People's Democracy

TRANSFORMATION of consciousness along communal lines is seen as a necessary precondition for the possibility of a successful fascist takeover -which is what the RSS agenda is all about. Towards this end the takeover of the academic-intellectual life -- in more ways than just the physical takeover of institutions -- is of crucial importance for the communal right wing forces. In fact the takeover of institutions is geared towards this projected end, and history is a significant instrument for manufacturing consent for such a regime. The politics around history must be seen in this larger context.

The BJP government is in a terrible hurry, and anxious to prove its credentials to the RSS. Its primary accountability is to the RSS and not to the Indian people. From day one the BJP government has been implementing the RSS agenda on education, and its attacks on secular history and secular historians have been particularly intemperate, including the famous ‘Eminent Historians’ treatise of journalist ideologue of the RSS. This book established a live link between street level propaganda and ‘research’ propositions by RSS linked intellectuals, which has since become the norm.

The strong arm tactics being employed to bring NCERT history texts in line with the propaganda of the RSS shakhas, with necessary sanction of the academic community being facilitated through spurious research in fields crucial to the RSS, is a flashpoint in this well thought out strategy. Suddenly reputed journals from reputed, but now revamped institutions, are speaking the language of the pracharaks, and we are being provided with ‘evidence’ for Indus valley civilization being an Aryan civilisation, for the Aryan civilization itself to have existed before 5000 BC and so on. All from the pens of people holding important positions in academic institutions, if not intellectual status in the academic world. There is little to distinguish what the Rajarams and Conrad Elst and PN Oaks of the RSS intellectual brigade are saying from what Sudarshan, Vinay Katyar and Ashok Singhal are saying. In fact what the RSS pracharaks first pronounce is what the great eminences (to borrow Arun Shourie’s phrase) obediently work towards ‘finding’ ‘evidence’ for, as the conjured up computer images of the horse to prove the Aryan status of Harappan civilization by Rajaram, show.

History has been brought to the centre of political discourse by the right wing in this country, and it is today using this prerogative to transform the national education policy, and to streamline history texts in line with this policy. It is using the same old Goebbelsian methods of telling a lie again and again till it sounds like a truth, and becomes not only a part of common sense, but gets transformed into ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’ through its status of being included in school texts. It is in fact the finest example of what post modernists characterise as ‘reality’ being created through texts, except that what is being ‘created’ and ‘reconstructed’ does have discrepancy with things as they actually existed.

The blurring of the issues of objectivity and perspective with ‘our history’ and ‘their history’, and everyone’s own history, presumably, is being achieved successfully, without doubt due to the spadework done by postmodernists of all varieties all over the world, including India. But the point at issue is to distinguish between what is happening in the rhetoric of the RSS ideologues at the street level and what is happening in the academic institutions. The distinction is of utmost importance in any effective resistance to the right wing project.

It is true that what is at stake is the very definition of the nation, as is being pointed out in the press, and following from that the direction that social and political life in this country could take. But it would be a mistake to characterise it as either a question to be decided at the electoral level by the people of this country, who it is said will decide how the nation is defined in history texts as well (as opposed to their more crucial intervention in defeating the right wing forces in the political contest), or as a battle between professional history and bureaucrats and politicians of a hue. Evidences for both opinions are no doubt there. But it is important to look at the complexities involved.

It is important to note that the RSS is going ahead with its changes in education policy, and more specifically, history texts, without reference to public opinion. Moreover, it is going to people with a history that they have anyway been reading since independence in schools, or learning through other social channels, almost in an unchallenged fashion. If anything has taught them to question this received knowledge it is their own lived experience and living memory of collective struggles and experienced oppression of their ancestors. As in the case of dalits, women and minorities.

The RSS is not trying to transform history in the electoral field. It is not going around telling them that dalits have not been oppressed by the caste system or that brahmans have not dominated society. It leaders cannot even dare to do that. It is trying to transform people’s opinion of the opposition forces and secular political groupings by identifying these groupings as contrary to the nation’s interest and as desecrators of India’s Hindu heritage. They are not fighting a battle of evidences there. They are simply creating divisions through misrepresenting and transforming their modern insecurities, and guiding these insecurities into retributive channels against the secular forces and the minorities.

In the case of the larger audience for their brand of history the RSS is fighting the battle of confronting people’s aspirations and popular struggles with detracting arguments and elements that go into weakening these struggles, and transforming these struggles into movements that strengthen their own mass base. While history impinges into this strategy and is a crucial element, the reversal and changes in national education policy and NCERT texts does not. More important, therefore, if we have to confront the RSS’s use of history for its own political designs we must confront the Vidya Bharti enterprise and call for reversal of changes in government school texts in the BJP-ruled states.

It is the universities and the secular academic-intellectual world that the NCERT changes in history and the National Curriculum Framework are aimed at calling to attention. The fact that such significant academic and research institutions have been successfully revamped by the BJP government, that it is able to go ahead without calling the meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), that it has got not just the NCERT and ICHR but the CBSE to tow its line on implementing its history changes, that a meeting of the education ministers of the states is not being called despite demands in parliament, that the Parliamentary debates are high jacked through misinformation and lies is an indication of how far things have proceeded since Murli Manohar Joshi was forced to abandon the Vidya Bharti paper at the State Education Ministers Conference in September1998.

The entire education system is being taken over and transformed by the communal forces, and the world of universities has simply laid down its defenses without a whimper. Apart from the heroic defense of secular history by some senior historians in the press, conventions by Leftist groupings in universities, and organisations like SAHMAT, where hundreds of people have voiced concern and statements by nine state governments, the university and school system has remained untouched.

Even in premier universities like the JNU and Delhi, it is impossible to have even a simple resolution condemning this sabotage and undermining of our entire educational world, the rewriting of history along communal lines, the forcing of this history into schools to poison young minds, the state of affairs in the Vidya Bharti set up. The retreat of the intellectuals, to use the remarkable phrase coined by James Petras more than a decade ago, in the face of this right wing challenge is what is allowing the RSS to achieve a runaway success with its education policy. It must be realised that battle for secular history has first and foremost to be fought in the academic and intellectual institutions. It is not people but intellectuals who have sanctioned the political abuse of history in this country through their silence and complicity in the right wing project.

The RSS is forced to confront popular aspirations and popular struggles through lies, but in the case of universities and other academic institutions, where it is actually known that it is lies and absolute junk that is being presented as history, the RSS has faced no confrontation. This is a crucial difference in the two fields that the RSS is operating in, and while the political parties can win the electoral battle without the intellectuals, the matter of education policy and history rewriting cannot be won without the fight being carried into the academic world. It will take more than a defeat of the BJP to undo what has already been done.