Fascist Design of the Modi Government to Distort History
Amit
When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power,
Burn me! He wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!
– Bertolt Brecht
Fascists are extremely afraid of history because history is their enemy. The principal reason behind this is their own black history, which is full of apologies to and compromises with the British imperialists and betrayal of the revolutionary national liberation movement. The second reason is that the imagined past that they construct to hoodwink the masses with their Hindutva fascism and nationalism. They are afraid of the masses and their revolutionary potential to make history. The people bereft of a true sense of history are also deprived of this revolutionary potential. This is the reason why fascists in all countries at all times prioritize to make every effort to distort history. They try to establish myths as ‘common sense’ and cover up what is true, so as to create a false consciousness in order to help their fascist agenda.
The recent case is of ‘Learning Outcome Based Curriculum Framework (LOCF): BA History Undergraduate Program, 2021’ presented by the UGC. In this program, UGC has attempted to advance the Sangh’s bundle of lies, instead of materialist and pro-people historical works of renowned historians like Irfan Habib and Ramsharan Sharma. This new course of UGC is designed to bring to the fore the ‘glorious past of Indian history’. In order to bring this glorious past to the fore, topics like origin of the Varna-caste system have been removed from this new syllabus introduced by UGC. At the same time, the proposed curriculum advances a Hindutva-fascist communal reading of the Indian history. To construct a mythical reading of this glorious past, efforts such as teaching Hindu scriptures, making ‘Saraswati Civilization’ a part of the curriculum, etc. have been started. This is what has been named the ‘Idea of India’ in this new syllabus of UGC. The leaders of the fascist Sangh Parivar and the BJP have started openly announcing that now no “controversial facts” will be taught in history. It is obvious that any fact which goes against the communal-fascist reading of the history by the Sangh Parivaar, will be dismissed as “disputed” and “controversial”. What the Sangh Parivar wants the students to learn will be considered beyond dispute and controversy! Let us see one specimen of things to come: teaching “uncontroversial” and “undisputed” facts has been implemented and students are now being taught that Rana Pratap was victorious in the battle of Haldighati!
Similarly, recently, the Inspection Committee of Delhi University removed the writings of Mahasweta Devi, Bama and Sukhartharini from the English syllabus. The story of Mahasweta Devi ‘Draupadi’ is the story of a tribal woman who was fighting against patriarchy, Brahminical mindset and caste discrimination. The Inspection Committee had tried to remove the chapter ‘Subaltern and Sovereign: An Anthropological History of Bastar’ written by Nandita Sundar. In 2019, there was a demand from right-wing teachers to remove ‘Moneyben Elias Bibijan’ written on the Gujarat riots, from English syllabus of the University. They also demanded the removal of articles related to Naxalism and communism from history. This is typical of fascist regimes, as they are afraid of any resistance and opposition from the masses.
In fact, Sangh Parivar is trying to transform the entire curriculum into a tool for propagating its fascist ideology. In 2019, NCERT was asked by the Sangh Parivar-affiliated organization Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas to remove details related to Ghalib and Tagore’s works, poetry by revolutionary poet Pash, excerpts from the biography of MF Hussain, Gujarat riots, Mughal emperors and National Conference. During the tenure of BJP government in Rajasthan, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Deen Dayal Upadhyay, K.S. Sudarshan etc. were included in the syllabus! The poem ‘Jhansi Wali Rani’, which described Scindia as a friend of the British, was taken out of the syllabus. The new education policy implemented by the Modi government in 2020 is a document of fascization of the entire education system.
This campaign of distortion and saffronization of the entire history by the Sangh Parivar and the BJP has intensified manifold since 2014, when Narendra Modi came to power. The new phase of distortion of history that began with the appointment of Sanghi “ideologue” Sudarshan Rao as the head of the ICHR continues to be a tragedy. In the Science Congress, foolish claims like the invention of aircraft in ancient India, knowledge of plastic surgery, stem cells etc. were repeated again and again. Narendra Modi’s own confusions and jumble of historical facts including his confusions regarding Nalanda and Taxila, Nanak-Kabir and Gorakhnath is just a representative of the hallmark stupidity of fascists. P.N. Oak and Dinanath Batra are RSS’s ‘knights in shining armor’ in this fascist march of ignorance and idiocy.
In fact, this agenda of distorting history by Indian fascists is not new. From the very beginning, the Sangh Parivar resorted to various rumors and lies to make its inroads in the Indian society. The distortion of history was institutionalized through the ‘National Institute for Rewriting History’ formed under the leadership of P.N. Oak, by the RSS in 1964. With their first stint in power in 1977, this fascist gang had modified all the NCERT books saying that they contained material that hurt the sentiments of a particular community. In this period, they had managed to get Ramsharan Sharma’s book ‘Ancient India’ out of the course. Later, in the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee too, the process of tampering with history and curriculum, inserting unscientific-irrational things into syllabus continued. Facts related to the arrival of the Aryans in Indian society, beef-eating in ancient India, etc. were changed during this period. This campaign of falsification and mythification by the fascists continued even when they were not in power. Who can forget the incident of these fascist goons creating a ruckus in Delhi University in 2008 regarding Ramanujan’s essay ‘300 Ramayanas’ and entering the History Department in the presence of the police administration and assaulting the then Head of the Department.
However, this campaign of distortion of history by the Sangh Parivar has not gone unchallenged. There has been a range of historians from D.D. Kosambi, Ramsharan Sharma, D.N. Jha, Bipan Chandra, Suvira Jaiswal to Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar who have revealed the hideous designs of the fascists. These historians were the ones who liberated history from the tales of kings and queens, the mythical veils wrapped around it, and attacked the notion of seeing history as static and merely a set of events and coincidences. They also showed what must be accepted as the progressive legacy of the Indian history and what must be rejected as regressive and reactionary and also the constant struggle between classes in Indian history and their reflection in ideology and politics of each era. This is the reason why the fascists, who are presenting the history of ancient India as a monolith of glory and prosperity with no struggle and a harmonious hierarchy of castes and classes and creating a ruckus in the name of “Ram Rajya”, are threatened by a scientific understanding of history. That is why along with distorting history, the Hindutva-fascists also spread slander and spew hate against these historians.
We must remember that fascism is not irresistible and it only becomes irresistible due to the betrayal of reformists and social-democrats and revisionists. It is the duty of the revolutionary communists to oppose this falsification of history and mythification of our past, without falling prey to any liberal logic of ‘democratic rights of fascists’ and ‘arguing with the fascists’. As Wilhelm Staple, a fascist from Nazi Germany said, “our movement cannot be defeated by arguments because it was not built on arguments in the first place.” Therefore, the revolutionary communists must organize an alternative mass campaigns to expose the fascists and demolish their web of false porpaganda. We must reveal the true face of their ideology, their reactionary aims and their shameful history among the masses.
We must not forget that even in the past their fascist forefathers like Hitler and Mussolini tried to set reason and science on fire. Heaps of books were burnt in the streets. We must also remember the history of downfall of such fascists and that ultimately these fascists were designated their appropriate place, i.e., into the dustbin of history by the masses. However, it did not and will not happen by itself. The revolutionary forces must play the role that the history has assigned to them. They have to be united against the hatred that is being sown in the society through magazines like Panchjanya and organizations like Akhil Bhartiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna and Vivekananda Foundation. The struggle against the distortion of history is an important front in the struggle against fascism.
“Fascism is not at all the revenge of the bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia. And the base of fascism lies not in a small caste but in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the proletariat. We must understand these essential differences in order to deal successfully with fascism.
“The view that fascism is merely a form of bourgeois terror, although advanced by some radical forces in our movement, is more characteristic of the outlook of many reformist social democrats.”
– Clara Zetkin
(at Third Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, June 20, 1923)
