‘Hindu-first’ history questioned
new delhi — The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s move to rewrite the history of the nation has triggered reactions from politicians and historians.
Shashi Tharoor, a prominent member of the Congress party, said right wing Hindus are “leading a political campaign over Indian history that seeks to reinvent the idea of India itself.”
“For seven decades after independence, Indianness rested on faith in the country’s pluralism,” Tharoor said, but the rise of Hindu nationalism had brought with it a “sense of cultural superiority.”
During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier.
Modi did not order the committee’s creation — it was instigated by Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, government documents show — but its mission is in keeping with his outlook.
Sharma confirmed that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.
Sharma said this “Hindu first” version of Indian history will be added to a school curriculum which has long taught that people from central Asia arrived in India much more recently, some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and transformed the population.
Hindu nationalists and senior figures in Modi’s party reject the idea that India was forged from a mass migration. They believe that today’s Hindu population is directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants. Historian Romila Thapar said the question of who first stood on the soil was important to nationalists because “if the Hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a Hindu Rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one.” To assert that primacy, nationalists need to claim descent from ancestors and a religion that were indigenous, said Thapar, 86, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for decades and has authored books on ancient Indian history.
The theory of an influx of people from central Asia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was embraced during British rule.
The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, said: “I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.”
The proceedings of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.
Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people — a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.
In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.
For India’s Muslims, who have witnessed incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous. Asaduddin Owaisi, the chief of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.”
“The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”
Helping to drive the debate over Indian history is an ideological, nationalist Hindu group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It helped sweep Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014 and now counts among its members the ministers in charge of agriculture, highways and internal security.
Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya said that “the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.”
India’s first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promoted a secular state and tolerance of India’s Muslims, said it was “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture.” That outlook informed the way India was governed by Nehru and then by his Congress party for more than half a century. The rights of minorities — including the prohibition of discrimination based on religion — are enshrined in India’s constitution, of which Nehru was a signatory in 1950.
Culture Minister Sharma said he will present the committee’s final report to parliament and lobby the nation’s Ministry of Human Re- source Development to write the findings into school textbooks. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, which is responsible for education and literacy programmes, is also headed by an adherent of the RSS, Prakash Javadekar.
“We will take every recommendation made by the Culture Ministry seriously,” Javadekar said. “Our government is the first government to have the courage to even question the existing version of history that is being taught in schools and colleges.”
During the last three years, Sharma said, his ministry has organised hundreds of workshops and seminars across the country “to prove the supremacy of our glorious past.” The aim, he said, is to build a fresh narrative to balance the liberal and secular philosophy espoused by India’s first prime minister, Nehru, and furthered by successive governments for most of the nation’s post-independence history.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, now controlled by Sharma’s ministry, these days mixes in sessions about right wing Hindu leaders and causes. —
For seven decades after independence, Indianness rested on faith in the country’s pluralism... But the rise of hindu nationalism had brought with it a sense of cultural superiority. Shashi Tharoor, Congress leader
If the hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a hindu rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one. Romila Thapar, historian
Muslims never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India...The government wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens. Asaduddin Owaisi, AIMIM leader