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.
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