and in the publications of our secular historians will restore the balance in school teaching.

History is crucial to the redefinition of the nation in religious and militaristic terms. It is not without significance that J S Rajput, Director of the NCERT, has clearly said that value education of the kind sponsored by the RSS is necessary in the new fight against terrorism. Or that this fight has to be fought not just militarily against the external terrorists, but also through education against the internal threats to national unity. Vajpayee has sanctioned the withdrawal of the texts of Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar, RS Sharma, Arjun Dev and Satish Chandra on the grounds that ‘one sided’ history needs to be replaced for building alternate views of the nation and its goals. The open challenge thrown is that secularism will not do and will not be tolerated. The command comes from none other than the RSS, and Dinanath Batra, head of the Vidya Bharti enterprise, and the state secret of who is going to write the new texts becomes secondary as one is told these texts are to be in line with the Vidya Bharti texts.

It is a measure of RSS’s sense of urgency that it is not prepared to wait until the new texts are put into circulation in March, just a few months ahead. The CBSE has sent a circular to schools that ‘offending’ portions be deleted from the existing texts immediately, that discussions on these themes be not allowed in the classrooms, and no questions be set in examination on these portions.

And the contents of these ‘offending portions’ is inextricably linked with the RSS current political concerns, and the long-term design of establishing hegemony.

(To be continued)