Amitabh Shukla
New Delhi, November 25
The book on Ancient India, portions of which have been banned by the NCERT, was in the thick of controversy even in 1977 when the Janata Party, comprising several Jan Sangh members, was in power.
Demands by the Jan Sangh MPs for a ban on the book was rejected by the then Education Minister, who was from the Congress (O). The members put pressure on the government through several campaigns to ban the book written by Ram Sharan Sharma. However, the Education Minister, who was not from the Sangh Parivar, did not relent and the book remained untouched for 24 years.
But unlike in 1977, when the Sangh group was not powerful enough to influence a policy decision, the BJP now has a major say in the NDA Government and has been able to do what the Sangh members couldn't do twenty-four years back.
Interestingly, the same paragraphs of the book which have now been deleted had once invited the wrath of former Jan Sangh MP Ramgopal Shalwale, who headed the All India Arya Samaj at that time. Another critic of the same text was SP Gupta, an archaeologist and a contributor to the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser.
In a spirited defence of his book, Sharma pointed out that a book on ancient history is not a catalogue of antiquities kept in a museum but a connected story which answers the questions on where, when and how and why something happened. Sharma said he countered all allegations made against his book academically, but none of the critics replied to them.
"The Parivar's history police will realise the difficulties of writing history or making changes suitable to their ideology," said an academician. She termed the debate on the left wing versus the right wing historians as meaningless. "Indian history writing has so far not produced a right wing historian of any stature, whereas several liberal and left historians enjoy undisputead international standing," she said, adding, "history should only be subjected to objectivity and not subjectivity".
Another academician feared that the new textbooks that will replace the ones written by Sharma, Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev may contain the hate propaganda taught in the Saraswati Shishu Mandirs of the RSS. "We would like to know the name of the historians writing the new books, their credentials, their research in the past and their standing in the historians' community," he said.
He said that an academic debate on the contents of the proposed books is a must, as the future generation could be conditioned to propaganda that would harm the composite culture of the country.
When contacted, a prominent historian quoted AL Basham, the author of The Wonder That Was India. "These atavistic ideologues hanker for the wonder that was India, a wonder ruined by foreign invasion - first Islamic, then western through colonisation and now globalisation". Some of these myths have long been exploded and living in the past would only bode dangers for the future, the historian said.
(2001)
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