History is Distorted by Everybody

Every time the BJP/NDA comes to power, a bunch of Indians will say that history is getting rewritten and distorted in school books. Is that true? Maybe. But as Ramachandra Guha points out in this interview:

“In all fairness, you should say that the original sinner was the Congress…  (that) portrayed a vision of modern Indian history in which, apart from Mahatma Gandhi, all the great figures were from one family.”

And so we saw a response:

“As Gopal Gandhi puts it, Congress disowned Patel, and that allowed the BJP to misappropriate Patel… (even though) Patel was not part of the BJP or the Sangh Parivar or the RSS.”

And then social media came into the “conversation”:

“[The narrative turned into] ‘Patel is a great figure and Nehru unfairly sidelined him, Gandhi should have made Patel Prime Minister’”.

Both the Congress and the BJP avoid the much more nuanced reality. So too does social media:

“They don’t understand the complexity of that time. And above all they don’t recognize what a difficult job it was for people like Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Patel to create a united country, to bring different people together, to give a democratic template to a society which had never known democracy, never known freedom of choice, to give women equal rights in a society that was deeply patriarchal, to at least fight against caste oppression, to allow affirmative action for Dalits and Adivasis… it’s an extraordinary achievement.”

The Americans worship their founding fathers. We just abuse them.

People who say that the RSS is Talibanizing our education would do well to remember that they were perfectly OK when the same was done in the past:

“It is true that you had a kind of Marxist cabal who controlled the universities. It dates back to the time when the Communist Party of India (CPI) aligned with Indira Gandhi in Parliament to save her majority and in return she gave CPI historians control of ICHR, NCERT etc.”

It’s stuff like this that the BJP/RSS bashers ignore. If it was tolerated that the Left and the Congress decide the narrative of history, the uproar today sounds very hypocritical.

The amusing (yet sad) thing is that we might make progress if both sides admit that they distort things. Unfortunately, the BJP/RSS bashers often genuinely believe that their version is the objective, unbiased truth! Get real, guys, your version was nothing of the kind. And a version of history, based on distortions via a religious lens, is just as wrong as one distorted by a “secular” lens.