SEVERAL DOCUMENTS IN THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES are not available to scholars if the Nehru family members feel that they might contain any damaging information. But the Congress, joined by the Communists, went much further, especially when Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. Just as Nehru sought control of the 'commanding heights of the economy' with his socialistic planning, he and his successors built a centralized educational establishment that would perpetuate his anti-Hindu view of Indian history and civilization. This led to anti-Hindu forces dominating education for nearly fifty years.
The first minister of education was Maulana Azad, said to be a 'nationalist' Muslim and a close friend and open admirer of Nehru at least in public. Azad was an indolent man and an ineffective administrator, but with a strong commitment to exalting the glory of Islamic rule in India. He also had a hand in sabotaging R.C. Majumdar’s multi-volume work on the Indian Freedom Movement, which at times was critical of the Congress.
So, the official rewriting of Indian history had begun with its whitewashing of the horrors of Islamic rule accompanied by the introduction of anti-Hindu propaganda describing Hinduism as full of inequities and Islam as egalitarian. Nehru himself had set the trend with his glorification of Muhammad of Ghazni and Babar.
Under this program of de-Hinduisation, vandals and terrorists like Ghazni, Babar and Aurangazeb were treated as bringers of civilization and equality, while portraying such freedom fighters as Shivaji, Rana Pratap, Chandrashekar Azad and others as obstructionists standing in the way of progress. But thanks to the official hospitality extended to such historical revisions, the influential National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) came to be dominated by scholars who pursued the Nehruvian agenda or were willing to cater to it. The same was true of another influential educational body, the National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA). Independent minded historians and other scholars who were not prepared to toe this official line were removed or made ineffective.
A fateful event that played into the hands of the Secularists was the appointment of Nurul Hassan as education minister in the Indira Gandhi regime. He claimed to be a Marxist, but he pursued an anti-Hindu agenda like a Muslim Fundamentalist. After the creation of Pakistan, many Muslim Fundamentalists pretended to be Marxists, and kept attacking Hinduism for its alleged inequality. As a result, anti-Hinduism acquired a stranglehold on education.
NIEPA is a particularly influential body that administers and oversees educational policy in India. NCERT controls textbooks and other materials that are used in schools and colleges in India. Both were now under the firm control of anti-Hindu forces.
Through his control of these two powerful bodies, Nurul Hassan became the education Czar in India. He extended patronage to the Marxist dominated Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Muslim separatist Aligarh Muslim University. They were allowed to provide consultants and experts on all educational matters. As a result, these two academically undistinguished but politically opportunistic universities have come to command resources and influence out of all proportion to their merit.
A single example should help give an idea of the dangers of this centralized feudal educational policy. For over 20 years, H.S. Khan headed the history and sociology division of the NCERT. He is known to hold the view that India became civilized only through the introduction of Islam. This incidentally is also the official Pakistani line. This was also the view of Nurul Hassan who was of course the patron of H.S. Khan. This is taking the Aryan invasion idea a giant step backward.
In 1986, on Khan's initiative, textbook writers in all the states were directed to change the version of history to accord with the anti-Hindu model. Specific guidelines were issued to all the states instructing them not to glorify any period of history, meaning any Hindu period, as a Golden Age. The Gupta period therefore, was not to be glorified despite its great achievements.
As a further step in de-Hinduisation and rehabilitation of tyrannical Muslim rulers, Hindu leaders like Shivaji, Chandrashekara Azad and Rana Pratap were not to be described as freedom fighters against alien rule, but treated as terrorists who opposed 'civilized and civilizing' rulers like Aurangazeb. As a result, the anti-Hindu agenda, which had been gaining strength since the early 1950s, accelerated dramatically under the feudal regime of Nurul Hassan. It was only after the rout of the Congress party in the 1999 elections, their monopoly has come under threat. This has made these men and women resort to desperate measures like what is coming out in the ICHR scandals.
These scandals leave one wondering as to what must be stirring in the minds and souls of these ‘eminent historians’, to make them sink to such depths of intellectual and moral degradation as would place them in the company of Lysenko and Goebbels. Their pathology — there is no other word for it — has two wings: cultural perversion and intellectual dishonesty. There is another point worth noting: their disloyalty to the nation and the culture that has sustained and nourished them, and without which they would be nothing. Unlike Indian scientists and technologists who are recognized everywhere, in the world of humanities, these ‘eminent historians’ are utter nonentities, little more than crooked reflections of colonial stereotypes. They are also shown to be dishonest to the core, caring nothing for truth and capable of stealing both money and research.
This also accounts for the dismal contribution to scholarship that this school has made in its fifty years of domination of the establishment. This weakness of scholarship, of which they are no doubt aware, does not fully account for their career of falsehood and fabrication. Normal people do not descend to such depths of behaviour simply to protect their reputations.
It is clear that a self-respecting nation like India cannot allow this disgraceful state of affairs to continue. It cannot have its children’s education controlled by men and women with slavish minds and a hostile attitude towards the nation and its history and culture.
The first step is to break the monopoly of these people, which has already begun to happen to some extent. But this is only because there is a Government in power that is more nationalistic in orientation than previous Governments. A more permanent solution should be found so that history and education are not subject to the whims of politicians and special interests.
To ensure a free-spirited inquiry and unfettered research, there should be no Government organizations that tell educators and scholars how to write and teach history. This means disbanding organizations like NIEPA and NCERT. They have become little more than centers for thought control and political propaganda. The ICHR should be reorganized strictly as a funding agency that invites and funds proposals. For any major research program, several scholars and/or groups of scholars should be funded so that independent schools of thoughts can flourish. It should never be allowed to become the monopoly of a single ideological advocacy group as happened under the Congress regime.
Series concluded
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