DISTORTION OF HISTORY- A NEW FORM OF TERROR

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once rightly said, “The most dangerous of all falsehoods is slightly distorted truth.”

In 2017, in an abrupt and sudden decision, Modi government ordered the removal of the poem सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है हमारे सपनों का मर जाना from Hindi textbooks of class XI, which was written by a so-called antinational poet, PAASH. At 19, when Pash questioned the aesthetics of Punjabi poetry, an established writer dismissed his poetry as “red rag”. Undaunted, the young poet retorted: “Don’t expect me to talk about your rotten taste.” One wonders, if alive, what would have been his reaction to RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra’s suggestion that his poem should be removed from an NCERT textbook.

Now 2 years later, they are here with another proposition to remove certain chapters from history textbooks of classes IX and X. It clearly shows their agenda to propound certain ideologies at a very early in the young minds. The present government is quite thoughtful of ways to whitewash caste considering the fact they want to expound the notion that there are equality and no caste issues within Hinduism. What else could they have done to popularise the brand of Hindutva?

In this era of growing jingoism and dissemination of misinformation, history or historical facts seems the easiest target. Now talking of its technicalities, distortion of history is basically done to promote certain ideologies and agendas. So who does this and why? Primarily this kind of historical negationism is done by people who are in power or those who seek power. They want to create certain events, stories, myths and facts out of nowhere which at the end serves their purpose. They alter facts, omit those parts which they find disturbing or rather antinational. They do this as this is the most effective way to influence the mind of the population. For example, presenting history in textbooks where there was no dissent during a particular period is basically telling the young students that nothing was bad about this period and if the present government supports the same ideology, then nothing can be bad about this government as well. But now my question is even if there was no dissent in the said period, can the same ideology be applied to the present generation where the situation, societal dynamics, size and composition of the population, role of government and rule of law have completely changed?

The earliest example of such distortion comes from American history as taught in the public schools e.g. showing American-Indians as primitive and savage. The Vietnam War seems to be barely mentioned; Americans have a perception of it being unpopular, and even worse, but have no or little knowledge of the war crimes committed by Americans, and the extent to which even soldiers protested the war. Some of the other examples include  Holocaust denial, Armenian Genocide denial, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Japanese war crime denial and the denial of Soviet crimes.

Also, I completely agree with the fact that this phenomenon has not popped up with the rise of right-wing around the world, but now it is on a larger and wider scale with huge financial and moral support from the corporate house especially the media houses. Earlier we had a scope to peep to the other side of the history if anybody wanted, but now despite the connectivity that we have today, we really do not have many people left to connect to. Starting from Janata dal’s attempt to remove some textbooks as they were not critical enough of the Muslim Invaders, then a slight Marxist bias to an almost complete dissolution of those portions of history that aren’t “Hindu enough” is the journey that the books and popular narrative have gone through. But changing the names of places or claiming Hindu connections to monuments that are clearly not- is the craziest of all.

This is not only harmful in terms of historical misinterpretations but also dangerous and disheartening for those whose history and culture they are trying to diminish although they are as much Indians as we are. We definitely can’t stop it but we can question it and we should continue to do it.

“History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity so that we can better face the future.” And therefore it is our duty to present history as it is without any bias and without any prior agenda.