Politics and Revisionism in India
By SALIL TRIPATHI
Ten years ago this week, a Hindu mob destroyed Babri Masjid, a medieval
mosque in Ayodhya. The leaders of that mob wanted to liberate the land where
some Hindus believe their revered God, Rama, was born, so that they could build
a temple on that spot. Despite heated rhetoric at the time, the actual attack
took many in India by surprise. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which led the
movement to rebuild the temple, was part of India's political mainstream, and
few thought it would defy the courts and step across the line into violence.
From the BJP's point of view, however, its strategy has paid off handsomely.
Since then, instead of being punished at the polls, it has emerged as the single
largest party in three elections, and today leads the coalition ruling India.
The politicians who were in Ayodhya a decade ago are today running the country.
Lal Krishna Advani is India's deputy prime minister, threatening to send troops
into Pakistan to strike at extremists continuing to infiltrate into India. Next
week, Narendra Modi, Mr. Advani's trusted aide, is seeking re-election as chief
minister of Gujarat. Under his watch hundreds of people, mainly Muslims, died in
riots this March.
Those activists were trying to undo the past and rewrite history in their own
way. Now help comes from the federal minister for human resource development,
science and technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, who is overseeing efforts to
rewrite India's history textbooks, to reflect more accurately the pain caused to
Hindu civilization by invading foreigners, usually Muslims.
To be sure, rewriting history is often necessary, as in modern Japan. Successive
Japanese governments have not educated children about the horrors of the
Imperial Japanese Army in East Asia between 1930s and 1940s. Japanese
politicians and business leaders continue to blunder by worshipping at
controversial shrines at home and making insensitive remarks in Asia. Japanese
history teaches them that Japan was a victim of the Second World War (Hiroshima
and Nagasaki), overlooking Japanese aggression -- Japanese forces beheaded
Chinese men, enslaved Chinese, Korean and other Southeast Asian women, forced
Allied POWs to build railways, and committed untold atrocities in the so-called
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Those seeking to rewrite Japanese history want to inject remorse and humility.
Mr. Joshi’s intention is quite different: it is to make Hindus more aggressive
and proud, by reminding Muslims they must be subservient and apologize for the
past. Indian textbooks already mention the horrors of invading Muslim armies
that destroyed many temples and killed many Indians. But they also celebrate the
heritage of monuments (the Taj Mahal), art (Mogul miniatures), music (sitar) and
food (samosa). By overstressing the former and understating the latter, the new
history books may not make Hindus feel any prouder, but they will certainly make
Indian Muslims insecure.
The Hindu nationalist view is ascendant because its advocates are capitalizing
on the failures of modern India. The governing consensus -- liberal democracy,
secularism and socialism -- has unraveled in the last quarter century. Liberal
democracy suffered with Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975-77, when parts of the
constitution were rewritten and the judiciary subjugated. Secularism weakened
during the Sikh insurgency of early 1980s, which consumed Mrs. Gandhi. Her
successor, Rajiv Gandhi, denied Muslim women the right to seek alimony in order
to appease fundamentalist Muslims, and later banned Salman Rushdie's novel,
"The Satanic Verses." Following rigged elections in Kashmir in 1989,
the insurgency there worsened. Corruption worsened, and socialism lost its
meaning after Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union became free.
In that period of gloom, the only solace for Indians came from the Hindu epics
"Ramayana" and "Mahabharata," which were televised on Sunday
mornings and harkened back to a golden age. Those schmaltzy Bollywood serials
filled an ideological vacuum. If only India could return to that past! If
Nehruvian non-alignment was wrong, if Nehruvian socialism too was wrong, if
Nehru's daughter could subvert liberal democracy and her son be accused of
corruption, surely Nehruvian secularism had to be wrong too.
The BJP was waiting for just such soul-searching. The BJP is a cadre-based
organization, closely linked with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National
Voluntary Corps, an organization that was twice banned after independence. Some
of the RSS's top leaders have expressed admiration for Hitler and Mussolini.
Today, they want Hindus to rise and regain pride, and reject Islam and
Christianity as alien faiths. The RSS and its associates have been working
painstakingly at changing the Indian consensus. Forget the corrupt Congress and
the ideologically bankrupt Left, the BJP says. Turn to us; we will bring back
Rama Rajya, the golden rule of Rama.
This swagger has received intellectual imprimatur from writers like the Nobel
Laureate V.S. Naipaul
and the late Nirad Chaudhuri. Mr. Naipaul has called the Ayodhya mosque's
destruction "an inevitable retribution." For too long Hindu
nationalism had been cowed; it was now finding its true voice, and this
resurgent yearning can only be good, he argued in "India: A Million
Mutinies Now." Rewriting history textbooks is part of this exercise. The
BJP intends to do this by challenging conventional history, debunking secular
historians for depending on colonial interpretations and understating Islamic
atrocities and offering a home-grown alternative.
The first challenge is a central building block of Indian history, the Aryan
Invasion Theory. Conventional accounts say that around 5,000 years ago Aryans
came to India and settled around the Indus Valley, creating the Mohenjo Daro and
Harappa civilizations. They later came into contact with Dravidians in the
south. Over time the two groups intermingled, creating the complex mosaic of
Indian society that has continued to absorb other influences, including Islam
and Christianity, creating the multi-everything Indian identity today. The
nationalists, by contrast, claim that Hindu civilization was pure and predated
everything; invasions occurred when the first Islamic invaders ransacked temples
and killed thousands, and later, when Westerners colonized India.
Next, the Islamic invasions. The revisionists blame Indian historians like
Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel and Bipan Chandra for understating the violence
Islam unleashed when it entered India. They quote from 16th and 17th century
accounts by Muslims that recount stories of Islamic rulers destroying temples,
taking Hindu slaves and killing women and children.
That may indeed have happened, but what has that to do with Hindus and Muslims
in India in 2002? The RSS says that to atone for those atrocities, Muslims
should allow Hindus to reclaim temples in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Kashi and
Mathura; then Muslims can live at peace. The ideologues argue that India has not
confronted these issues because of the colonized Indian mind -- the Congress
leaders who led India's freedom movement, including Gandhi and Nehru, were
educated in England. Thus, nationalists argue, they could hardly be expected to
understand the concerns of the real India.
The final target is Mohandas Gandhi. Not necessarily the Gandhi who asked
Indians to boycott foreign goods, but the non-violent Gandhi, who doesn't square
with the nuclear program, and the Gandhi who went out of his way to accommodate
Muslims. While no BJP leader has openly criticized Gandhi, plays and films that
attack him have become popular. In his place, the martial and violent heroes of
India's freedom struggle, like Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose, are being
resurrected.
The BJP is not in a hurry. Like communist ideologues, BJP's leaders think long
term; their vision is to transform the way Indians think over a generation or
two. That's why rewriting history books, rather than spreading scientific or
English education or removing mass illiteracy, is a priority for Mr. Joshi,
whose responsibilities include science and technology.
If this strategy succeeds, it would make India a Hindu Pakistan. When India and
Pakistan became independent, Pakistan chose to be a religious state, with Islam
as its identity. India chose secularism and democracy. By championing Hindutva,
the Hindu nationalist ideology, the BJP is convincing Indians to identify with
their narrower identities. The BJP's goal is not to win only the next election,
but the next generation. It can't get more ominous than that.
Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London.