In our school days, we have read the story of the Scottish King, Robert the Bruce, who, inspired by a spider’s relentless attempt to weave a web, gained confidence to come back after six consecutive losses to wage a war against the King of England and regain his land. But what happens if untiring pursuit is taken up by a small set of people who were inspired by Joseph Goebbels’ dictum: “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
My office gets mails from the likes of Robert the Bruce as well as Joseph Goebbels. The former helps to correct mistakes, make amends, effect course correction, and keep the newspaper’s status as the repository of records intact. The latter expects the paper to give space for tall claims and misplaced national pride at the cost of truth. They think their tireless spamming will intimidate scholars from speaking their mind.
This disturbing phenomenon is growing in its reach not just in India but also in Turkey and Japan, where the notion of national pride is used to obfuscate facts and peddle an artificial construct as organic history that fails to meet rigorous scrutiny. History should be based on credible sources, the selection of particular details from authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination. The Hindu always strives to make a distinction between myths, legends and history.
Facts and dissent The supporters of Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are distressingly similar in their approach to facts and opposition to dissent and reason. They do not think twice before unleashing vitriolic assault where truth becomes the first casualty. “ >Overturning Ataturk’s legacy ” (December 13, 2014, Comment page) gives us a clear idea of what is happening in Turkey.
A recent report in The Economist , “History is haunting Shinzo Abe,” is a grim reminder of what will happen to truth and history if newspapers cave in under the pressure of the political Right. The Economist wrote: “In August, the liberal Asahi Shimbun admitted running stories based on discredited testimony by a former Japanese soldier who said he had corralled Korean women into wartime military brothels. Last week, the Asahi ’s conservative arch-rival, Yomiuri Shimbun , said sorry to its 10 million readers for using the term “sex slaves” in many articles about so-called comfort women since 1992.” But this retraction is not about getting the facts right and setting the records straight. It is a meek acceptance of the diktat of the ruling political Right and an act of denying history. United Nations’ special rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, has given an authoritative report in 1996 on the comfort women. She documented how during World War II, imperial Japan forced women and girls into sexual slavery.
In India, we see a similar trend gaining currency and it is imperative to counter it in its infancy rather than permit it to grow and undermine the wellspring of knowledge, governance and multiple cohabitations of various religious, linguistic and ethnic groups. In October this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time. We all read about Karna in Mahabharat. If we think a little more, we realise that [the] Mahabharat says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb… We worship Lord Ganesh. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
Perils of mixing myths and knowledge It was natural that many scholars found this assertion problematic and questioned the veracity of the statement. This paper carried critical pieces in its Editorial and Comment sections by eminent writers that included historian Romila Thapar, journalist Karan Thapar, physicist Vikram Soni, molecular biologist D. Balasubramanian and sociologist Shiv Visvanathan.
These articles tried to give us a fair perspective. Not one tried to deny the existence of traditional knowledge systems in India. They were not polemics about either Indian knowledge systems or western knowledge systems. They were about the danger of mixing myths and knowledge systems. They were about history and what distinguishes it from bigotry. They were about what constitutes the past and how to protect one’s legacy from falsification and spin doctoring. However, a handful of readers reduced these studious arguments to a lack of national pride, an unwillingness to acknowledge India’s glorious past and some sort of sycophancy towards western knowledge systems.
So far Indian media, by and large, has desisted from going the Japanese way. But these Goebbels-inspired warriors hope that their relentless efforts will end up in rewriting history. This paper has more Bruce-like readers who would ensure that the space for reason and moderation would not be replaced by illiberal rants.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
