“The Left distorts” (Interview with Arun Shourie)
Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: India Today
Date: November 23, 1998

Controversy and Arun Shourie are inseparable. He, has taken on
governments, politicians and corporate houses, championed
contentious causes and assumed the role of India's permanent
gadfly. After questioning the mythology centred on Babasaheb
Ambedkar and offending Dalit activists, Shourie has now targeted
Left historians. Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their
Line, Their Fraud (ASA, Rs 350), released last week, is a
characteristically robust attack on India's history
establishment. He has accused it of shoddy scholarship, wilful
distortion and even milking the exchequer He spoke to Deputy
Editor Swapan Dasgupta on his latest battle. Extracts:

Q: Let me start with a question you accuse communists of
constantly asking. Why now?
A: It is what the Gita calls a war unasked for. We should never
shirk work that has been brought upon us. Some magazines
published reports that the BJP Government had changed the
resolution of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR)
by converting "rational" into "national". It was a concoction by
some CPI(M) members and I learnt from the ICHR staff that the
letter circulated to the newspapers was typed in the ICHR office.
A staff member told one of these so-called historians that it was
not true. He replied. "Who cares? Let it go." That was the
origin. And every newspaper just swallowed it. I contacted the
editors but none of them retracted the story. Even the story
carried by INDIA TODAY was about the eminent historians not
having accepted one penny as if there was a genuine other side to
it.

Q: So you believe that in this controversy there is no other
side?
A: Not yet. Not in the three limited matters which I have touched
upon in the book. Which are: the technology by which they acquire
these institutions and the uses to which they put it to; the
pickpocketing that they do; the complete and systematic
perversion of facts. I don't think there is another side.

Q: It's curious that it took a non-historian to question some of
these assumptions. Why hasn't this challenge come from within the
discipline of history?
A: There are too many establishments in India, the Indian
journalists service, the Indian intellectual service, the Indian
historians service. They capture institutions. There is a great
timidity in India in all intellectual circles. You want a
promotion in the history department, increase in research funds,
funds for travel, promotion, everything depends upon certificates
>from these persons. If you want to challenge the accepted
notions, you not only need a person who is outside the discipline
but one who is deaf to the reproaches of these persons.

Q: Your interventions in history have aroused claims and
counterclaims that you are waging a proxy. political war?
A: These are allegations. Have they found anything wrong with my
facts? When they quote a source, I look it up and I find it is
the opposite. Then they say that he did not look up the correct
one. Whatever they write is politics. So why are they so
surprised that an honest man may also write?

Q: Part of the problem in your view has been caused by shoddy
scholarship and shoddier journalism.
A: Yes. That, as well as slavish scholarship and journalism. One
and a half paras from Stalin's Short History of the CPSU(B). Just
look up any one the books of R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra, Romila
Thapar or D. N. Jha. It is the slavish mentality, providing
examples that substantiate those one and half paras on
periodisation. Even the Soviet historians have liberated
themselves from those categories. We got stuck in the categories
of the 1920s and 1930s.

Q: But you haven't stopped at mere intellectual slavishness. You
have actually accused these "eminent historians” of milking the
state.
A: Yes. It is a pitiable milking by current standards-all for
just Rs 12,000 or Rs 6.5 lakh. But it is a gross misuse of
authority and position. If the NBT or NCERT send a proposal that
R.C. Majumdar's edited Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on the
history of India should be translated into Indian languages,
these people would pass a resolution saying that it was not worth
translating into any Indian language. And lo and behold-they will
recommend their own works or that of EMS (Namboodiripad), the
great historian.

The deputy director of ICHR gives a project to Dr Paramatma
Saran, one of the great medievalists in India. He translates and
sends it to ICHR. After his death, the deputy director takes that
manuscript and gets a PhD for himself from Rajasthan University
without changing anything and publishes the book dedicated to
Nurul Hasan and thanking Irfan Habib who wrote a laudatory
foreword to it. In his office there is a picture of him
presenting his book to the then President Shankar Dayal Sharma,
another great scholar. So it's not just milking the state.

Some people in ICHR have told me that well known sociologist A.R.
Desai had been given a project to compile the history of the
trade union movement in India in 15 volumes. He completed the
task before he died. Then it mysteriously disappeared. The
current ICHR chairman has succeeded in tracing these manuscripts
inspite of non-cooperation. By doing so, he has deprived 15
people of their mock PhDs.

Q: None of these details have been seriously contested. But your
detractors sail they will not give you the pleasure of a de
defamation suit because you are beneath contempt?
A: Why aren't they replying through the newspapers. They are
always issuing statements, these six eminent historians, 10
leading intellectuals. They put on lofty airs because they have
no answers.

Q: How should people, governments and public spirited individuals
approach the question of teaching history in schools?
A: I feel that each time their books are recommended, mine should
be too. The students should see what great perversity they are
being made to swallow. There is no sufficient professional
scrutiny, no professional discourse on what has been published.
The same thing gets repeated. Nobody goes back to the sources.
Also, it is a bad idea for governments to get into the business
of preparing textbooks just as it is a bad idea to have
institutions like ICHR. It only leads to the patronage of
intellectuals. This is the bad legacy of Indian socialism.

Q: Will the book be of assistance to the BJP governments which
have also been accused of doctoring history?
A: Firstly I do not know what changes have been brought about by
them. I have asked them (Left historians) to show me those
textbooks which they think have been changed. But they haven't.
It can't be that you set one standard and any departure from that
stand is communal. The cure is that if someone perverts the next
set of history text books then they should also be subjected to
professional scrutiny

Q: Has the spirit of inquiry completely gone out of Indian
intellectuals?
A: Yes, I think so. By and large our work is very derivative in
most subjects. I find this in the case of many subjects. In
history it is slavishness to the verbiage of the 1920s and 1930s.
There is a lack of creativity even in activist movements in
India. When an issue became prominent in the West, five years
later you'll see it prominent in India like feminism, human
rights, big dams, child labour and child prostitution. We are so
blind that someone has to yank our eyelids open for us. I am
considered disreputable if I depart from the standards of
political correctness set by the establishment.

Q: Why does it fall on you to yank open the eyelids, whether it
is on Ambedkar, Ayodhya or ICHR?
A: First. I'm deaf, and secondly, I'm shameless. I am not looking
for a job and find it quite easy to survive without a job. Of
course, they will say he is not a historian, that it is part of a
political agenda. It starts with allegations and smear and will
not stop till they say facts are not as important as social
revolution. It doesn't affect me. I hope readers will see through
it.

To Undo the Scandal, Undo the Control

To Undo the Scandal, Undo the Control
Arun Shourie






"There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans," writes the author. "Islam came out as the enemy of the 'But'. The word 'But,' as everybody knows, is an Arabic word and means an idol. Not many people, however, know that the derivation of the word 'But' is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin of the word indicates that in the Moslem mind idol worship had come to be identified with the Religion of the Buddha. To the Muslims, they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went. Before Islam came into being Buddhism was the religion of Bactria, Parthia, Afghanistan, Gandhar and Chinese Turkestan, as it was of the whole of Asia...."

A communal historian of the RSS-school?

But Islam struck at Hinduism also. How is it that it was able to fell Buddhism in India but not Hinduism? Hinduism had State-patronage, says the author. The Buddhists were so persecuted by the "Brahmanic rulers", he writes, that, when Islam came, they converted to Islam: this welled the ranks of Muslims but in the same stroke drained those of Buddhism. But the far more important cause was that while the Muslim invaders butchered both -- Brahmins as well as Buddhist monks -- the nature of the priesthood in the case of the two religions was different -- "and the difference is so great that it contains the whole reason why Brahmanism survived the attack of Islam and why Buddhism did not."

For the Hindus, every Brahmin was a potential priest. No ordination was mandated. Neither anything else. Every household carried on rituals -- oblations, recitation of particular mantras, pilgrimages, each Brahmin family made memorizing some Veda its very purpose.... By contrast, Buddhism had instituted ordination, particular training etc. for its priestly class. Thus, when the invaders massacred Brahmins, Hinduism continued. But when they massacred the Buddhist monks, the religion itself was killed.

Describing the massacres of the latter and the destruction of their vihars, universities, places of worship, the author writes, "The Musalman invaders sacked the Buddhist Universities of Nalanda, Vikramshila, Jagaddala, Odantapuri to name only a few. They raised to the ground Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. A very large number were killed outright by the Muslim commanders. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians themselves. Summarizing the evidence relating to the slaughter of the Buddhist Monks perpetrated by the Musalman General in the course of his invasion of Bihar in 1197 AD, Mr. Vincent Smith says, "....Great quantities of plunder were obtained, and the slaughter of the 'shaven headed Brahmans', that is to say the Buddhist monks, was so thoroughly completed, that when the victor sought for someone capable of explaining the contents of the books in the libraries of the monasteries, not a living man could be found who was able to read them. 'It was discovered,' we are told, 'that the whole of that fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindi tongue they call a college Bihar.' "Such was the slaughter of the Buddhist priesthood perpetrated by the Islamic invaders. The axe was struck at the very root. For by killing the Buddhist priesthood, Islam killed Buddhism. This was the greatest disaster that befell the religion of the Buddha in India...."

The writer? B. R. Ambedkar.

But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, three inscriptions were cited. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of the inscriptions had absolutely nothing to do with the matter. And the third told a story which had the opposite import than the one which the Marxist historian had insinuated: a Jain king had himself taken the temple from Jain priests and given it to the Shaivites because the former had failed to live up to their promise. Goel repeatedly asked the historian to point to any additional evidence or to elucidate how the latter had suppressed the import that the inscription in its entirety conveyed. He waited in vain. The revealing exchange is set out in Goel's monograph, "Stalinist 'Historians' Spread the Big Lie."

Marxists cite only two other instances of Hindus having destroyed Buddhist temples. These too it turns out yield to completely contrary explanations. Again Marxists have been asked repeatedly to explain the construction they have been circulating -- to no avail. Equally important, Sita Ram Goel invited them to cite any Hindu text which orders Hindus to break the places of worship of other religions -- as the Bible does, as a pile of Islamic manuals does. He has asked them to name a single person who has been honoured by the Hindus because he broke such places -� the way Islamic historians and lore have glorified every Muslim ruler and invader who did so. A snooty silence has been the only response.

But I am on the other point. Once they occupied academic bodies, once they captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these "historians" came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan, but insist on reproducing his denunciations of "Brahmanism," and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers.

Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they raise a shriek: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream.

But they are the ones who had distorted it in the first place -- by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods. And these "theses" of their's are recent concoctions. Recall the question of the disappearance of Buddhist monasteries. How did the grand-father, so to say, of present Marxist historians, D. D. Kosambhi explain that extinguishing? The original doctrine of the Buddha had degenerated into Lamaism, Kosambhi wrote. And the monasteries had "remained tied to the specialized and concentrated long-distance 'luxury' trade of which we read in the Periplus. This trade died out to be replaced by general and simpler local barter with settled villages. The monasteries, having fulfilled their economic as well as religious function, disappeared too." And the people lapsed!

"The people whom they had helped lead out of savagery (though plenty of aborigines survive in the Western Ghats to this day), to whom they had given their first common script and common language, use of iron, and of the plough," Kosambhi wrote, "had never forgotten their primeval cults."

The standard Marxist "explanation" -- the economic cause, the fulfilling of historical functions and thereafter disappearing, right to the remorse at the lapsing into "primeval cults". But today, these "theses" won't do. For today the need is to make people believe that Hindus too were intolerant, that Hindus also destroyed temples of others....

Or take another figure -- one saturated with our history, culture, religion. He also wrote of that region -- Afghanistan and beyond. The people of those areas did not destroy either Buddhism or the structures associated with it, he wrote, till one particular thing happened. What was this? He recounted, "In very ancient times this Turkish race repeatedly conquered the western provinces of India and founded extensive kingdoms. They were Buddhists, or would turn Buddhists after occupying Indian territory. In the ancient history of Kashmir there is mention of these famous Turkish emperors -- Hushka, Yushka, and Kanishka. It was this Kanishka who founded the Northern School of Buddhism called Mahayana. Long after, the majority of them took to Mohammedanism and completely devastated the chief Buddhistic seats of Central Asia such as Kandhar and Kabul. Before their conversion to Mohammedanism they used to imbibe the learning and culture of the countries they conquered, and by assimilating the culture of other countries would try to propagate civilization. But ever since they became Mohammedans, they have only the instinct of war left in them; they have not got the least vestige of learning and culture; on the contrary, the countries that come under their sway gradually have their civilization extinguished. In many places of modern Afghanistan and Kandhar etc., there yet exist wonderful Stupas, monasteries, temples and gigantic statues built by their Buddhist ancestors. As a result of Turkish admixture and their conversion to Mohammedanism, those temples etc. are almost in ruins, and the present Afghans and allied races have grown so uncivilized and illiterate that, far from imitating those ancient works of architecture, they believe them to be the creation of super-natural spirits like the Jinn etc. ...".

The author? The very one the secularists tried to appropriate three-four years ago -- Swami Vivekananda.

And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?

Swamiji focussed on another factor about which we hear little today: internal decay. The Buddha -- like Gandhiji in our times -- taught us first and last to alter our conduct, to realise through practice the insights he had attained. But that is the last thing the people want to do, they want soporifics: a mantra, a pilgrimage, an idol which may deliver them from the consequences of what they have done. The people walked out on the Buddha's austere teaching � for it sternly ruled out props. No external suppression etc., were needed to wean them away: people are deserting Gandhiji for the same reason today -- is any violence or conspiracy at work ?

The religion became monk and monastery-centric. And these decayed as closed groups and institutions invariably do. Ambedkar himself alludes to this factor -- though he puts even this aspect of the decay to the ravages of Islam. After the decimation of monks by Muslim invaders, all sorts of persons -- married clergy, artisan priests -- had to be roped in to take their place. Hence the inevitable result, Ambedkar writes: "It is obvious that this new Buddhist priesthood had neither dignity nor learning and were a poor match for the rival, the Brahmins whose cunning was not unequal to their learning."

Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and others who had reflected deeply on the course of religious evolution of our people, focussed on the condition to which Buddhist monasteries had been reduced by themselves. The people had already departed from the pristine teaching of the Buddha, Swamiji pointed out: the Buddha had taught no God, no Ruler of the Universe, but the people, being ignorant and in need of sedatives, "brought their gods, and devils, and hobgoblins out again, and a tremendous hotchpotch was made of Buddhism in India." Buddhism itself took on these characters: and the growth that we ascribe to the marvelous personality of the Buddha and to the excellence of his teaching, Swami Vivekananda said, was due in fact "to the temples which were built, the idols that were erected, and the gorgeous ceremonials that were put before the nation." Soon the "wonderful moral strength" of the original message was lost "and what remained of it became full of superstitions and ceremonials, a hundred times cruder than those it intended to suppress," of practices which were "equally bad, unclean, and immoral...."

Swami Vivekananda regarded the Buddha as "the living embodiment of Vedanta", he always spoke of the Buddha in superlatives. For that very reason, Vivekananda raged all the more at what Buddhism became: "It became a mass of corruption of which I cannot speak before this audience...;" "I have neither the time nor the inclination to describe to you the hideousness that came in the wake of Buddhism. The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism"....

With reform as his life's mission, Swami Vivekananda reflected deeply on the flaws which enfeebled Buddhism, and his insights hold lessons for us to this day. Every reform movement, he said, necessarily stresses negative elements. But if it goes on stressing only the negative, it soon peters out. After the Buddha, his followers kept emphasising the negative, when the people wanted the positive that would help lift them.

"Every movement triumphs," he wrote, "by dint of some unusual characteristic, and when it falls, that point of pride becomes its chief element of weakness." And in the case of Buddhism, he said, it was the monastic order. This gave it an organizational impetus, but soon consequences of the opposite kind took over. Instituting the monastic order, he said, had "the evil effect of making the very robe of the monk honoured," instead of making reverence contingent on conduct. "Then these monasteries became rich," he recalled, "the real cause of the downfall is here... some containing a hundred thousand monks, sometimes twenty thousand monks in one building -- huge, gigantic buildings...." On the one hand this fomented corruption within, it encoiled the movement in organizational problems. On the other it drained society of the best persons.

From its very inception, the monastic order had institutionalized inequality of men and women even in sanyasa, Vivekananda pointed out. "Then gradually," he recalled, "the corruption known as Vamachara (unrestrained mixing with women in the name of religion) crept in and ruined Buddhism. Such diabolical rites are not to be met with in any modern Tantra..."

Whereas the Buddha had counseled that we shun metaphysical speculations and philosophical conundrums � as these would only pull us away from practice -- Buddhist monks and scholars lost themselves in arcane debates about these very questions. [Hence a truth in Kosambhi's observation, but in the sense opposite to the one he intended: Shankara's refutations show that Shankara knew nothing of Buddha's original doctrine, Kosambhi asserted; Shankara was refuting the doctrines which were being put forth by the Buddhists in his time, and these had nothing to do with the original teaching of the Buddha.] The consequence was immediate: "By becoming too philosophic," Vivekananda explained, "they lost much of their breadth of heart."

Sri Aurobindo alludes to another factor, an inherent incompatibility. He writes of "the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions," and of how "its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people..."

We find in such factors a complete explanation for the evaporation of Buddhism. But we will find few of them in the secularist discourse today. Because their purpose is served by one "thesis" alone: Hindus crushed Buddhists, Hindus demolished their temples... In regard to matter after critical matter -- the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the Freedom Struggle -- we find this trait -- suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history-writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these "eminent historians" to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, you have to undo the control.

Objective Whitewash for Objective History (PART I of II) !

Arun Shourie

"This is an old charge which keeps surfacing now and then," wrote one of those "eminent historians", K. N. Panikkar, in an vituperative response to an article of mine -- the charge that close to two crores had been spent on the "Towards Freedom" project of the Indian Council of Historical Project, and little had been achieved. "About a year back Times of India carried a front page story on this. The historians had then clarified through a public statement published in several newspapers, that they have not drawn any money from the ICHR and that they worked for five years purely in an honorary capacity. When he [that is, me] gets the information from the ministry, if he does, that the editors have not taken any money, I would normally expect Shourie to tender a public apology. But given the intellectual honesty and cultural level reflected in his article, I do not think it would be forthcoming. The alternative of suing for defamation the likes of Shourie is below one's dignity. But I do expect at least the ministry to make a public statement on the factual position."

Strong stuff, and definitive, one would think. It turns out that on 17 July, 1998, in answer to a question tabled in the Rajya Sabha, the Ministry stated that only one part of the project has been completed and published since the original volume of Dr. P. N. Chopra. This is the volume -- in three parts -- by Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta covering 1943-44. In answer to another question, the Ministry has reported that "After publication of the Volume he was paid an honorarium of Rs. 25,000 in September, 1997."

Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta, in other words, is the one editor who has completed the work which he had undertaken. For that he has been paid Rs. 25,000. The others have not completed the work they had undertaken, they have therefore not been paid the Rs. 25,000 which are to be paid to them only when their volumes are completed and published. That is how they go about proclaiming themselves to be social workers -- we have been working in an honorary capacity, we have not taken a penny !

And as bits and pieces about the ICHR at last start trickling out, we learn that the "Towards Freedom" project isn't the only one on which large amounts have been spent and which has not been completed. There is an "Economic History of India Project." Rs. 1,955,000 have been spent on it. Nothing has been published as a result. Though, the Ministry told the Rajya Sabha that "according to the information furnished by the ICHR," two volumes of the project -- on Railways and Agriculture -- are "ready for the press".

The Ministry also told the Rajya Sabha that "Professor Bipin Chandra was sanctioned a sum of Rs. 75,000 during 1987-88 for the assignment entitled 'A History of the Indian National Congress'. A sum of Rs. 57,500 has been released to him till 23-6-1989. The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." In a word, spare readers this social-worker stance -- "doing all this in a strictly honorary capacity". It is as if Bipin Chandra were to go about saying, "See, I have not even taken the Rs. 17,500 which the ICHR still owes me." And do not miss that effort from the ICHR to help to the extent possible -- "The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." Does that mean that some "informal" manuscript has been received, or that no manuscript has been received?

As newspapers and magazines such as Outlook had done, Panikkar had concocted his conspiracy theory on the charge that the BJP Government had changed the word "Rational" into "National", and that it had suppressed three of the five objectives of the ICHR by changing the Memorandum of Association of the ICHR. I had reproduced relevant paragraphs from the Resolutions to show that the same wording had continued for at least twenty years. I had given the numbers and dates of the Resolutions. I had also reported that I had requested the Secretary of the Ministry to help ascertain the year since which the same wording had continued. And what was the response of this "eminent" historian who, as he said, writes signed articles in publications of the Communist Party "because I believe in the ideals it stands for"? "Even if Shourie's contention is true (unlike Shourie who is a BJP MP, a resident of Delhi elected from UP, I have no means to ascertain from the Ministry)..."

That is a much favoured stance: when caught peddling a lie, insinuate that the other fellow is privileged! And that as you are from the working masses, you cannot ascertain whether the facts he has stated are true. Therefore, what you stated must stand as fact -- Q.E.D. !

Exactly the same dodge was used a day or so later by another of these progressives. Manoj Raghuvanshi had invited K. M. Shrimali and me to discuss on Zee Television's Aap ki Adalat the charge that history was being rewritten in communal colours. Raghuvanshi read out what Outlook had reported -- that the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that "Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned."

Raghuvanshi asked Shrimali, whether this did not amount to distortion? True, that was a painful period of our history, Raghuvanshi said, but should it be erased from our history books? Would that be objective, rational history? Shrimali's response was the well-practised script : firstly, he did not know that such an instruction was ever issued; if it was issued, he said, he was against it; but one must see what the context was in which the instruction had been issued...

Concerned teachers in West Bengal have been so kind as to send me the circular relating to textbooks for class IX. Dated 28 April, 1989, it is issued by the West Bengal Secondary Board. It is in Bengali, and carries the number "Syl/89/1".

"All the West Bengal Government recognised secondary school Headmasters are being informed," it begins, "that in History textbooks recommended by this Board for Class IX the following amendments to the chapter on the medieval period have been decided after due discussions and review by experts." "

"The authors and publishers of Class IX History textbooks," it continues, "are being requested to incorporate the amendments if books published by them have these aushuddho [impurities, errors] in all subsequent editions, and paste a corrigendum in books which have already been published. A copy of the book with the corrigendum should be deposited with the Syllabus Office (74, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, Calcutta -- 16)." Signed,

"...Chattopadhyaya, Secretary."

The accompanying pages contain two columns : aushuddho -- impurity, or error -- and shuddho. One has just to glance through the changes to see the objective the progressives are trying to achieve through their "objective", "rational" approach to the writing of history. Here are some of the changes.

Book : Bharat Katha, prepared by the Burdwan Education Society, Teachers Enterprise, published by Sukhomoy Das....

*
Page 140 : Aushuddho -- "In Sindhudesh the Arabs did not describe Hindus as Kafir. They had banned cow-slaughter."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'They had banned cow-slaughter'."
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- "Fourthly, using force to destroy Hindu temples was also an expression of aggression. Fifthly, forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema."
Shuddho : though the column reproduces the sentences only from "Fourthly....", the Board directs that the entire matter from "Secondly.... to ulema" be deleted.
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- The logical, philosophical, materialist Mutazilla disappeared. On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis...."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis'...."

Book : Bharatvarsher Itihash, by Dr. Narendranath Bhattacharya, published by Chakravarty and Son...

*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion."
Shuddho -- "There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud." That is, no reference to killing, no reference to forcible conversions.
*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "He looted valuables worth 2 crore dirham from the Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni."
Shuddho -- "Delete 'and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.'"
*
Page 112 : Aushuddho -- "Hindu-Muslim relations of the medieval ages is a very sensitive issue. The non- believers had to embrace Islam or death."
Shuddho -- All matter on pages 112-13 to be deleted.
*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "According to Islamic law non-Muslims will have to choose between death and Islam. Only the Hanafis allow non-Muslims to pay jaziya in exchange for their lives."
Shuddho -- Rewrite this as follows : "By paying jaziya to Allauddin Khilji, Hindus could lead normal lives." Moreover, all the subsequent sentences "Qazi...", "Taimur's arrival in India..." to be deleted.

*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "Mahmud was a believer in the rule of Islam whose core was 'Either Islam or death'.
Shuddho -- Delete.

Book : Bharuter Itihash, by Shobhankar Chattopadhyaya, published by Narmada Publishers.

*
Page 181 : Aushuddho -- "To prevent Hindu women from being seen by Muslims, they were directed to remain indoors."
Shuddho -- Delete.

Book : Itihasher Kahini, by Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, published by B. B. Kumar.

*
Page 132 : Aushuddho -- According to Todd [the famous chronicler of Rajasthan annals] the purpose behind Allauddin's Chittor expedition was to secure Rana Rattan Singh's beautiful wife, Padmini."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 154 : Aushuddho -- "As dictated by Islam, there were three options for non-Muslims : get yourself converted to Islam; pay jaziya; accept death. In an Islamic State non-Muslims had to accept one of these three options."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 161 : Aushuddho -- "The early Sultans were eager to expand the sway of Islam by forcibly converting Hindus into Islam."
Shuddho -- Delete.

Book : Bharuter Itihash, by P. Maiti, Sreedhar Prakashini.

*
Page 117 : Aushuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked the capital of Mewar, Chittorgarh, to get Padmini, the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 139 : Ashuddho -- "There was a sense of aristocratic superiority in the purdah system. That is why upper-class Hindus adopted this system from upper-class Muslims. Another opinion has it that purdah came into practice to save Hindu women from Muslims. Most probably, purdah came into vogue because of both factors."
Shuddho -- delete.

The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on "Aurangzeb's policy on religion". Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule -- to spread the sway of Islam -- are directed to be excised from the book. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion -- an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one -- to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the Court, and that it is these things he banished. The only allusion to his having done anything in regard to Islam which is allowed to remain is that "By distancing himself from Akbar's policy of religious tolerance and policy of equal treatment, Aurangzeb caused damage to Mughal rule."

Book : Swadesho Shobhyota, by Dr. P. K. Basu and S. B. Ghatak, Abhinav Prakashan.

*
Page 126 : Ashuddho -- "Some people believe that Allauddin's Mewar expedition was to get hold of Padmini, the wife of Rana Rattan Singh." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 145 : Ashuddho -- "Apart from this, because Islam used extreme inhuman means to establish itself in India, this became an obstacle for the coming together of Indian and Islamic cultures." Shuddho -- Delete.

Book : Bharat Katha, by G. Bhattacharya, Bulbul Prakashan.

*
Page 40 : Ashuddho -- "Muslims used to take recourse to torture and inhuman means to force their religious beliefs and practices on Indians." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 41 : Ashuddho -- "The liberal, humane elements in Islam held out hope for oppressed Hindus." Shuddho -- The entire paragraph beginning with "the caste system among Hindus.... was attacked" is to be deleted. Instead write, "There was no place for casteism in Islam. Understandably, the influence of Islam created an awakening among Hindus against caste discrimination. Lower caste oppressed Hindus embraced Islam."
*
Page 77 : Ashuddho -- "His main task was to oppress non-believers, especially Hindus." Shuddho -- This and the preceding sentence to be deleted.

Book : Bharuter Itihash, by A. C. Roy, published by Prantik.

*
Page 102 : Ashuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked Chittor to get the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh, Padmini." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 164 : Ashuddho -- "It was his commitment to Islam which made him a fundamentalist." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Book : Bharut Kahini, by G. C. Rowchoudhury, published by A. K. Sarkar and Co.
*
Page 130 : Ashuddho -- "That is why he adopted the policy of converting Hindus to Islam -- so as to increase the number of Muslims. Those Hindus who refused to discard their religion were indiscriminately massacred by him or his generals." Shuddho -- Delete.

In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam !

Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.

Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the scream, "Communal rewriting of history."

But there isn't just whitewash of Islam. For after Islam came another great emancipatory ideology -- Marxism- Leninism.

The teachers furnish extracts from the textbook for Class V.

".... in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and in other East European countries, the workers and peasants are ruling the country after capturing power, whereas in U.S.A., England, France and Germany the owners of mills and factories are ruling the country."

".... after the Revolution in Russia the first exploitation-free society was established."

".... Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated man with honour and equality...."

Thus, not just whitewash, there is hogwash too.

Did the Court Ask, What is Mohd Aslam�s Locus Standi?

Arun Shourie

"What is the VHP? Whom does it represent? What is its locus standi?", the Supreme Court asked the other day -- and it seemed to have done so in a tone that triggered much delight among secularists.

��A strange question,�� the PM remarked in the Rajya Sabha. A member was up and shouting, actually several secular ones were, interrupting the Prime Minister. Who are the VHP?... They don�t represent the Hindus... They will put a bullet through me..., so what?... The members seemed quite beside themselves. If the mere mention of its name causes so much reaction, the PM observed, then it certainly has locus standi.

In matters of religion and faith, standing is not acquired by winning elections, he said. It depends on the esteem in which people come to hold one...

A telling answer in itself. And it left the critics non-plussed.

Another side to the question that had fallen from the Bench too would have struck you. The Bench did not ask, as the Constitution Bench had not asked, ��Who is Mohammed Aslam, alias �Bhure�? Whom does he represent? What is his locus standi?�� It did not ask, ��What is the Babri Masjid Action Committee? Whom does it represent? What is its locus standi?�� It did not ask, ��What is the �All India Muslim Law Board�? Whom does it represent? What is its locus standi?�� How is it that doubt assailed it only in regard to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad?

To put the matter at the least, the Bench could have looked up the Supreme Court�s own judgement in the Ayodhya case itself! ��The movement to construct a Ram temple at the site of the disputed structure gathered momentum in recent years which became a matter of great controversy and a source of tension,�� the judgement quoted the (Narasimha Rao) Government�s ��White Paper�� as saying. ��This led to several parleys the details of which are not very material for the present purpose. These parleys involving the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee (AIBMAC), however failed to resolve the dispute...�� Again, ��At the centre of the Ram Janma Bhumi - Babari Masjid dispute is the demand voiced by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its allied organisations for the restoration of a site said to be the birthplace of Sri Ram in Ayodhya...��

Yet again, ��The VHP and its allied organisations base their demand on the assertion that...�� And yet again, ��The demand of the VHP has found support from the Bhartiya Janata Party...�� And yet again, ��It was also stated by certain Muslim leaders that if these assertions were proved, the Muslims would voluntarily hand over the disputed shrine to the Hindus. Naturally, this became the central issue in the negotiations between the VHP and the AIBMAC.��

But suddenly, What is the VHP? Who does it represent? What is its locus standi?

In any event, that allusion to ��parleys�� holds a lesson we will do well to remember. One of the best things Mr Chandrashekhar did during his brief Prime Ministership was to get the two sides to agree that the only way to make progress was to exchange evidence on the matter. The two sides started meeting and exchanging documents and written arguments. The Babri Masjid Action Committee was guided by a clutch of Marxist historians -- actually, ��guided by�� is not quite right: it seemed just the front for these ��eminent historians��. The latter used the offices and facilities of the ICHR that they then controlled to prepare the AIBMAC submissions -- a fact that led the then Member Secretary to resign from his post.

The ��evidence�� that the Babri Masjid group submitted was no evidence at all. It was just a miscellaneous pile -- much of it puerile: that Rama was a King of Egypt, that he was born in Afghanistan, and the rest!

The VHP marshalled an array of evidence from archaeological sources, from historical records, from literary sources. That was the end of the ��parleys��! Realising that they could produce nothing to match what the VHP had submitted, the Marxist historians and the AIBMAC gentry just stopped attending the meetings. And it was this withdrawal, and the consequential death of the talks that Mr Chandrashekhar had initiated, as much as anything else that triggered the chain of events that led ultimately to the destruction of the mosque.

I did not doubt for a moment that the new efforts of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi would meet exactly the same fate. And for good reason. In one of the letters that he included in his 'A Bunch of Old Letters', Pandit Nehru used a phrase about Jinnah that describes this bunch, and its invariable device to the dot: ��Mr Jinnah�s permanently negative answer,�� Panditji wrote. This is the singular negotiating tactic of such individuals: just go on rejecting every formula that the other fellow brings up.

And the tragedy is -- the self-inflicted tragedy is -- that there always are persons, groups, powers that insist that the onus of producing the next formula, some formula which will incorporate an even greater concession to the other fellow is on us. And in the end we give in to this insistence. The power and groups that keep insisting that we go on producing new formulae: the British on the question of partition, the host of interlocutors on Kashmir, the secularists on the Ram Janmabhumi.

And the ones who merely keep deploying the ��permanently negative answer��: Jinnah kept rejecting every formula on partition; Pakistan keeps rejecting every formula on Kashmir; the Babri Masjid votaries keep, and will keep rejecting every formula on the Janmabhumi.

And the infuriating part is that the advice to engage in a dialogue is always directed at us -- the Congress on the question of partition, India on Kashmir, the Hindus on the Janmabhumi! It is because of this unbroken, unvarying pattern of 75 years that the new Interim Order of the Supreme Court fills me with foreboding -- doubly so.

The first concerns dialogue, negotiations. In its 1994 judgement the Supreme Court also had expressed the same pious faith: ��This is a matter suited essentially to resolution by negotiations which does not end in a winner and a loser while adjudication leads to that end,�� the Court said. ��It is in the national interest that there is no loser at the end of the process adopted for resolution of the dispute so that the final outcome does not leave behind any rancour in anyone. This can be achieved by a negotiated solution on the basis of which a decree can be obtained in terms of such solution in these suits. Unless a solution is found which leaves everyone happy, that cannot be the beginning for continued harmony between �we the people of India�.�� The same touching faith! Doomed to the same outcome.

But the least that this route requires to succeed is that the Executive has leeway, that it has a wide enough field over which it can bring the contenders closer. The Supreme Court in its 1994 judgement had left this space -- recall, for instance, the passages regarding the undisputed area. The Interim Order has snatched that space away completely. And taken into the judicial lap what the Constitution Bench had realised was not well suited for resolution through judicial adjudication.

The other omen is of an even darker hue. What the Supreme Court had held about the status quo being maintained only on the disputed site, what the Court had said about it being not just permissible but desirable that the undisputed area be handed back to its Hindu owners -- all this was important, but of far lesser importance than another feature of that judgement, a feature that was of foundational significance.

An argument had been advanced on behalf of Muslims -- the Court remarked that it had been advanced with ��vehemence��. This was the familiar assertion that once a mosque has been built on a piece of land, irrespective of who owned the plot earlier, irrespective of what might have stood on it earlier, irrespective of whether the structure had subsequently been used or not, the land would always be a possession of Muslims.

It was contended that this was the position under Muslim Law, and therefore this is what must hold in this case too -- whether a temple stood on the land earlier, whether namaz had been offered at the site since 1949 etc., all these were essentially irrelevant questions. And that the acquisition of the site by the Government for determining its true owners was invalid on this ground alone: secular laws like the Statute of Limitations, the laws regarding acquisition of property by the State etc., do not apply at all to either a mosque or the site on which it was once built, it was argued on behalf of Muslims.

The Supreme Court dealt in detail with this question -- because of the vehemence with which this argument had been advanced, it said. In doing so it laid down three vital principles. First, it held that what will apply in India is not some abstraction called Mahomedan Law, but ��Mahomedan law as approved by Indian courts��.

Second, it reiterated what Indian courts had from the British period consistently held in regard to the status of a mosque: namely, that a mosque is just another immovable property; that, therefore, the Statute of Limitations applies to it exactly as it does to any other immovable property, that the sovereign power of the State to acquire the structure or the site on which it stands is as unlimited as it is in relation to any other piece of property.

Third, the Court held that even if a structure or practice is manifestly associated with a religion it shall not be immune from State action under the freedom of religion guaranteed by our Constitution -- unless it is a practice essential to that religion. This vital distinction will come home to us when we think of the contrast between, say, the Kaba in Mecca and the mosque next door, between offering namaz and killing cows. The result was immediate. Citing judgements from even the British period, the Court established how, for instance, a mosque could be lost by adverse possession. It showed how even by those judgements it was subject to the Statute of Limitations. It established how ��A practice may be a religious practice but not an essential and integral part of practice of that religion.��

These principles were of foundational importance. They were essential correctives to what had come to pass in the name of secularism. They gave hope that the excesses that had come to be perpetrated in the name of religion could indeed be rolled back through the courts -- for instance, the insistence that namaz shall be offered on public roads, the insistence that slaughtering cows was a fundamental right that flowed from the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution.

That is why not so much the Interim Order but the remarks that fell from the Bench during this hearing are so ominous. If that is the mood of the Court, these vital principles will themselves be diluted in the days ahead.

Dialogue and negotiations blocked each time by that ��permanently negative answer��. And the Courts in the mood of which the Bench has given us a glimpse. What conclusion will the Hindus draw?

But they must abide by the verdict of the courts, the secularists say. Will some Hindu in turn not one day tabulate how many times the Constitution has been amended precisely to overturn verdicts of the Supreme Court, and throw the number back at those who keep hurling this counsel at him, and him alone?

Actually, why wait for that anonymous Hindu, dear reader, why not pre-empt him? Study the 90-odd amendments yourself, and answer: how many of them have been enacted to reverse judgements of the Supreme Court?

Indian Express
March 18, 2002