-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN News * Analysis * Research * Action _______________________________ SPECIAL EDITION - March 17, 2000 - ______________________________________________________________________________ HINDU CHAUVINISTS CENSOR INDIAN HISTORIANS ______________________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS: 1. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [UK]: Hindu Extremists Stop Publication of Indian History Volumes. 2. FRONTLINE [India]: The Falsification of History. * * * AFIB Editor's Introduction: As a contemporary political reality neofascism is hardly confined to Europe and North America. On the Indian subcontinent, far-right communalist movements allied with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the secretive Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have launched a sustained campaign to "cleanse" Indian society of dissident cultural and intellectual workers perceived as hostile to the project of transforming India into an ultra-nationalist Hindu state. On the level of cultural warfare the ideological parallels between BJP-RSS "purification" campaigns to similar crusades in the West, most notably those launched by the North American Christian Right to portray the United States as a fundamentalist "Christian Republic", are striking. In both cases far-right movements characterized by markedly clericalist and ultra-nationalist rhetoric, seek to achieve (or consolidate) state power in order to advance a regressive political-cultural vision whose signposts are "order", "family" and the ubiquitous "free market." But the role of historical falsification, under the guise of upholding the alleged "eternal verities" of religion serve very secular gods indeed: chief among them the universal god of greed and exploitation: Capital. * * * WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Web: http://www.wsws.org/ E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Thursday, 16 March 2000 - ----- ____________________________________________________________________ HINDU EXTREMISTS STOP PUBLICATION OF INDIAN HISTORY VOLUMES ____________________________________________________________________ News & Analysis: India By Richard Phillips http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/ind-m16.shtml The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), which the Indian government has stacked with Hindu chauvinists, last month stopped publication of two volumes of Towards Freedom, a projected multi-volume collection of historical documents concerning the struggle against British colonial rule. The suppression of these volumes of scholarly research is a serious attack on academic and intellectual freedom in India. Moreover, it is part of a broader assault on basic democratic rights by Hindu fundamentalist organisations associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the dominant partner in the India's coalition government. Last month the BJP government in the state of Uttar Pradesh forced film director Deepa Mehta to suspend work on her latest film Water, after communal organisations allied with the BJP mounted physical attacks on the film set. Edited respectively by K.N. Panikkar and Sumit Sarkar, two of India's most eminent historians, the Towards Freedom volumes were to be the third and fourth in a project initiated by the ICHR in 1972. Initially, the Towards Freedom project was conceived of as a counterpoint to a 12-volume series of documents published by the British government under the title The Transfer of Power. Subsequently, however, the purpose of the series was broadened from providing evidence of the mass popular movement against colonial rule to documenting all the major political processes in the last decade of the British raj, including the rise of communalist parties and the role of the peasant, labour, and socialist movements. Panikkar, who is Professor of Modern History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, edited the volume devoted to 1940, whilst Sarkar, a Professor of Modern Indian History at Delhi University, was responsible for the 1946 volume. Although they had worked on the project for more than a decade, the ICHR failed to inform Sarkar and Panikkar that it had ordered work on the volumes to cease. Instead, they only learned of the decision, when they received letters on February 11 from Oxford University Press, which has been commissioned by the ICHR to publish the volumes. After news of the stop-work order reached the press, the ICHR felt compelled to issued a "fact sheet" justifying its decision. It claimed previous volumes in the series were "shoddy", "subjective" and an attempt to "sanitise" the role of leftwing organisations. It also accused Sarkar and Panikkar of sending the edited work to Oxford University Press without submitting it to the ICHR for approval. When these crude lies were quickly exposed, ICHR chairman, B.R. Grover, announced he would publish a "white paper" explaining why production was stopped. There are two basic reasons why Grover and the other BJP supporters and Hindu communalist academics in the ICHR have stopped publication of the latest Towards Freedom volumes. Firstly, they contain material exposing the reactionary role played by the Hindu communalist organisations--the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha. Many of the leaders and a majority of the cadres of the BJP are drawn from the ranks of the RSS. Although the Hindu Mahabha is no longer prominent, V.D. Savarkar, who served as it president from 1937 through 1944, was the principal ideologue of Hindutva, the Hindu supremacist doctrine that India is a Hindu nation. The 1943-44 Towards Freedom volume (which was published in 1998) reproduced British intelligence documents that reported the RSS had been reorganised in the early 1930s along the lines of the Italian fascist movement, after B.S. Moonje, a top RSS and Hindu Mahasabha leader, had visited Italy and met with Mussolini. Other documents revealed that Savarkar had urged his supporters to oppose the Indian National Congress's 1942 Quit India movement and had opposed Gandhi's release from British custody when he fasted in 1943. Second, the BJP-led government, and the Hindu fundamentalists forces on which they rest, are anxious to wipe out all record of the fact that the movement against the British was of a broad-based, secular character. The rewriting of Indian history in communal terms is part of the BJP's broader project of putting a Hindu stamp on all aspects of politics and culture in India. This is illustrated in the political record of those now heading the ICHR and its so-called review committee. Last year, India's Minister for Human Resources and Development (HRD), Murali Manohar Joshi, retired several prominent and secularly-minded historians from the ICHR, replacing them with people known not for their scholarship, but for their support for the BJP and its causes. Joshi, a BJP member and lifelong RSS cadre, is one of three sitting ministers in the Indian cabinet currently under criminal investigation for their role in inciting the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya December 1992. As minister in charge of education, he is also playing a leading role in pushing through a revision of the Indian school curriculum on Hindu communalist lines. ICHR head B.R. Grover is a supporter of the fundamentalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Forum), one of the organisations recently involved in stopping production of Water. He has a well-documented record of communalist politics and has consistently defended the razing of the 400-year old Babri Masjid mosque, an act that launched the worst round of communal violence in India since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent. At a meeting of the World Archeological Congress in New Delhi in 1994, Grover opposed a resolution condemning the destruction of the mosque and two years later urged delegates of the same organisation to oppose a resolution condemning the "manipulation of archeological evidence to justify destruction of historical structures." Only one member of the three-member committee that will review Towards Freedom, is trained as an historian. The others are a retired bureaucrat and a former director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India who is a well-known supporter of the destruction of the Masjid mosque. The ICHR's decision to stop publication of Towards Freedom was immediately denounced by leading Indian academics, including S. Gopal, general editor of the series. Gopal described the ICHR's actions as a "clear violation of the terms under which the project was conceived and executed" and an "infringement of the academic rights and freedom" of the historians involved. Three former heads of the ICHR, all renowned historians, R.S Sharma, Irfan Habib and Ravinder Kumar, issued a statement on February 16 describing withdrawal of the Towards Freedom volumes as "the grossest form of censorship". The statement, which was signed by over 30 academics, demanded that the volumes be published immediately. On February 25, over 1,500 students, artists and intellectuals demonstrated outside the ICHR's offices in New Delhi. Several busloads of students participated carrying placards attacking the ICHR and denouncing the BJP-led government in Uttar Pradesh for stopping shooting of Deepa Mehta's film, Water. The protestors chanted slogans comparing the RSS with Hitler's Nazis and accused the Sangh Parivar, the RSS-led alliance of Hindu fundamentalist organisations, of attempting to "communalise" India. Sumit Sarkar, who addressed the demonstration, later told India's Frontline magazine that Towards Freedom was suppressed because it showed that the RSS and other Hindu fundamentalist formations were "absent" from the anti-colonial struggle. "These right-wing Hindu movements share with the Muslim League a particular honour--they were the only groups that were never repressed by the British... This is one kind of absence of the Hindutva forces from the movements towards freedom. The bigger absence, of course, is that they had no role in the broadening of the content of the struggle for freedom." Sarkar also warned that the ICHR's actions were an attempt to suppress "all notions of intellectual and cultural freedom." "Basically what these people want to bring back," he said, "are old-fashioned, discredited notions of what history is all about, that is, Indian history is divided neatly into Hindu and Muslim periods, defining periods by the religion of the rulers. That was the dominant way in which, partly due to colonialism and partly on account of our own contributions, history was taught and studied for a long time. The national movement would then be understood like a story of cops and robbers, of great leaders and great villains." Professor Panikkar told the magazine that the ICHR decision was "rooted in a fear of history" and constituted a new stage in communalist attempts to refashion Indian history. "So far they have been using history in order to stigmatise Muslims. Their entire communal enterprise was based on that stigmatisation. Now communalism has entered a new phase in which aggressive steps are on to define India as a Hindu nation. As part of this project, they have developed this concept of cultural nationalism, which is based on a reinterpretation of the past. Therefore in the present circumstances, particularly in the context of the recent socio-economic developments, the reinterpretation of the past in religious terms has become more crucial. All secular voices have to be marginalised or suppressed. So history is going to be a major arena of contest. These are the forewarnings of greater attempts, sponsored and supported by the state, to change our notions of the past." The suppression of the two volumes of Towards Freedom is another sharp warning of the implications of the extreme rightwing political agenda of the BJP and its associated Hindu chauvinist organisations. In the name of defending Indian culture--in fact its own supremicist interpretation of Hinduism--the BJP is attacking basic artistic and academic freedoms which are crucial to broader critical thought and discussion. For decades, support for the BJP's communalist agenda was marginal. But the Indian ruling class can no longer employ anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to claim it is pursuing a people's development program. Having been forced to abandon the pretense of "Congress socialism," sections of the bourgeoisie have turned to the BJP with its Hindu chauvinist, militaristic and virulent anti-socialist ideology to ram through its economic agenda of subsidy and social spending cuts, deregulation, privatisation and layoffs. The whipping up of religious tensions serves to divert attention from the country's growing social inequality and rising levels of poverty and to divide the working class and Indian masses along communalist and caste lines. The World Socialist Web Site has launched a campaign calling on artists, writers, intellectuals and all working people to take a stand against the attacks on Deepa Mehta and to oppose the onslaught on democratic and artistic rights both in India and elsewhere. Copyright 1998-2000 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved. ***** ____________________________________________________________________ THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY ____________________________________________________________________ FRONTLINE India's National Magazine Volume 17, No. 06, March 18 - 31, 2000 http://www.the-hindu.com/fline/fl1706/17061090.htm The latest ICHR-sponsored assault on academic freedom is just one of several official actions under BJP rule in the realm of education and research that are aimed to disseminate the Hindutva version of history. By PARVATHI MENON AEVEN Saket Ram, the Hindutva protagonist of the 'Hey! Ram', who builds a dangerously sympathetic case for Mahatma Gandhi's assassin through the greater part of the much-publicised film, is shaken by anger and revulsion when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fascist, shoots the peace-loving and trusting mass leader at point blank range. However, for the Publications Division that functions under the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, one of the most dastardly assassinations of our times could have been carried out by anybody. Or nobody. Why else would a compact disk (CD-ROM) on the life of Mahatma Gandhi produced in 1999 by a private software company for the Publications Division choose not to mention the name, and the philosophy which inspired, Gandhi's assassin? (The CD-ROM was reviewed in Frontline, February 18, 2000). Who killed Mahatma Gandhi? The answer, quite simply, does not qualify as history. Both in its Introduction, which is a multimedia run-through of the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and in a section called Landmark Events, a sound-and-image treat which offers the user 40 landmark events of Gandhi's life to browse through, the CD-ROM's narrative offers the information that Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948. It then proceeds to discuss the reactions to his death with images of his funeral. There is no naming Godse; there is not even an allusion to the political forces of the Hindu Right that were arraigned against Gandhi or why they opposed him. There could be two reasons for this glaring omission. The first is that commercial logic prompted the creators of the CD-ROM to keep on the right ideological side of the sponsors of the project; the second is that the Ministry itself planned the project choosing to delete this uncomfortable piece of history. After all, Gandhi was murdered for his unshakable faith in the secular and pluralist basis of the Indian nation. His assassin Nathuram Godse was a Hindutva fundamentalist and a one-time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (as his only living brother Gopal Godse has proudly testified to several times in the recent and not-so-recent past). The political and ideological forebears of the Bharatiya Janata Party, in power today at the Centre, killed Gandhi. It is therefore logical to assume that the absence of an important piece of historical information in the CD-ROM could hardly have been oversight. The whitewash job on Gandhi performed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is of a piece with a string of actions taken by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development in the direction of officialising history. In their justification of the official withdrawal of two manuscripts of the "Towards Freedom" project of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), BJP spokespersons have repeatedly alleged in the media and in Parliament that Gandhi has been given a raw deal in the manuscripts, that a great Indian has been relegated to the footnotes of history by 'leftist' historians. Their own version just cleanses him away. It is significant that the CD-ROM, at Rs. 2,500, is affordable only to schools, libraries and institutions - which are now the targets of Hindutva organisations and governments for the dissemination of their version of Indian history. History, history teaching and historical research have together become an arena where a political battle for a nation's identity and future is being waged. In this battle zone, two historical traditions face each other. On the one side is a historical tradition - by far the more influential and robust - of critical, rational historical enquiry that draws upon an expanding base of historical evidence, which affirms the composite nature of India's culture and heritage, and which is itself a product of the diverse nationalist streams within the freedom movement. On the other side is a historical tradition exemplified by the Hindutva view of history (after Partition its Muslim counterpart found a 'national' homeland in Pakistan). In this perspective, religious communities are distinct political entities, even nations. That India's heritage is Hindu is the premise, and in its effort to 'prove' this thesis and deny the plurality of India's past, it resorts to every subterfuge - falsification of history, doctoring of historical data, and now, the suppression of historical research through official channels. Thus must today's Hindutva-ite see the remains of a temple in every mosque, historicise myth in various ways including underwater explorations in quest of a supposed Golden Age of Hinduism, stop publications that would reveal uncomfortable truths of the past, terrorise "enemies" for the alleged historical wrongdoings of their forebears, seek changes in democratic instruments such as the Indian Constitution, itself the product of the nation's diversity and multi-facetedness which Hindutva seeks to deny and suppress, and so on. This process became ever more purposeful and directed once the BJP-led coalition came to power. The takeover of the ICHR is a case in point. It is clear from the growing evidence that is now in the public realm, including what Frontline has published, that the demand to recall the manuscripts of K.N. Panikkar and Sumit Sarkar was made by B.R. Grover, Chairman of the ICHR, as early as August 1998 in the first Council meeting after the reconstitution of the ICHR with historians sympathetic to the BJP. We know now that following the reconstitution, pressures were almost immediately applied on the then Chairman of the ICHR, S. Settar, to give in on two issues. These were the recall of the manuscripts (which neither Grover nor any of his group had read), and the withdrawal of the annual ICHR grant to the Indian History Congress (IHC), an organisation which meets annually and which has an impressive record of scholarship in its over seven decades of existence. The antipathy of Grover and his fellow historians in the Hindutva camp to the IHC stems from its fiercely independent stand on issues of historical and political importance (including a spirited opposition to the use and abuse of history by the Sangh Parivar), and its promotion of rational and scientific academic research. 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