People's Democracy

WITH one stroke a CBSE circular, demanding compliance with the deletions ordered in history texts by the NCERT, has brought the national education policy in line with the hateful indoctrination of the RSS shakhas. The manner in which this is being steam rolled is an indication of how far the BJP government has traveled since Mr Murli Manohar Joshi was forced to abandon the Vidya Bharti paper at the state education ministers’ conference in September1998.

The tone and tenor of the said circular, which says that the deletions are with "immediate effect" and the portions and statements mentioned "are not to be taught in the respective classes or discussed in the classroom", show that the RSS has decided to treat national opinion in the most cavalier fashion. A list of the books, with the specific passages deleted was attached for reference. The books in question have in any case been withdrawn by the NCERT from the next session. The hurry to act through deletions therefore has as much to do with immediate politicking as with history.

Along with POTO, this is another move at a "win-win" situation by the RSS in favour of the BJP in the coming UP elections. Mr Joshi is on record that he is the only member of the government to have fulfilled the RSS agenda through the BJP government. There is a clear political intention to use the controversy to make all opposition forces appear as unpatriotic and unmindful of sensitivities of particular communities.

The Congress has regretfully allowed this trap to nicely fall in place. It has let itself be manipulated into an unenviable situation, by passing through the Delhi assembly some of the very same deletions demanded by the RSS, where if it withdraws it lends itself to the charge of being insensitive to Sikh, Jain and Jat sensibilities in the coming elections, and if it does not retract it unhappily sits in the BJP's lap. The BJP has forced on the biggest opposition party a situation where it has to take a clear and open stand on secularism, something the Congress finds difficult in today's charged communal atmosphere created by the BJP's discourse.

The deletions from the four books taken together do not amount to more than a few pages. But the portions and statements edited out have a specific design and purpose.

Having achieved its purpose of creating an anti-Muslim sentiment in the country through the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign and the sustained anti-Muslim propaganda since independence, the RSS has forced secular parties and groups to be more vocal on minority rights and against RSS’ anti Muslim stance. It is therefore now in a position to present secularism as not just anti-Hindu but as essentially pro-Muslim.

In a related move the historical experience of minorities other than Muslims and Christians is incorporated and appropriated into the ‘Hindu’ version of ‘nationalist’ history. In this version it is now easy to present the NCERT books as pro-Muslim in their depiction of any conflict between the Muslims and another community, and to proclaim everywhere in public meetings, as RSS ideologues Sudarshan, Batra and Joshi, and the NCERT director, Rajput, have been doing, that the so called secular historians have in fact been whitewashing the sins of Mughal emperors and denigrating those who fought against them because they are Hindus, Sikhs and Jats etc. It is of course another matter that it is in the RSS version that religious communities like Muslims and Christians are wiped out from history except as villains --- even if, as in the case of Malik Ambar, they happened to be fighting the ‘foreign’ Mughal empire!

The sudden hue and cry over ‘minority’ sentiments of the Sikhs, Jains and Jats is a major election ploy, but it is also significant for the fact that it seems to achieve the impossible of reversing the trend of denying them their separate existence, by giving them the status of grieving minorities suffering at the hands of secular interpretations and manouvres, and at the same time enables the RSS to emerge as champion of minorities! The deletions seemingly subvert RSS practice and interpretations, while in fact are geared to strengthen the RSS historical perspective of Indian history as another example of civilisational conflict based on religious affiliations.

The BJP has made great efforts to woo Sikh religious leadership after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms and the Sikh anger against the Congress with regard to Sikh killings in 1984. It has met with great success, except that the RSS’ recent aggressiveness in Punjab in trying to show of Sikhism as part of Hinduism has caused resentment against the RSS as well. The BJP as a political party needs very badly to move in again as the champions of Sikhs on the eve of elections, particularly after its economic policies have hit the peasantry badly. It has therefore created the bogey of Sikh sentiments being hurt by the NCERT books authored by leftist historians.

An entire portion has been deleted from a chapter in Professor Satish Chandra's Medieval India for class XI, on the deliberately misquoted grounds that he has called Guru Teg Bahadur a "plunderer and rapist". What the professor has done is in fact to show that there is uncertainty regards information on the execution of the Guru. He has therefore quoted and tried to evaluate the conflicting Persian, Sikh and Hindu sources, pointing out that the Persian sources represent the official explanation, and concluded that "the guru, while being a religious leader, had also begun to be a rallying point for all those fighting against injustice and oppression." He has also criticised Aurangzeb on many counts, not least for the "unjustified" execution and his "narrow approach" towards him.

Yet it is important to see that what the RSS has cleverly managed is that, as if from 1658 onwards, the Sikhs have no existence in medieval India. Even as they shout hoarse over Sikh sentiments being hurt! It is entirely convenient to RSS politics that Sikhs lose their association and inheritance of past peasant struggles and conflicts with the caste system and egalitarian visions of religion to become a ready vote bank whose historical memory remains restricted to defending faith against Mughal rulers and anger against those who deny this. In such a memory 1984 will naturally loom larger as it has the same associated connotations, and a major section the Sikhs will happily continue to become a pawn in RSS politics as Akali inclusion in NDA government signifies. If others’ memory of Sikhs remains so as well it better serves the RSS national policy with regard to Sikhs, while it sidelines the doings of RSS in Punjab.

The Modern India text for class VII by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev has its references to the Jats chopped off for stating that "they founded their state in Bharatpur wherefrom they conducted plundering raids in the regions around and participated in the court intrigues against Delhi," again on grounds of "hurt sentiments."

Interestingly, plunder by Jats is a fact and tradition that Jats neither hide nor are ashamed of. On the contrary, they are quite proud of how they got the better of the powers in Delhi. It is well known that much of Jat folklore is a celebration of such deeds, and talk of Jat hurt is only a current phenomenon created by the caste politics in North India. Even Natwar Singh's book on Suraj Mal has references to the plundering role of Jats.

Jats have traditionally had their own leadership and this holds true for post independence India. The legacy of Charan Singh and the competition between Ajit Singh and Chautala type politics, centred on questions of farmers and reservations for Jats in the Mandal OBC scheme, have created a new modern identity that is not easily subsumed in the Hindu Rashtra logic of all Hindu castes opposed to Muslims and Christians, despite the role of the Jats in the riots and plunder in their region during Partition.

Caste and religion are being brought to bear on identity to create a reserve force of the Hindutva army through reference to old hurts and guilts sanitised and divorced from the history of plunder. Jats are talked of as hurt by their essentiality being reduced to that of plunderers, which incidentally is not true at all of the book/passages deleted, at the same time that their old animosities are being resurrected to enable them to in fact play that role now as junior partners of the Bajrang Dal brigade.

The maximum deletions pertain to the Vedic age, references to the oppressive caste system in ancient India, the characterisation of Rama and Krishna as mythological figures and not historical figures and real heroes, and privileging of archaeological evidence over religious myths in the reconstruction of history.

These deletions tell their own story and hardly call for elaboration, although one must say that Dalit sentiments, or for that matter the sentiments of Christians and Muslims, women and secular people in this country, who collectively constitute the real majority in this country, hardly count for anything in the RSS’ vision of "hurt sentiments" and "offensive texts."

But that is another story --- to be considered in the light of the Vidya Bharti texts that the new RSS-sponsored NCERT texts are to confirm to, the question of the validity of religious sentiments as guiding force for writing history, and a host of other such questions.