The Hindu : An Indian Minister's idea of a `coup'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 28, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

An Indian Minister's idea of a `coup'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON NOV. 27. The Union Human Resource Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, made a startling statement when asked about allegations of factual inaccuracies in the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) history textbooks during his visit to London recently.

Was it true that the Russian revolution had been described as a "coup", he was asked. "What was it then?" the Minister countered and said he had been to Russia several times in recent years and "nobody cares about these things". Nobody, he went on to add, talked about the Communist manifesto or the Revolution. "In China, people don't even remember Mao," he noted with some satisfaction.

Maybe, but was he seriously suggesting that simply because people no longer talked about it there was no such thing as a Communist manifesto, let alone the much-documented Revolution, or that Mao was a figment of imagination?

Since one doesn't argue with a Minister beyond a point, the exchange ended there. But it was clear that in his enthusiasm to run down Communism, he had inadvertently confirmed the BJP's proclivity for rewriting history.

So, allegations of tampering with books were not simply a left-wing conspiracy after all. For here was a responsible Minister, only third in the pecking order after the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, making "new" history on the hoof by portraying selective interpretation and fleeting impressions as hard historical facts — good enough to be taught in state-approved textbooks.

If that is what history is about then the BJP's natural constituency should be among the revisionist historians across the border in Pakistan where, one is told, school textbooks are full of creative "facts" in relation to India. And, since interpretation is all, there should no longer be any quarrel with British colonial historians who insist that what Indians call a freedom struggle was a myth.

For 50 years, Indian scholars — with the support of successive governments including the BJP's — have consistently challenged the view that India's independence was the result of a voluntary and peaceful transfer of power but it would now seem that the Brits are entitled to their own view. Time, then, to bin the Indian Council for Historical Research's (ICHR) high-profile and often controversial "Towards Freedom" project?

At a more serious level, the issue is not about interpretation but whether school children, whose only source at that stage is their textbook, should be taught questionable interpretations of well-established events as historical truth. There are historians in Europe who have their own view of the Holocaust and some even believe that it never happened but that is not dressed up as a fact to be taught in schools.

Indeed, the Minister in question would be the first to protest if the view that beef-eating among Hindus was not always taboo were to be presented as an irrefutable fact in history texts without any reference to other views. Or, if the widespread view that the Gujarat violence was an open-and-shut case of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing were to become official history in some countries, including perhaps a post-BJP India.

The most interesting bit was the Minister's suggestion that historical events ceased to be history and historical figures became non-entities if people no longer cared or were disillusioned. So, should we start looking the other way whenever the freedom struggle or Gandhiji are mentioned? After all, millions of Indians are disillusioned with post-independence India and with each passing year, Gandhiji is becoming more and more of a distant figure, whose "relevance" is routinely debated. And if children in India are going to grow up learning that there was no such thing as the Russian revolution or that the Long March was a myth, Moscow and Beijing would be entitled to returning the compliment by repudiating some of India's holy cows.

Admittedly, the scenarios one has sketched here are patently absurd but that's precisely why they are there. For what appears absurd or impossible can, with a little help from the likes of our Minister or his party, become a reality. Stalin showed us how history could be airbrushed, and it is ironical that a party whose tactics smack of Stalinist fanaticism in many ways should set out to repudiate the Russian dictator's very raison d'etre.

There is already too much revisionism abroad — the Holocaust did not take place, Islam was never meant to be tolerant or democratic, imperialism was a civilising force etc., etc. — and Indian Ministers can do without contributing to further blurring of facts and myths.

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