Secularists overeaction to Anti-Thapar petition is quite revealing

[Guest guest]

Secularists overeaction to Anti-Thapar petition is quite revealing.

how many times have individual efforts been misconstrued by these

rabid anti-hindu traditionalists?

The Article below http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/13praful.htm

from rediff about the petition and our personal knowledge of its

genesis proves these people are completly out of touch with reality.

Or just maybe they are doing their assigned tasks on behalf of some

foriegn intelligence agency.At least its nice to see that many

rediff reader's comments clearly see thru the hypocracy...or should

I say hype-crazies.

Vrn parker

PS I encourage any interested to go to the anti-hindu link at the

bottom and let them know what you think.

 

McCarthyism's Indian rebirth

 

May 13, 2003

 

 

When future scholars write the social history of this past decade in

India, a major trend they will undoubtedly note is the upsurge of

intolerance. Right since the Babri mosque was demolished in December

1992 by a frenzied mob out to settle scores with history, there has

been unrelenting violence, discrimination, and humiliation against

groups of people.

 

They are vilified simply because they happen to disagree with

something, or have different beliefs, faiths, or ethnic origins.

Books are burned (eg: Ambedkar's Riddles of Hinduism), eminent

artists (M F Husain) are attacked, and newspaper offices (Mahanagar

and Outlook) are ransacked. Even more frequently, indeed

casually, 'secularists' and 'liberals' are demonised.

 

It can be argued that this isn't new. Indian society is far less

tolerant and respectful of dissent than, say, the West. Yet, there

is something new and different about today's intolerance. Until the

mid-1970s, people could publish irreverent, iconoclastic, even

blasphemous, material not just in 'little magazines', but in the

mainstream media.

 

Dalits could publicly condemn the Manusmriti without being

branded 'anti-national'. Periyar (E V Ramaswamy Naicker), an atheist

and bitter critic of 'Aryan' Hinduism, could parody gods and

goddesses in street processions, joined by hundreds of thousands.

Of course, the government, with characteristic paranoia, would

periodically ban books by foreigners, which were considered

sensitive from the security point of view -- like Nine Hours to

Rama, or Neville Maxwell's India's China War. But by and large,

domestic dissent wasn't punished -- until the Emergency.

 

Today's culture of intolerance is pervasive -- both within the state

and society. It's stridently majoritarian too. Unadulterated hate-

speech against religious and ethnic minorities has become routine

within our public discourse. Our television channels regularly

broadcast programmes in which people like Mr Praveen Togadia vent

their spleen with perverse delight and rank communalists launch foul

attacks on Muslims and advocate suicide-bombing of Pakistani

civilians. (This happened on BBC Question Time-India on May 2, with

the Shiv Sena's Sanjay Nirupam leading the charge.) Terms

like 'secularist conspiracy' now feature in mainstream newspaper

captions.

 

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the new intolerance is the

official sanction it receives through ministers and leaders of

academic institutions which have been unscrupulously and ruthlessly

saffronised, including universities, councils of historical and

social science research, and the National Council for Educational

Training and Research. Soon after the BJP took over the Indian

Council of Historical Research, it banned volumes in the Towards

Freedom project edited by distinguished historians Sumit Sarkar and

K N Panikkar. NCERT has revised social science textbooks in a

blatantly communal manner.

 

For instance, in the book for Class X, all that's left of history is

the unit, The Heritage of India. The chapter on major religions

doesn't include Sikhism and Islam. Other textbooks don't even

mention Gandhiji's assassination and its Hindu-communal inspiration.

Indeed, some textbooks (Class IX) promote 'the superiority of

Indian thought and culture over the Western mind', a phrase

reminiscent of the Nazis' Aryan-German supremacism.

 

Praise for these national-chauvinist and communal ideas comes from

Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, no less.

On April 29, he outlined what he called the proper projection of the

country's history and tradition. He said: "I want to teach students

a history of Indian successes and victories and not of subjugation

and defeats."

 

This is a straightforward recipe for falsifying history by

expurgating unpleasant realities like caste, male supremacism, or

the persecution of Buddhists in ancient India. Whole generations of

Indians will grow up steeped in ignorance, prejudice against other

cultures and non-Hindu religions, and unrelieved jingoism.

 

Pro-Hindutva non-resident Indians in North America are among those

spearheading this campaign of intolerance, especially on email

circuits. Driven by their long-distance or 'Green Card' hyper-

nationalism, they take extremely illiberal positions. They target

individuals and assassinate their character, abuse them, and try to

intimidate them. Among their targets are journalists, including

myself.

 

The communalists' latest victim is the illustrious scholar, and one

of the world's most distinguished historians of ancient India,

Professor Romila Thapar, whose accomplishments are rivalled by few

others. Prof Thapar has authored many seminal works, including

classics like Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, A History of

India (Penguin 1966, expanded and just published as Early India),

Ancient Indian Social History and Cultural Pasts, besides the more

recent Sakuntala, and History and Beyond, not to mention countless

scholarly papers.

 

Prof Thapar, one of India's best-known world-class academics, has

taught at a host of universities, including Oxford, London and

Paris, besides Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has received

honorary doctorates from Paris, Oxford, Chicago and Calcutta. Prof

Thapar was recently appointed to the Kluge Chair in Countries and

Cultures of the South at the US Library of Congress, the world's

greatest library of record. Her Penguin History of India has

dominated the ancient Indian history field like a colossus. This is

acknowledged not just by Left-leaning intellectuals, but by non-Left

liberal historians like Parthasarathi Gupta, Dharma Kumar and Sanjay

Subrahmaniam as well.

 

The Library of Congress appointment triggered what must be one of

the most vicious attacks ever launched on a scholar anywhere,

through an online petition, which now has over 1,700 signatories,

most of them NRIs. The petition would deserve a serious academic-

level rebuttal if it were signed by people who have at least read

and are minimally acquainted with Prof Thapar's work. It isn't. It

accuses her of being an ignorant yet 'avowed antagonist of India's

Hindu civilisation' who wants to discredit India in the same way as

the 'Europeans discredited the American Indians' land claims...' It

says that as a Marxist, she 'represents a completely Eurocentric

worldview' and 'disavows that India ever had a history'!

 

This is ludicrous. Prof Thapar has spent a lifetime arguing

against 'Orientalist' Eurocentric stereotypes which hold that

ancient India lacked a sense of history and that pre-colonial Indian

society was 'static' and 'stagnant'. She is devoted to the study of

India's civilisation with all its multiplicity of traditions --

secular and religious, metaphysical and scientific. How she could be

an 'antagonist' of Indian civilisation defies comprehension except

within a philistine communal framework, which holds that all ancient

Indian civilisation was Hindu, even when it had Jain, Buddhist,

Christian, animist and agnostic traditions.

 

Even worse, the petition says Prof Thapar is engaged in a 'war of

cultural genocide', and the result of her Library of Congress

research, Historical Consciousness in Early India, is 'a foregone

conclusion'. "She will of course attempt to show that Early India

had no historical consciousness"!

 

In reality, some of Prof Thapar's most exciting work (eg: Time as a

Metaphor for History) attempts to refute the Eurocentric notion that

ancient Indians only had a cyclical concept of time, and to

establish that there existed linear and genealogical concepts too.

Devoid of logic, rationality or sobriety, the petitioners resort to

abuse in comments appended to the main letter. They demand that the

Library of Congress must not waste good 'American money' on

a 'Marxist' who is 'anti-Hindu'.

 

The campaign represents the rebirth of McCarthyism -- the worst

witchhunt of the 20th century outside Nazi Germany, conducted in

post-World War II America by Senator Joseph McCarthy against anyone

suspected to be a communist. One of the signatories gives the game

away: 'Fidel Castro would have been a better choice [than Prof

Thapar]. At least he is not a venom-spitting anti-Hindu. I am

worried about the future of USA. The Indian communists have already

infiltrated into all the American universities. And now the Library

of Congress. McCarthy, where are you?' (verbatim)

 

Here's a sample of other comments: 'She is a pinko and a fake

historian...', 'This Thapar woman will be a Trojan Horse for

Islamic terrorists in the US', 'It is disappointing that the US that

once opposed communism is now in cahoots with one of its

practitioners', 'Ban Marxist Scholars from the USA... After all, the

American Communist Party was banned' (Praveen Togadia). 'Prelude to

Hindu Holocaust...', 'Romila does not know anything about India. She

only knows Indian history which has been formatted and manipulated

by the British. Besides, she is a Marxist who are as fundamentalist

as Muslim Jehadies', 'This stupid lady should be stripped of her

citizenship'.

 

'Kick her out. Kick should be of such a force that she remains dead

on the ground', 'CIA was supposed to specialize in covert

operations, now we learn they do overt operations too!', 'The agenda

of neo-conservatives is getting clearer now -- recalling Ambassador

Blackwill, now appointing Romila Thapar -- to further

demoralise/weaken India and its people...', '...Going by her track

record ... [she] might even illegally interfere in the politics of

America'.

 

So vicious and depraved is this campaign that the Library of

Congress is unlikely to reverse Prof Thapar's appointment. But other

US institutions and universities might want to play safe and avoid

appointing Indian scholars of Left-wing or anti-communal persuasion.

 

This will seriously vitiate the intellectual climate in India and

the US. That's why this witchhunt must be stopped. All those who

believe in critical inquiry and free debate (free from both

intimidation and censorship) must stand up against this explosion of

bigotry and vile communalism.

 

(Emailers who want to defend Prof Thapar, please visit the Web

site: www.mnet.fr/aiindex/Alerts/IDRT300403.html )

 

Praful Bidwai