Looking at recent election campaigns, and the political climate of the country in general, several things come to light, one of them being the twisting of historical facts.
In his novel 1984, Orwell says, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Speaking at the Banaras Hindu University, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said, “Putting together our history, embellishing it and rewriting it is the responsibility of the country, its people and historians.”
Of course, efforts to do this have been underway for a few years now-during its first tenure, the culture ministry under the BJP Government set up a fourteen-member committee to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of Indian History, to prove that Hindu scriptures are not myths and that today’s Hindus descend directly from India’s first inhabitants from thousands of years ago.
India, unfortunately, is no stranger to such practices. Read Indian school textbooks, and you’ll see omissions of history from the dark days of Indira Gandhi’s tenure as Prime Minister. In textbooks from Rajasthan, you’ll see a watered-down version of Ambedkar’s fight against the oppressive caste system, where instead of representing him accurately as a vehement opponent of the caste system ingrained into the then prevalent structure of Hinduism, he is portrayed as a “Hindu Social Reformer” akin to the likes of Dayanand Saraswati and K B Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Nehru said that Mahmud Ghazni was a lover of art (the same Mahmud Ghazni who destroyed idols and temples in India). Gandhi is praised and hailed as a reformer and father of the nation but nowhere do we mention his obsession with the caste system
This cherry-picking of facts is incredibly problematic. It is the job of historians to present facts as they are, good or bad. However, politics is a different game altogether, and when contentions in History come into the political realm, things get ugly. Integrity is a crucial part of historical method, except no compulsion is there on politicians to be morally prudent.
When politicians are allowed to twist facts in order to pursue a particular narrative, they not only change what people think happened in the past. The key to the future lies in revisiting history, thus, history becomes an incredibly powerful tool to influence people’s emotions and actions.
Coming back to the status quo, that is exactly what the current government is doing. Historian Romila Thapar says “if the Hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a Hindu Rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one.” It aims to revisit history in a manner where it establishes the current Hindu majority as indigenous. That, of course, comes at a cost, which here are the core values that make India what it is. That is precisely why it’s best to ensure that History is left outside of the political realm. It is far too dangerous a tool to be left in the hands of people like politicians, who’re guided by principles that primarily benefit themselves.
Image Credits: India TV
Khush Vardhan Dembla
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