Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 08:56:46 -0700
Subject: Hijacking India's History


December 30, 2002

Hijacking India's History

By KAI FRIESE

     NEW DELHI
     While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run
India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be
bolstered by the landslide
victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western
India state of Gujarat.

The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But
India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They
are unhappy with the notion
that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival
of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the
dates of 1500 to 1000
B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the
forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization
predates Vedic civilization. And
they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other
religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures
and peoples from different
lands.

Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training,
the central government body that sets the national curriculum and
oversees education for
students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school
textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics
protested loudly. The
schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like
the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the
chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added
several novel
chapters to Indian history.

Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in
place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally
agreed to have appeared
around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The
all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu
myth, is meant to show that
Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We
have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest recognizable
"Hindu culture" in India and
generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. —
that appears without a single date.

The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual
Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this
plan are not elaborated upon; the
council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only
that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will
have to be devised."

More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So
we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's
elections in Gujarat. They
were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March,
in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more
lost their
homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the
leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a "natural
reaction" to an act of arson on a
train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost
their lives.

The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against
the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards
of the burning railway
carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status,
although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly
into the campaign
theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success.

The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather
than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century
mosque in Ayodhya,
for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in
Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist
cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a
seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not
political parties but
"social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power
for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.)

In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the
uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that
"Aryan culture is the nucleus of
Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and
creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of
the Aryans." They will learn that
Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."

But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the
R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind
originated in the upper
reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that
explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable
Harrapan script: they are of
Vedic origin.

After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys
who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids,
between 8 and 11
years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots.
Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn
about religion? About
Hinduism, Christianity?

They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A
bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make
converts of Hindus by bribing
them or beating them."

He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were
something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.

Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/opinion/30FRIE.html?todaysheadlines


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