Author: Rajeev Srinivasan
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: January 3, 2002
I would like you to take the following
quiz: How many of the following recent news stories (all from the year
2001, except one, maybe) have you personally heard of?
* Two Hindu priests were dragged
out of a temple in Jammu and beheaded by suspected Islamic terrorists.
* There was a conference in New
Delhi on the preservation of diversity in religion, which was attended
by luminaries such as the Dalai Lama.
* A Hindu Bangladeshi professor,
a college principal in Chittagong and a prominent freedom fighter, were
shot dead during the genocide against Hindus in that country.
* Two Christian Rwandan nuns were
convicted of crimes against humanity for their roles in the massacres of
minority Tutsis in their country.
* The Konkan Railway, the first
major railway project in India since Independence, has been a major success
despite the difficult terrain and the logistics nightmares.
* The Vatican released a report
admitting that many nuns have been raped, impregnated and even murdered
by priests, missionaries, et al.
* A group of Indian and foreign
experts got together to release their plans for preserving the heritage
of India for humanity and for all time.
* The Tarun Bharat Sangh has succeeded
in reviving many rivers in the arid foothills of the Aravalli ranges in
Rajasthan through simple traditional water conservation measures.
* The Kansas City Star reported
that the levels of AIDS amongst Catholic priests in the US were 4 times
the rates of AIDS among the general population.
* An acclaimed Russian film about
Lenin was prevented from being exhibited in West Bengal by the state government
because it was less than laudatory.
* Muslim militants went on a rampage
in Pathanamthitta, Kerala, burned the BJP offices as well as gas stations
and buses, and attacked Sabarimala pilgrims.
If you recall seeing more than three
of the above, I would wager that you do not live in India. Because the
English-language media in India completely censored almost all of these
stories.
Many of these got substantial airplay
in the international media. The shocking story of the Rwandan nuns accused
and convicted, Nazi-like, of crimes against humanity has been in the news
in Europe for some time. For instance, this is what The Economist had to
say about the nuns in Rwanda: in "Judging genocide", June 16, 2001.
At the end of April, Kenyan police
arrested a former Anglican bishop, Samuel Musabyimana, who is accused of
genocide and of paying militiamen to kill Tutsis...
On June 8th... two Roman Catholic
nuns were found guilty... of complicity in the Rwandan genocide... Sister
Maria and Sister Gertrude had handed over to their killers up to 7,000
Tutsis who were sheltering in their convent; later, they provided petrol
so that militiamen could set fire to a barn in which about 500 Tutsis had
taken refuge. They were sentenced to prison terms of 12 and 15 years by
a jury... in Belgium. It was the first time that a jury of citizens from
one country had judged defendants for war crimes committed in another.
As for the story about the Konkan
Railway, it is an inspiration. In the face of obstacles, including extremely
difficult terrain (many tunnels, bridges, etc) as well as the task of raising
large amounts of money through a public bond issue, the railway was constructed
on schedule and within budget. It used to be said that Indians could never
match the feats of the British engineers who built much of India's network;
isn't it amazing that E Sreedharan, the man who ran this Herculean effort,
is a virtual unknown?
We have heard all about 'Mother'
Teresa, but why is Baba Amte, whose work with lepers deserves at least
as much renown as the Albanian nun's work, is not pushed forward for a
Nobel Prize? Nor do large sums of money get thrown at him.
Michel Danino told me about the
International Forum for India's Heritage that has been formed with the
express intent of preserving India's remarkable heritage, some of which
is in danger of being lost due to neglect and mismanagement. In this context,
see also an interview with Maneka Gandhi. However, notes Michel with chagrin,
not a single English-language Indian newspaper carried the announcement.
India's Marxists and their fellow
travellers had a field day complaining about censorship in regards to Fire
and Water. Why then did they not extend the upholding of the freedom of
expression to the Lenin film, Taurus, by renowned Russian director Alexander
Sokurov? And why did the media not upbraid them for this hypocrisy?
Swami Dayananda Saraswati, a respected
Hindu monk and scholar, hosted a major conference in Delhi in mid-November.
It was the "World Congress for the Preservation of Religious Diversity",
intended to support the preservation of the mosaic of religious traditions
and cultures, "a priceless heritage of humankind". His Holiness the Dalai
Lama attended. Yet, India's English-language newspapers almost completely
blacked out this conference. Why? Because it was challenging the rationale
for religious conversion.
I could go on and on, but let me
sum it up: I think the English-language media in India is in the hands
of a cabal of vested interests; in many cases these interests appear to
be Christian-funded. In other cases they appear to be heavily influenced
by Marxists, possibly the Chinese. None of these vested interests worry
overly about India's national interests, not surprisingly.
If there is anything positive and
good happening in India, you certainly won't find it written up by the
regular media, which is too full of bellyaching and accusations. Incidentally,
I found many inspiring examples of success stories in India on the site
www.goodnewsindia.com (no, not www.goodnewsindia.org, which is one of those
offensively smarmy Christian fundamentalist sites), which apparently is
a labour of love for a gentleman named D V Sridharan. I salute this person's
persistence and spirit of service for the nation, which is so sorely lacking
in the mainstream media.
Therefore I find the current brouhaha
in the English-language media about history textbooks most alarming. They
who are so worried about censoring the past (as they accuse the BJP of
doing) certainly do censor the present with gay abandon! This is important:
the young become what they are fed, a topical case in point being the Islamic
seminaries of Pakistan. These have inculcated in an entire generation of
Pakistanis a mindset of intolerance and violence against Hindus and Indians
based on a falsified history of the Indian subcontinent. If we inculcate
in our children a false history of India we will create a society of monsters:
much like our lost generation that worships America, Russia or China, but
never India. This cannot be countenanced.
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said
that the only thing we owe to history is to rewrite it. The Marxists have
been true believers in the virtues of "truth by repeated assertion". They
have been adept at fabricating history to suit their pet theory du-jour.
They have used history as a tool for propaganda and for their agit-prop
tactical goals.
Let us remember the Soviet Union's
habit of manufacturing a different history every day, excising purged comrades
(such as Trotsky) from history and even cutting them out of photographs;
the Chinese fabrication of abominable lies about Tibet (read Claude Arpi's
The Fate of Tibet, Har-Anand) and the literal attempt by the Khmer Rouge
to entirely erase history and start with Year Zero.
Consider the status of the leftist
historians who are now waxing eloquent about their 'objectivity'. It turns
out that large numbers of them were friendly witnesses cited by the Sunni
Waqf Board in their case in the Ayodhya matter. If they are testifying
on behalf of one side, the Muslims, in a litigation where the facts are
anything but crystal clear and there is a lot of room for interpretation,
how they could then be considered purely 'objective' or 'impartial' is
somewhat mysterious. Interestingly, almost all of the grey eminences currently
breathing fire were associated with the Babri Masjid Action Committee,
according to Arun Shourie, in Eminent Historians, ASA Publications, 1999:
* R S Sharma
* Suraj Bhan
* D N Jha
* Romila Thapar
* Irfan Habib
* B N Pandey
* R L Shukla
* Satish Chandra
* Gyanendra Pandey
Shourie skewers each of the individuals
famously grousing now about their lovely textbooks being rejected: R S
Sharma, D N Jha, Satish Chandra, et al. He shows them to be shady characters
just short of being charlatans, scarcely the saintly academics they like
to pretend to be. It is nothing short of astonishing that these are the
people who have been allowed to mould India's children for the past half-century.
India's citizens have clearly failed in their duty of vigilance.
There is an unholy alliance of these
'eminent historians' and others, for example Bipan Chandra and K N Panikkar.
These people have formed a cozy clique, where they review and applaud each
other's works and ensure they all have cushy, government-funded posts where
they are supposed to write books that never do get written; but large sums
of money do get paid, and they get 'research grants', 'travel grants' and
other porkbarrel goodies to hand out at taxpayer expense. The sinecures
have continued till now; the real problem is that the BJP is now ensuring
that some of these 'eminent historians' are forced to do some work to justify
their existence.
Romila Thapar, taking up cudgels
on behalf of her friends, has accused those on the other side of being
"pulp historians". She targets, in particular, scholars such as Koenraad
Elst, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, N S Rajaram, et al who are not necessarily
holders of PhD in history; but then they are also not fattening at the
trough of Indian taxpayer money.
There are several responses to such
an ad hominem attack. First, granted, they may not be professional historians,
but that probably enables them to see the Emperor's New Clothes very well
indeed. Second, if they are pop historians, why, then Thapar et al might
well be considered court hagiographers. Third, non-professionals often
contribute dramatically to the growth of a discipline as compared to hide-bound
traditionalists.
First, they are not professional
historians, granted. But then, why do leftists not object when Amartya
Sen, Nobel Prize winner in economics, not history, holds forth on history?
But they do not: Romila Thapar shared the stage with Sen, and surely nodded
approvingly, at the Indian History Congress in Kolkata on January 2. The
title of Sen's address was "History and the enterprise of knowledge". This
quote will give a flavour of the content:
There is also a systematic confounding
here of mythology with history. An extraordinary example of this has been
the interpretation of the Ramayana not as a great epic but as documentary
history which can be invoked to establish property rights over places and
sites possessed and owned by others.
Sen pontificates thus about Ayodhya.
To put it bluntly, what does Sen know about either mythology or history?
A Nobel Prize in one discipline is no guarantee of knowledge in any other.
I am reminded of William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner in physics, who later
became a laughing-stock for his idiotic theories on race and intelligence.
Why isn't Thapar asking Sen to cease embarrassing himself with inane pronouncements?
And frankly, even Sen's economics
is suspect. Kerala, the Marxist paradise and object of much adulation by
Sen, has now become a basket case, a 'money-order economy' sustained only
by remittances from expatriates, along with large doses of Christian and
Arab money for conversion and church-/mosque-building activities. Kerala
is perilously close to having a cargo cult: it would come to a standstill
without produce-laden trucks from Tamil Nadu.
Furthermore, as a friend remarked,
if you have in Sen the left-wing Nobel Prize winner with pithy quotes to
support Thapar and company, then there is in V S Naipaul the right-wing
Nobel Prize winner. Do the two cancel each other out? In point of fact,
Naipaul certainly knows much more than Sen does about people and societies,
as a much-admired travel writer. Why won't India's leftists then accept
Naipaul's opinions? Why do they attack him instead?