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<b><i>Coming to terms with the past: India: Latha Menon deplores the effects of religious extremism on Indian society and the writing of history.(Today's History)</i></b>
History Today; 8/1/2004; Menon, Latha
ON JANUARY 5TH, 2004, a group of thugs ransacked the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, destroying priceless manuscripts and artefacts. Their 'protest' stemmed from the involvement of some of the Institute's academics in translating manuscripts for the book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by the American historian James W. Laine, in which Laine allegedly made insulting remarks against their hero. Though partly driven by regional tensions, this attack illustrates several points relating to history, historiography, and recent socio-political developments in India.
First, it highlights the central role of irreplaceable material evidence in history. Second, it underlines the role of perceptions of the past in the concerns of the present, particularly those relating to identity. Shivaji was a Hindu king who successfully fought the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, declaring himself king and establishing the powerful Maratha Confederacy; His story has become legendary.
The story of the Hindu Maratha hero's defiance and success against a Muslim king has taken on its own part-mythical life, so much so that the actual historical evidence seems secondary, troublesome and inconvenient. The past is dead and can be manipulated or, if necessary obliterated; the myth must live.
The final point concerning the Bhandarkar raid--is the extreme, whipped-up response against a Western historian. The history of India has for too long been interpreted, written, and thus, as Edward Said pointed out, in some way owned and controlled, by the colonialists. They, now widened to encompass all modern Westerners, cannot possibly be trusted to understand or interpret our history. There is no doubt that the Orientalists of the nineteenth century did frame and periodise Indian history in accordance with certain assumptions concerning the other, which coloured and constrained their otherwise impressive achievement in building a vast corpus of knowledge about aspects of Indian history and culture. Yet Indology has moved on since then. Western scholars of Indian history today are Far more sensitive to such assumptions, while remaining appropriately rigorous and critical in their analysis. Yet in the intensely Hindu nationalist climate that has pervaded India in recent years and that continues to flourish in sections of the Indian diaspora, <b>even distinguished Indologists such as Wendy Doniger have been attacked in a knee jerk response for daring to critically evaluate Hindu texts</b>. Those Indian historians who dared question the agenda of Hindutva or 'Hindu-ness' fared even worse. Internationally respected historians such as Romila Thapar have been threatened and vilified.
The origins of Hindutva go back to the early twentieth century. The term refers to the <b>Hindu chauvinistic nationalist agenda </b>of a number of interconnected organisations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, that range from the paramilitary to the cultural. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the broad political front of this movement, and was the leading party, in the ruling coalition that was defeated in the recent elections. The other two major bodies are the cultural arm of the movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the openly militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh Parivar has taken to itself the colour saffron. <b>Once associated with renunciation, it is flaunted now as a symbol of Hindu pride and power</b>.
Over the past dozen years or so, the growth and spread of Hindutva has been remarkable. Aided by a powerful propaganda machine and the wealth pouring in from <b>Indians abroad, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom</b>, the 'saffron brigade' sought to replace the secular, pluralist vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and other earlier nationalists with their own Hindu chauvinist concept of the nation and its past, and to indoctrinate the young with this conception. The unexpected defeat of the BJP in the 2004 elections is an encouraging reminder of the power of democracy, and of the resilience of Indian secularism. But the influence of Hindutva runs deep. To understand the nature of the challenge facing the new Congress-led administration, it is necessary to review the impact of Hindutva on the interpretation and teaching of Indian history.
Material evidence is of vital importance to historians. It plays an anchoring role, preventing political groups from legitimising their agenda by taking control of the past. To argue that the past cannot be seen in any objective light, that it is a mere battleground of present ideologies in which the most persistent will win, is not only unwarranted but constitutes a dangerous concession to the extreme right. In a climate of postmodernism, of discourses floating free, Holocaust-deniers can thrive with impunity, as Richard Evans has noted.
History, as conducted by professional historians, is a rigorous and objective field, a social science in which knowledge accumulates over time. As well as from texts, inscriptions, and artefacts, studies of ancient India have utilised evidence available from archaeology, from linguistics, from indications of climate change and alterations to water courses, and sometimes from population genetics, anthropology, and the study of myth (used notably by the late distinguished Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi). Techniques of textual analysis have become more rigorous and faster, with much use of computers.
<b>By contrast, Hindutva offers little more than assertions and poor scholarship, suffused with a lavish helping of mythology. The Sangh's 'indigenism' lacks the fundamental characteristics of any reasoned approach to history. In the words of Romila Thapar, indigenism </b>
<i> attempts to invent a 'tradition' and retain it as
something essentially different from other cultures
and societies, and to build an ideology on
such a tradition. But it fails to provide a theory of
historical explanation or a method of historical
analysis. </i>
Ironically for a movement anxious to remove all trace of colonialist perceptions, the vision the devotees of Hindutva espouse is one anchored in the simplistic periodisation of the nineteenth-century Orientalists: that of an ancient and glorious Hindu 'golden age', followed by a 'dark' period of crushingly oppressive Muslim rule, and a modern period of less oppressive British rule. They continue the old British colonial view of India as constituted by two essentially antagonistic religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, a view that, abetted by both the RSS and the Muslim League, led to partition. Of course one of these communities is seen as forever the outsiders.
The real history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history of the subcontinent is much more complex. As Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out, the relationship of the two has varied not only with ruler, but with the social groups being considered, with particular sects (the Sufis, in particular, became considerably Indianised), and the way in which Islam entered the area. In Kerala, for example, with its strong and ancient trade links with the Mediterranean, the Muslim community grew from Arab traders, and was primarily assimilationist, compared to the undoubted confrontations and military conquest in the north. Yet here, too, cooperation existed, both among the elites, and among the poor of both religions. The situation cannot adequately be described in terms of any simple polarisation between two monolithic religions. This was true even during the rule of the notoriously intolerant Aurangzeb. The historian K. N. Panikkar has remarked, 'Aurangzeb's chiefs and courtiers were more Hindus than Muslims. And the person who fought against Shivaji was Raja Jaisingh, a Hindu.'
The recent sensitivity over this period of Indian history is linked to the Sangh's highly effective campaign to mobilise Hindus trader the banner of Ram Janmabhoomi ('birthplace of the god Ram'). More than a decade after the Sangh incited mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built by Babur over, as they claim, a Hindu temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, the pressure to allow the building of a temple on the site continues. So far, the courts have not relented.
The way in which Hindutva has been able to exploit and promote the image of the god Ram is interesting in itself. <b>By effectively focusing on a single god, and transforming him into a warrior god, they have given the polytheistic Hinduism the sleekness and muscle of a monotheistic faith. India becomes the land of Ram. </b>
The historicisation of Ram, his presumed epiphany in historical, as opposed to mythical time, has been the mainstay of the Hindutva project. This brazen mixing of history and mythology to suit political ends runs throughout Sangh ideology. To the masses, the mythological elements are simply asserted as history. To the intellectuals, this unholy 'interpenetration' is presented with a suitably postmodern flourish: 'The fact is that there is often more history in myths and more myth in history.'
Hinduism is far from the monolithic belief system projected by Hindutva as enduring from time immemorial. With no founder, no single canonical text, and no ecclesiastical structure (through it has priests), its development has been distinct in pattern from that of Semitic religions. It is worth quoting Romila Thapar again:
<i> The evolution of Hinduism is not a linear progression
from a founder through an organisational
system, with seeks branching off. It is
rather the mosaic of distinct cubs, deities, sects,
and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing or distancing
of these to existing ones, the placement
drawing not only on belief and ideas but also on
the socio-economic reality. </i>
This brings us to the other historical period of high sensitivity to Hindutva: the nature of ancient India and the Hindutva assertion of an indigenous 'Aryan race'. The philologist William Jones identified the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, and first proposed that they all derived from a single language, Indo-European. What should have remained a linguistic category was altered to that of a race in the race-conscious late-nineteenth century. European scholars, including even Max Muller for a time, built up the idea of an 'Aryan race' that swept into India as invaders from the north-west, bringing their language with them, and establishing superiority over, and hermetic separation from, the indigenous 'Dravidian race' through the caste system.
Yet with the growth of archaeological evidence, and supporting evidence from linguistics, the <b>story that is emerging is not one of invasion but of gradual migration and settlement </b>of peoples speaking an Indo-European language, following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The subsequent growth of a caste system is also now regarded as having been a rather more complex process than previously thought.
In contrast to this careful and maturing view, the assertion of Hindutva is simple: the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were neither migrants nor invaders, but were indigenous to India. The ancient Harappan civilisation is regarded as part of a great Vedic Age, and the dates of the Vedic texts set so far back in time (up to 9000 BCE) as to confirm that India must have been the first centre of human civilisation (and even of human origins), with subsequent migration of Aryan peoples into Iran. Needless to say, during this glorious Vedic Age, India was a land of wisdom, peace, and knowledge; it was a time of the profoundest discoveries in mathematics and science, boasting a well-knit and harmonious society, with no oppression of women or of lower castes.
It would scarcely seem worth taking the effort to <b>repeat Hindutva's nonsensical claims, but for the fact that they have been widely and effectively propagated as Hindu history and culture by the saffron brigade</b>. This is the interpretation of the nation's history that is being perpetrated through the Sangh Parivar's wide network of sectarian schools and that has even infiltrated in part into the fabric of the country's national curriculum and school textbooks.
From the late-1990s, national education became a battleground, drawing in many distinguished historians, scientists, and other academics who refused to tolerate any move away from a secular education system, who have protested against the mingling of myth alongside history, and pseudoscience alongside science. India has too robust a secular intellectual community to take such measures without a fight. The dissenting academic voices, it should be noted, were those of postmodernists, and their attempts at loosening history's firm mooring in objective reality have caused untold damage.
The chief architect of the saffronising of academia and national education was the BJP Union Human Resource Development Minister, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. Following his appoint merit in 1998, Joshi, who has been associated with the RSS from 1944, spearheaded the takeover of academic institutions and committees by those sympathetic to Hindutva, the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) among them.
All almost immediate casualty was the 'Towards Freedom' project sponsored by the unreconstituted ICHR--a compilation of archival documents from the period leading up to Independence, under the General Editorship of the late distinguished historian Sarvepalli Gopal. Two volumes of this work have been withheld from publication. No reasons were given, but the sensitivity of the pre-Independence period for the militaristic RSS is well known.
In school education, a takeover of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) by Hindutva sympathisers was followed by the adoption, despite wide protests and court challenges, of a Hindutva-infused National Curriculum Framework. NCERT history textbooks by leading historians were purged of small but significant passages, including references to the eating of beef by Brahmins in ancient India, and to the lack of archaeological evidence for settlement in Ayodhya during the purported reign of Ram. New textbooks were produced which, according to the prestigious Indian History Congress, include errors, omissions, and misleading emphases that distort history.
These moves were widely reported in the media and aroused fierce controversy. Opposition party leaders refused to adopt the new texts in states in which they were in power. Despite government moves to manipulate research and education bodies, the Indian History Congress remained defiantly committed to the continuance of sounds historical study in India. Indeed, its 64th session, held in December 2003, was one of the biggest ever conducted by the body.
Such defence of reason and objectivity is inspiring, but the damage done to academia and education during the past decade should not be underestimated. <b>Nevertheless the new Human Resource Development Minister, Arjun Singh, has announced moves to restore autonomy to academic institutions and research bodies, and to bring back the original history textbooks. There is real hope that the trend of saffronisation will now be reversed. </b>
In the aftermath of the recent election, the forces of the Hindu right have blamed defeat not on the BJP leaders' efforts to promote Hindutva, but on their failure to do so more forcefully. With the saffron brigade still powerful and waiting in the wings, it is as well to remember that the consequences of perpetrating narrow perceptions of nation and history have been felt far beyond universities and schools. The ultimate cost of Hindutva's success must be measured in lives. Nearly 2,000 Muslims, including children and babies, were hacked and burned to death in Gujarat in the riots of 2002. <b>This is what happens when the Sangh's 'children of the soil' go on the rampage. It is a lesson not restricted to India alone. </b>
Latha Menon is a freelance writer and editor.
COPYRIGHT 2004 History Today Ltd.
<b><i>Coming to terms with the past: India: Latha Menon deplores the effects of religious extremism on Indian society and the writing of history.(Today's History)</i></b>
History Today; 8/1/2004; Menon, Latha
ON JANUARY 5TH, 2004, a group of thugs ransacked the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, destroying priceless manuscripts and artefacts. Their 'protest' stemmed from the involvement of some of the Institute's academics in translating manuscripts for the book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by the American historian James W. Laine, in which Laine allegedly made insulting remarks against their hero. Though partly driven by regional tensions, this attack illustrates several points relating to history, historiography, and recent socio-political developments in India.
First, it highlights the central role of irreplaceable material evidence in history. Second, it underlines the role of perceptions of the past in the concerns of the present, particularly those relating to identity. Shivaji was a Hindu king who successfully fought the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, declaring himself king and establishing the powerful Maratha Confederacy; His story has become legendary.
The story of the Hindu Maratha hero's defiance and success against a Muslim king has taken on its own part-mythical life, so much so that the actual historical evidence seems secondary, troublesome and inconvenient. The past is dead and can be manipulated or, if necessary obliterated; the myth must live.
The final point concerning the Bhandarkar raid--is the extreme, whipped-up response against a Western historian. The history of India has for too long been interpreted, written, and thus, as Edward Said pointed out, in some way owned and controlled, by the colonialists. They, now widened to encompass all modern Westerners, cannot possibly be trusted to understand or interpret our history. There is no doubt that the Orientalists of the nineteenth century did frame and periodise Indian history in accordance with certain assumptions concerning the other, which coloured and constrained their otherwise impressive achievement in building a vast corpus of knowledge about aspects of Indian history and culture. Yet Indology has moved on since then. Western scholars of Indian history today are Far more sensitive to such assumptions, while remaining appropriately rigorous and critical in their analysis. Yet in the intensely Hindu nationalist climate that has pervaded India in recent years and that continues to flourish in sections of the Indian diaspora, <b>even distinguished Indologists such as Wendy Doniger have been attacked in a knee jerk response for daring to critically evaluate Hindu texts</b>. Those Indian historians who dared question the agenda of Hindutva or 'Hindu-ness' fared even worse. Internationally respected historians such as Romila Thapar have been threatened and vilified.
The origins of Hindutva go back to the early twentieth century. The term refers to the <b>Hindu chauvinistic nationalist agenda </b>of a number of interconnected organisations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, that range from the paramilitary to the cultural. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the broad political front of this movement, and was the leading party, in the ruling coalition that was defeated in the recent elections. The other two major bodies are the cultural arm of the movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the openly militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh Parivar has taken to itself the colour saffron. <b>Once associated with renunciation, it is flaunted now as a symbol of Hindu pride and power</b>.
Over the past dozen years or so, the growth and spread of Hindutva has been remarkable. Aided by a powerful propaganda machine and the wealth pouring in from <b>Indians abroad, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom</b>, the 'saffron brigade' sought to replace the secular, pluralist vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and other earlier nationalists with their own Hindu chauvinist concept of the nation and its past, and to indoctrinate the young with this conception. The unexpected defeat of the BJP in the 2004 elections is an encouraging reminder of the power of democracy, and of the resilience of Indian secularism. But the influence of Hindutva runs deep. To understand the nature of the challenge facing the new Congress-led administration, it is necessary to review the impact of Hindutva on the interpretation and teaching of Indian history.
Material evidence is of vital importance to historians. It plays an anchoring role, preventing political groups from legitimising their agenda by taking control of the past. To argue that the past cannot be seen in any objective light, that it is a mere battleground of present ideologies in which the most persistent will win, is not only unwarranted but constitutes a dangerous concession to the extreme right. In a climate of postmodernism, of discourses floating free, Holocaust-deniers can thrive with impunity, as Richard Evans has noted.
History, as conducted by professional historians, is a rigorous and objective field, a social science in which knowledge accumulates over time. As well as from texts, inscriptions, and artefacts, studies of ancient India have utilised evidence available from archaeology, from linguistics, from indications of climate change and alterations to water courses, and sometimes from population genetics, anthropology, and the study of myth (used notably by the late distinguished Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi). Techniques of textual analysis have become more rigorous and faster, with much use of computers.
<b>By contrast, Hindutva offers little more than assertions and poor scholarship, suffused with a lavish helping of mythology. The Sangh's 'indigenism' lacks the fundamental characteristics of any reasoned approach to history. In the words of Romila Thapar, indigenism </b>
<i> attempts to invent a 'tradition' and retain it as
something essentially different from other cultures
and societies, and to build an ideology on
such a tradition. But it fails to provide a theory of
historical explanation or a method of historical
analysis. </i>
Ironically for a movement anxious to remove all trace of colonialist perceptions, the vision the devotees of Hindutva espouse is one anchored in the simplistic periodisation of the nineteenth-century Orientalists: that of an ancient and glorious Hindu 'golden age', followed by a 'dark' period of crushingly oppressive Muslim rule, and a modern period of less oppressive British rule. They continue the old British colonial view of India as constituted by two essentially antagonistic religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, a view that, abetted by both the RSS and the Muslim League, led to partition. Of course one of these communities is seen as forever the outsiders.
The real history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history of the subcontinent is much more complex. As Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out, the relationship of the two has varied not only with ruler, but with the social groups being considered, with particular sects (the Sufis, in particular, became considerably Indianised), and the way in which Islam entered the area. In Kerala, for example, with its strong and ancient trade links with the Mediterranean, the Muslim community grew from Arab traders, and was primarily assimilationist, compared to the undoubted confrontations and military conquest in the north. Yet here, too, cooperation existed, both among the elites, and among the poor of both religions. The situation cannot adequately be described in terms of any simple polarisation between two monolithic religions. This was true even during the rule of the notoriously intolerant Aurangzeb. The historian K. N. Panikkar has remarked, 'Aurangzeb's chiefs and courtiers were more Hindus than Muslims. And the person who fought against Shivaji was Raja Jaisingh, a Hindu.'
The recent sensitivity over this period of Indian history is linked to the Sangh's highly effective campaign to mobilise Hindus trader the banner of Ram Janmabhoomi ('birthplace of the god Ram'). More than a decade after the Sangh incited mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built by Babur over, as they claim, a Hindu temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, the pressure to allow the building of a temple on the site continues. So far, the courts have not relented.
The way in which Hindutva has been able to exploit and promote the image of the god Ram is interesting in itself. <b>By effectively focusing on a single god, and transforming him into a warrior god, they have given the polytheistic Hinduism the sleekness and muscle of a monotheistic faith. India becomes the land of Ram. </b>
The historicisation of Ram, his presumed epiphany in historical, as opposed to mythical time, has been the mainstay of the Hindutva project. This brazen mixing of history and mythology to suit political ends runs throughout Sangh ideology. To the masses, the mythological elements are simply asserted as history. To the intellectuals, this unholy 'interpenetration' is presented with a suitably postmodern flourish: 'The fact is that there is often more history in myths and more myth in history.'
Hinduism is far from the monolithic belief system projected by Hindutva as enduring from time immemorial. With no founder, no single canonical text, and no ecclesiastical structure (through it has priests), its development has been distinct in pattern from that of Semitic religions. It is worth quoting Romila Thapar again:
<i> The evolution of Hinduism is not a linear progression
from a founder through an organisational
system, with seeks branching off. It is
rather the mosaic of distinct cubs, deities, sects,
and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing or distancing
of these to existing ones, the placement
drawing not only on belief and ideas but also on
the socio-economic reality. </i>
This brings us to the other historical period of high sensitivity to Hindutva: the nature of ancient India and the Hindutva assertion of an indigenous 'Aryan race'. The philologist William Jones identified the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, and first proposed that they all derived from a single language, Indo-European. What should have remained a linguistic category was altered to that of a race in the race-conscious late-nineteenth century. European scholars, including even Max Muller for a time, built up the idea of an 'Aryan race' that swept into India as invaders from the north-west, bringing their language with them, and establishing superiority over, and hermetic separation from, the indigenous 'Dravidian race' through the caste system.
Yet with the growth of archaeological evidence, and supporting evidence from linguistics, the <b>story that is emerging is not one of invasion but of gradual migration and settlement </b>of peoples speaking an Indo-European language, following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The subsequent growth of a caste system is also now regarded as having been a rather more complex process than previously thought.
In contrast to this careful and maturing view, the assertion of Hindutva is simple: the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were neither migrants nor invaders, but were indigenous to India. The ancient Harappan civilisation is regarded as part of a great Vedic Age, and the dates of the Vedic texts set so far back in time (up to 9000 BCE) as to confirm that India must have been the first centre of human civilisation (and even of human origins), with subsequent migration of Aryan peoples into Iran. Needless to say, during this glorious Vedic Age, India was a land of wisdom, peace, and knowledge; it was a time of the profoundest discoveries in mathematics and science, boasting a well-knit and harmonious society, with no oppression of women or of lower castes.
It would scarcely seem worth taking the effort to <b>repeat Hindutva's nonsensical claims, but for the fact that they have been widely and effectively propagated as Hindu history and culture by the saffron brigade</b>. This is the interpretation of the nation's history that is being perpetrated through the Sangh Parivar's wide network of sectarian schools and that has even infiltrated in part into the fabric of the country's national curriculum and school textbooks.
From the late-1990s, national education became a battleground, drawing in many distinguished historians, scientists, and other academics who refused to tolerate any move away from a secular education system, who have protested against the mingling of myth alongside history, and pseudoscience alongside science. India has too robust a secular intellectual community to take such measures without a fight. The dissenting academic voices, it should be noted, were those of postmodernists, and their attempts at loosening history's firm mooring in objective reality have caused untold damage.
The chief architect of the saffronising of academia and national education was the BJP Union Human Resource Development Minister, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. Following his appoint merit in 1998, Joshi, who has been associated with the RSS from 1944, spearheaded the takeover of academic institutions and committees by those sympathetic to Hindutva, the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) among them.
All almost immediate casualty was the 'Towards Freedom' project sponsored by the unreconstituted ICHR--a compilation of archival documents from the period leading up to Independence, under the General Editorship of the late distinguished historian Sarvepalli Gopal. Two volumes of this work have been withheld from publication. No reasons were given, but the sensitivity of the pre-Independence period for the militaristic RSS is well known.
In school education, a takeover of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) by Hindutva sympathisers was followed by the adoption, despite wide protests and court challenges, of a Hindutva-infused National Curriculum Framework. NCERT history textbooks by leading historians were purged of small but significant passages, including references to the eating of beef by Brahmins in ancient India, and to the lack of archaeological evidence for settlement in Ayodhya during the purported reign of Ram. New textbooks were produced which, according to the prestigious Indian History Congress, include errors, omissions, and misleading emphases that distort history.
These moves were widely reported in the media and aroused fierce controversy. Opposition party leaders refused to adopt the new texts in states in which they were in power. Despite government moves to manipulate research and education bodies, the Indian History Congress remained defiantly committed to the continuance of sounds historical study in India. Indeed, its 64th session, held in December 2003, was one of the biggest ever conducted by the body.
Such defence of reason and objectivity is inspiring, but the damage done to academia and education during the past decade should not be underestimated. <b>Nevertheless the new Human Resource Development Minister, Arjun Singh, has announced moves to restore autonomy to academic institutions and research bodies, and to bring back the original history textbooks. There is real hope that the trend of saffronisation will now be reversed. </b>
In the aftermath of the recent election, the forces of the Hindu right have blamed defeat not on the BJP leaders' efforts to promote Hindutva, but on their failure to do so more forcefully. With the saffron brigade still powerful and waiting in the wings, it is as well to remember that the consequences of perpetrating narrow perceptions of nation and history have been felt far beyond universities and schools. The ultimate cost of Hindutva's success must be measured in lives. Nearly 2,000 Muslims, including children and babies, were hacked and burned to death in Gujarat in the riots of 2002. <b>This is what happens when the Sangh's 'children of the soil' go on the rampage. It is a lesson not restricted to India alone. </b>
Latha Menon is a freelance writer and editor.
COPYRIGHT 2004 History Today Ltd.