[sacw] SACW #2 | 10 Feb. 02 [ Jang Parivar & India]

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - Dispatch #2 | 10 February 2002

------------------------------------------

#1. India: Nationalism gone berserk (Praful Bidwai)
#2. India: Peaceful Democratic Fantasy (Dilip D'Souza)
#3. The RSS runs a network of schools of hate (Anjali Mody)
#4. India: Organisation fighting superstitions faces harassment from 
Gujarat Chief Minister

________________________

#1.

February 15, 2002

Frontline Column: Beyond the Obvious

Praful Bidwai

Nationalism gone berserk

The growing hubris-driven, illiberal, intolerant, nationalism in 
India falsifies and glorifies the country's "Hindu" past. It is 
viscerally hostile to Pakistan, but servile to the United States.

****
Have we reached such a point of moral degeneration and 
self-brutalisation that plotting to assassinate Pakistan's leaders 
becomes the ultimate test of "patriotism" for our youth? A terrible 
story from Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh, not far from Gwalior, suggests 
that this may be actually happening. This is the story of two boys, 
Pinku (10) and Rinku (17), who wanted to become the "heroes of the 
nation" by avenging the December 13 attack on Parliament House--by 
assassinating Pervez Musharraf, no less.

Brought up on a daily diet of Bollywood-style "patriotism", and 
hero-worship of the Knights in Shining Armour who take on the mighty 
with their macho strength, Pinku and Rinku decided that India must 
wage war on Pakistan, or else they would become good "patriotic" 
terrorists, buy arms, smuggle themselves into Pakistan, and go and 
kill Musharraf.

On January 11, they kidnapped Shanu, the eight-year-old son of a 
businessman, for ransom, with which to procure the weapons for the 
Great and Holy Deed of killing Musharraf the Monster. Driven as they 
were by the role-models offered in films like Gadar and Indian, and 
Fiza and Mission Kashmir, they hatched a plot to hold the boy, Shanu, 
hostage and collect the money they needed to execute their plan.

But once they abducted Shanu, they realised they couldn't really hide 
him anywhere. Nor could they invent credible alibis, nor even ways of 
collecting the ransom. They panicked and strangled him to death with 
a shoelace. According to The Telegraph (Jan 21), the boys have 
confessed to their crime, but the district authorities believe that 
their motivation was indeed "patriotic".

It is tempting to discount this gory incident as a mere aberration, a 
rare case of "juvenile delinquency" coupled with "misguided 
patriotism", as exposure to "too much Bollywood", and so on. But it 
warrants serious, sober, reflection on the kind of values we are 
imparting to a whole generation of young people--through textbooks, 
through extremely competitive merit-ranking at school, through cinema 
and television, through accepted but aggressive patterns of behaviour 
in the street, and more generally, through our general social and 
political discourse.

These values have long glorified maleness, raw power, violence, 
aggression and war, and "normalised" or routinised cruelty. For 
years, India's "popular" cinema and television have shamelessly 
promoted negative hate-driven images of heroes as well as vamps and 
villains. This phenomenon has recently got even more perverse as the 
hero and the villain have merged, and the vamp has become the 
quintessential bride-dancer whom wedding parties emulate, especially 
in the north. The cynical depiction of violence and aggressive 
behaviour has kept pace with sex and sleaze in the mass media.

Take education. Many of our schools, cast in the post-colonial 
"nation-building" tradition, valorise military-style discipline and a 
stressfully competitive view of "achievement" and excellence. The 
typical child grows up believing that hubris and pride in India's 
"inherent" greatness and moral-cultural superiority is a "normal" 
characteristic of the good citizen. The tone and tenor of school and 
college debates has become increasingly raucous under the influence 
of the same kind of aggressive nationalism.

This nationalism is self-aggrandising. It pits itself against reason, 
logic and truth. It constructs indefinitely continuous communities 
(e.g. "Hindus", from the Vedic period, followed by the rise of 
Buddhism, through the Brahminical-caste consolidation phase, and the 
Bhakti movement, to the late medieval period), where none existed. 
This nationalism validates aggressive and militarist notions of power 
relations as part of "human nature". Thus, India is "naturally" 
great. It has always been. Millions of Indians are being drilled and 
coached into believing 'Mera Bharat Mahan'!

Human resources development minister Murli Manohar Joshi and his 
hatchet-men in the National Council for Educational Research and 
Training, and numerous other institutions, have added a particularly 
toxic ingredient to this already foul cocktail of values and 
prejudices by saffronising education and rewriting history. This 
enterprise, a veritable cultural counter-revolution in itself, has 
been subjected to so much incisive criticism that it is unnecessary 
to recall the factual inaccuracies, the lies and half-truths, the 
indelible ethnic-religious prejudices, and the sophistry and 
irrationality that suffuse it. (See this Column Mr Jacob: Will send 
the dates later-- -- --)

The larger, central, overwhelming, purpose of Joshi and Co's project 
is to "prove" that India is the greatest civilisation and culture in 
world history, that virtually everything valuable in the "ancient" 
world was derived from India. This "ancient" periodisation can be 
arbitrarily stretched to the 10th or even the 13th century, as in the 
case of the Konark or Lingaraja temples of Orissa or the Nataraja 
temple of Chidambaram. Joshi claims that it is now "proved" that the 
river Saraswati actually existed. The other day, he proudly announced 
the discovery of a 7,500 year-old "civilisation" in the Gulf of 
Cambay--a strange thing for a minister to do in the absence of an 
academic paper, and when the "finds" there are still under 
interpretation and in need of corroboration.

The concept of nationalism involved here is ethnic-religious and 
cultural. It conceives of India as a quintessentially traditional 
society. It cannot accommodate modernist notions of universal values, 
political identity or citizenship. It demands total, blind, loyalty 
to the woolly concept of an "Eternal India", which is further 
mystified and deified as "Bharat Mata".

On this view, respect, or rather reverence, for the nation is based 
on unquestioning devotion to the abstract notion of India's 
"inherent" greatness and its unique superiority, its spectacular, 
unmatched achievements in all fields. These are grossly exaggerated 
and mystified. (For instance, RSS sararsanghachalak Sudarshan in his 
last Vijayadashami address claimed that an Indian actually built and 
flown an airplane in Baroda, years before the Wright Brothers did--a 
fabricated and ludicrous assertion!)

In this scheme, pride is one's nation is premised upon disdain for, 
or hatred of, other nations or identities. Islam and Muslims have 
functioned as the Other longest of all within this ethnic-nationalist 
demonology. Everything that is "Eastern", but other than Indian, is 
trivialised, minimised, parodied or reviled. This could be Persian or 
Chinese, or from Sumer or Sri Lankan. These cultures are considered 
at best derivative (and unimportant) in relation to India. The 
"true", essential, authentic, subject of the Nation is one particular 
community. "Others" can be accommodated on its fringes. But that's 
because 'We' are tolerant, not because India is plural.

In the contemporary context, this hatred of the Other gets focused 
upon Pakistan, which is demonised as a country, society, state and 
regime which is inherently inimical to India and with which peaceful 
co-existence is virtually impossible. Pakistan is credited with 
virtually mystical powers to subvert and destabilise India and create 
havoc. As in the classical Savarkar formulation, Pakistan is the 
external manifestation of the eternal "internal" threat embodied by 
Muslims--just as Indian Muslims represent Pakistan's Fifth Column.

India's sheer size allows the votaries of this nationalism to look at 
our other neighbours (barring China) as dwarfs, midgets and 
non-entities compared to the Indian giant. India is unique, India is 
exceptional, India is unmatched, India is eternal.

This is precisely the kind of nationalism that Rabindranath Tagore 
described as a "great menace". As he put it: "It is the particular 
thing which for years has been at the bottom of India's troubles".

This toxic, aggressive, exclusive, competitive, belligerent 
nationalism is the very opposite of a relaxed, self-confident, 
inclusive view of the nation and the world. It binds and encloses. It 
does not liberate. In fact, it lacks a progressive character. It is 
not anti-imperialist. At least no longer. Not only does it not 
question the skewed distribution of power in the world. It accepts 
the dominant-dominated duality as the "natural" order, but wants 
India to be the cock of the walk.

This nationalism kowtows to the powerful, the dominant, the 
hegemonic. In its present form, it is servile to "the West", in 
particular, to the United States, just as it is arrogant towards "the 
East" (minus India, of course, which being Aryan, "really" belongs to 
the West). Nothing illustrates this better than the Indian official 
reception to Pervez Musharraf's landmark address of January 12, and 
the growing intimacy between the Vajpayee government and Bush, now 
leading to dangerous liaisons in intelligence-sharing and even 
ground-level operations.

Musharraf in his speech set out to do something exceptionally bold: 
undermine a major part of the foundation of his own state (viz 
extremist political Islam). This is the sharpest and most 
comprehensive criticism of ethnic-religious fundamentalism voiced by 
the head of any South Asian state in the past half-century. Musharraf 
minced no words in laying out Pakistan's pathology, marked by its mix 
of Islam and politics, the military and the mullahs, the Taliban and 
terrorism. He posed the choice for Pakistan clearly: between a 
"theocratic state" and a modern, moderate, liberal, tolerant society.

Musharraf also told jehadi militants not to mess around with other 
countries, whatever the offence to Islam there. Implicit here is the 
view that Pakistan has paid dearly by pandering to pan-Islamic ideas. 
Musharraf has since cracked down on jehadi militants, arresting 2,500 
of them. He may have started cutting the umbilical cord between the 
Pakistani state and political Islam, and proceeded to dismantle 
communal electorates.

Musharraf has launched only "half a revolution". His reform agenda 
lacks a "perspective from below", one that arises from the struggles 
of the working people. It has no economic content worth the name. 
Musharraf's chosen agency for his reform "from above" is none other 
than the Pakistani state, a thoroughly corrupt, compromised and 
unreliable entity. He may not succeed. Formidable forces are arrayed 
against him.

To point this out is one thing. To term his address an exercise in 
"deception" or "doublespeak" is quite another. This approach 
ridicules the very possibility of reform in Pakistan by declaring it 
irredeemable. Indian leaders have at best been grudging and 
mean-spirited in acknowledging that Musharraf has done something 
remarkable. Thus, L.K. Advani called the address "path-breaking", but 
only for its domestic agenda. Vajpayee only saw some "positive 
elements" in it.

This leaves one wondering if this parsimonious response has something 
to do with the BJP's general fear of secularisation and 
modernisation---contrasted to its own agenda of turning India into a 
morass of obscurantism, superstition and communal prejudice.

Contrast this with the Vajpayee government's kowtowing to the US. 
Never before has any Indian government so pusillanimously colluded 
with hegemonic US moves in this region or actively invited American 
interference in its internal affairs. Vajpayee & Co not only 
uncritically supported the US "war on terrorism" with all its 
excesses and its devious manipulation of the United Nations. They did 
not let out even a squeak of protest or concern at the US' current 
construction of four military bases in Pakistan.

It allowed an FBI agent to visit Kolkata after the recent "terrorist" 
attack just as it welcomed a whole stream of FBI, Defence 
Intelligence Agency, "counter-terrorism" and other officials. 
According to The Telegraph (Jan 21 & 22), it is about to launch joint 
operations with US agencies to stop possible terrorist infiltration 
and activities in Jammu and Kashmir. The Indo-US Joint Working Group, 
which met in New Delhi in the third week of January, has announced a 
broad range of "cooperative" activities including "political, 
diplomatic, military, intelligence and financial measures".

India has "welcomed" a US "pilot project" involving equipment and 
technology to strengthen "border management and surveillance". The 
two sides reportedly also discussed "forensic cooperation" and added 
aviation security to their agenda, and placed "special stress" on 
ways to beef up intelligence and investigative cooperation, including 
the possibility of access to each other's database on terrorists.

This goes far beyond "intelligence sharing", even "cooperative 
monitoring" through agencies like the Sandia National Laboratories of 
New Mexico, a well-known US weapons design and production facility. 
On the cards are "joint operations" on the ground, for which the way 
may have been paved by the visit of DIA chief Admiral Thomas Wilson 
to the Kashmir Valley, including "sensitive" border areas.

This spells serious interference in India's affairs and erosion of 
our sovereignty, with potentially dangerous consequences. The public 
stands warned.--end---

______

#2.

Rediff.com
February 8, 2002
http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/feb/08dilip.htm

Dilip D'Souza

Peaceful Democratic Fantasy

Oh, the fantasies we weave. Rajeev Srinivasan informs us about recent 
happenings at the American Museum of Natural History, whose showings 
-- this weekend -- of Anand Patwardhan's films have been cancelled. 
Why? Well, says Rajeev, they were "muckraking and shrill films", and 
of course Patwardhan is an "extreme leftist who portrays Hinduism as 
evil". Others who felt similarly "mounted a signature campaign" to 
prevent the films being shown. And Rajeev is "glad to say that once 
again peaceful democratic dissent seems to have had its effect, and 
the offending films have been withdrawn."

There is, as Rajeev is no doubt aware, a counter campaign to have 
those films shown. So is that also "peaceful democratic dissent"?

But never mind academic questions. We were discussing fantasies in 
which such words as "evil", "extreme", "leftist" and so forth are 
important ingredients. I suspect neither Rajeev nor the dudes who 
"mounted a signature campaign" against the films have seen any of 
Patwardhan's work. I would dearly love to be proved wrong, to know 
that this is informed dissent as well.

Now I have seen one of the two that were scheduled at the AMNH -- Ram 
ke Naam or In the Name of God -- and it is hard to believe that 
anyone who sees it would come away thinking "Hinduism is evil". 
("Muckraking and shrill" are opinions. Rajeev is welcome to have 
those. Mine are different). Since Rajeev makes such a claim, I can 
only conclude he has not seen Patwardhan's films. But if you do see 
Ram ke Naam, you will come away with an appreciation for the way the 
men who propound what they call Hindutva go about their propounding.

Yes, what they call Hindutva is what Patwardhan has centred some of 
his films on. He follows Hindutva's people, interviews them, shows 
some of them addressing meetings, things like that. His films let 
them speak for themselves; and because they do, they are far more 
telling than any number of learned commentaries would be. And the 
tale these people tell isn't pretty.

For example, one scene in Father, Son and Holy War, a mid-'90s 
Patwardhan film, sticks in my mind. Manohar Joshi of the Shiv Sena 
and a Hindu religious leader are addressing an election meeting. They 
urge the Hindu women in the audience to produce eight children -- 
eight children! -- each to combat what they would have them, and us, 
believe is the dangerously rising count of Muslims in the country. 
This task of producing streams of kids is, Joshi would have those 
women believe, their very duty as women, Hindus and Indians.

Several questions come to mind. One, when Hindus outnumber Muslims by 
more than 7 to 1 in India, when the birthrates indicate that it will 
be hundreds of years before that turns around, if it ever does, what 
must we call it when a man waves the bogey of an impending Muslim 
flood? The word "lie" seems appropriate.

Two, in a country that struggles to feed and cope with its existing 
population, that has been working for years to reduce its growth rate 
to a point that it does not negate other advances, that urges couples 
to limit themselves to one or two children (that appeal down from two 
or three only a few years ago) -- in such a country, what must we 
call it when a major political figure urges women to have eight kids? 
The word "irresponsible" seems appropriate.

Three, how should such lies and irresponsibility be rewarded? I would 
have thought, at least a public reprimand. But Joshi? Nothing like 
that. He became Maharashtra's chief minister for four years and is 
now the country's minister for heavy industry. That's what 
irresponsibility brings when you claim to be a champion of Hindutva.

Four, who should we condemn here? The man who makes this exhortation 
at a public meeting, uses it to find votes? Or the man who films him 
doing so? Or let's put this another way. Who despoils an ancient, 
wise faith? The man who, in the name of that faith, tells an absurd 
and irresponsible lie? Or the man who films him doing so?

Easy answer to question #4, at least for Rajeev and fellow 
campaigners: Anand Patwardhan. The film-maker.

Be sure, by no means are Patwardhan's films the second coming of Snow 
White and 101 Dalmatians. He makes films that are meant to provoke, 
to set off debate and thought. That they certainly do, given the way 
Rajeev and his signing friends have reacted to the planned AMNH 
screenings; given also the way they have been received wherever 
Patwardhan has shown them, the battles he has fought to have them 
broadcast.

But think for a minute. Why did the signature men not say, simply: 
"We don't agree with these films. There is another side to Hindutva 
that we would like discussed as well." That would have been the 
truth, because what they find offensive is Patwardhan's depiction of 
a Hindutva they support -- which is fair enough; after all, nobody is 
happy to have their pet likes shown up. Unfortunately, saying that 
would also have been far less effective than what Rajeev did say. 
Yes, far more effective to claim that Patwardhan portrays an entire 
faith, one followed by every sixth human, as "evil".

Think how angry Rajeev has managed to make his readers with that 
claim: far more than if he had said, simply again, that the film 
criticizes what we are told is Hindutva. (Which it does, 
unashamedly.) That -- stimulating the anger -- is the reason to say 
Patwardhan paints Hinduism as "evil".

And this matter of peaceful democratic dissent. Nothing wrong with 
that, of course. If people are unhappy about the screenings, they 
have every right to start a protest campaign. Only, what happened to 
the AMNH was just a step or two removed from being peaceful and 
democratic.

When the originator of the counter campaign sent his collected 
signatures in to the AMNH on January 30, the curator of the exhibit 
wrote back: "Unfortunately, the films were cancelled owing to threats 
of violence." Some people I know in the States called the museum to 
find out more. They learned that the films had been "postponed" 
(which is how the AMNH Web site now describes them) until "better 
security" could be arranged. One person who called was "told by the 
museum that there had been threatening calls ... from unidentified 
callers and the museum did not want to jeopardize the safety of its 
visitors".

Hmm. So some of the "peaceful democratic dissenters" were not being 
quite so peaceful and democratic after all. Quite apart from being 
too lily-livered to use their names as they made their threats over 
the phone. And that, too, in the guise of protecting Hinduism.

Ah, the fantasies.

So let's ask again, shall we? Who despoils an ancient, wise religion? 
The man who made these films? Or these others who, in the name of 
that very religion, anonymously threaten American museum officials 
with violence?

And what's been quite ignored in all this? The two films that were to 
be screened. The AMNH has these blurbs about them:

1. We Are Not Your Monkeys: The song "We Are Not Your Monkeys", 
composed by Daya Pawar and sung by Sambhaji Bhagat, offers the dalit 
(lower caste) perspective on the Ramayana epic.

Now Daya Pawar was one of Maharashtra's most revered poets, an 
eloquent man mourned widely when he died suddenly a few years ago. To 
pretend voices like his don't exist, or to prevent others from 
hearing them, is ostrich Hinduism: itself a slap in the face of the 
traditions of Hinduism.
2. In the Name of God: This film presents an incisive account of 
the movement by Hindu nationalists to rally ordinary citizens around 
the purported birth site of the Hindu god Rama in the north Indian 
city of Ayodhya. It details the campaign waged in the late 1980s and 
early 1990s by the militant Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu 
Organization) to destroy the 16th century Babri Mosque and build a 
temple to Rama. Presenting a range of views, the film highlights how 
Hindu nationalism and militancy is primarily an upper-caste and 
middle-class phenomenon.

True: even if I had not seen the film already, this blurb gives the 
impression that it is critical of the agitation to demolish the Babri 
Masjid. But that's just the point: to move from that to a claim that 
it pronounces Hinduism "evil" is a leap of considerable, and 
perverse, agility.

Finally, Hindutva's heroes lose no opportunity to tell us that the 
demolition of that 16th century mosque was actually a great 
redemption of honour. Which doesn't quite square with shutting down a 
film that depicts how they went about that redemption. Just as it 
didn't quite square with the way they attacked several journalists in 
Ayodhya on that very day -- December 6, 1992 -- of redemption.

Unless they are secretly ashamed of that redemption. Fantasies everywhere.

_____

#3.

The Hindu
Sunday, Feb 10, 2002

Manufacturing believers

The RSS runs a network of schools country wide Anjali Mody looks at 
what is taught there

ON A cold January morning, the Union HRD Minister, Murli Manohar 
Joshi, told a captive audience of restive high school students from 
12 institutions run by Vidya Bharati (the RSS' education wing) about 
the changes his Government had made to school syllabuses and 
textbooks. Pradeep (not his real name), a class 11 student from GLT 
Saraswati Shishu Mandir, in South Delhi who was there, summarised 
what he understood of the Minister's message: "He told us that 
although some people say that Lord Ramachandra never existed, that he 
did... He produced him in front of us... No... no... that's only a 
joke... he said that there is this river which people say never 
really existed, but he has scientifically proven that it did exist, 
that Lord Ramachandra was born on its banks... so he also existed."

The strange logic of this deduction would not have bothered the 
Minister. Nor, perhaps, Pradeep's teachers. For they, like him and 
his classmates, are drilled in `sanskriti gyan' or `cultural 
knowledge' based on a series of workbooks devised by Vidya Bharati. 
Last year, the `history' section of Pradeep's Sanskriti Gyan 
Pareeksha workbook would have told him: "In Faizabad district of 
Uttar Pradesh where present day Ayodhya stands, there on the banks of 
the Sarayu river was ancient Ayodhya, capital of Suryavanshi 
Kshatriya kings. Manu and Maharani Shatroopa were reborn in Ayodhya 
as Raja Dasharatha and Kaushalya, and in their home sakshaat Narayana 
took incarnation (as Lord Ram). According to astrologers and the 
puranas the time of Shri Ram is believed to be around 8,86,000 years 
ago."

This lesson in `history' is part of the `national education' that 
Vidya Bharati's 19,741 schools around the country impart to their 
24,00,000 students. Vidya Bharati is, says its head Dinanath Batra, 
one of the "organisations through which the Sangh's vichardhara or 
way of thinking is propagated". Its aim is to provide an education 
which will turn out "self-less citizens... suffused with the spirit 
of Hindutva".

The first Vidya Bharati school was set up in 1952. Since then growth 
has been exponential. In just five years from 1998, the number went 
up from 13,000 to 19,741. These are by and large fee paying schools, 
started with private donations. Mr. Batra says Vidya Bharati has 
neither received, nor sought, financial support from the Government 
to run its schools. At Vidya Bharati's schools across the country 
there is much talk of `sanskara'. This broadly includes prayers in 
Sanskrit, the Saraswati Vandana, teachers being called `acharya' and 
students who touch their feet. Respect for parents established by 
touching their feet. Some schools run tulsi planting campaigns as 
part of `environmental awareness'. Mr. Batra believes that it is the 
`atmosphere' of a school that makes the `difference'. With 
uncharacteristic flourish he declares: "walls should speak, stones 
should sing". The walls of Vidya Bharati's schools do speak, to those 
willing to listen. They are lined with calendar art images of 
`mahapurush' - RSS gurus, M.S. Golwalkar and Baliram Hedgewar, 
Shankaracharya, Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda, Shivaji, Rana 
Pratap, Subhash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad, sometimes Sardar 
Patel, but not Mahtama Gandhi.

A curious panoply of greats given that the majority of schools run by 
Vidya Bharati - variously called Saraswati Mandirs, Gita Niketans, 
Vivekananda Vidyalayas across the country - are affiliated either to 
the CBSE or the local state education boards, which still accept 
Mahatma Gandhi's pre-eminence in the history of the nation. Mr. Batra 
dismisses this observations saying: "We publish many pictures 
including a very beautiful one of Gandhi."

Pictures apart, how do those who run Vidya Bharati schools balance 
their version of the truth with the facts and figures in the 
prescribed syllabuses and textbooks? Sitting in front of a life size 
portrait of Golwalkar, R.P. Vishvendu, Principal of the Shri Sanatan 
Dharma Saraswati Bal Mandir, in New Delhi's Punjabi Bagh 
neighbourhood, admits it is a tricky business: "When you are teaching 
a child to distinguish between good and bad... you tell them Shivaji 
was good... then how do you tell them that Auranzeb was also good... 
that there was a battle between two good people?... similarly with 
Subhash Chandra Bose... and Gandhi..." He adds, "if you pour water 
over concrete it simply flows off... But if you keep dripping water 
at the same spot then after sometime there will be a dent even in 
concrete... that is how we work..."

Clearly, Mr. Vishvendu hopes that the drip-drip of a compulsory 
regime of Sanskriti Gyan Pareeksha (the workbooks to which he 
contributes) from classes 4 to 12, with their own version of history, 
will do the trick. Especially since two-thirds of the over 70,000 
teachers in Vidya Bharati's schools have been `qualified' to teach 
the truth according to these books through a three-stage exam 
specially designed for them.

Sandeepji, the young clear-eyed history teacher at the Mata Ramrakhi 
Sanatan Dharma Saraswati Bal Mandir(MRSD), just north of Delhi 
University, whose students are drawn from the post-Partition 
resettlement colonies of north and west Delhi, has a far more 
sophisticated method: "I present the truth as written in the 
textbooks. The textbook for instance says `In the end the Congress 
accepted the partition of India'. I tell my students to go home and 
talk to their grandparents who experienced Partition about whether 
there was any need to accept Partition, I then have a discussion in 
the classroom. And through the stories of their families and friends 
they understand that although Congress accepted partition it was not 
necessary."

Teachers at Vidya Bharati schools are happy to share their teaching 
techniques. Mrs. Kulsreshta, the highly regarded English teacher at 
the Punjabi Bagh Shishu Mandir, says that "in every lesson you can 
draw out the impact of Indian culture... from the Gita. I point out 
examples of this... I tell my students that even in this foreign 
author's writing you can see the influence of the Gita."

Veena Khanna, the Hindi teacher at MRSD, says, "It is so hard to 
remove the wrong ideas from their minds... to teach them that it was 
not the Muslims who built the Qutub Minar, that Muslims peeled off 
the sculptures of gods and covered them with Arabic script... 
Prithviraj Chauhan's sister used to look at Yamuna maiya from the top 
of the minar." With great feeling, and no sense of irony she 
pronounced, "If you repeat a lie ten times it becomes the truth. It 
is even happening today". At least in Model Town the lessons have had 
their impact. In sanskritised Hindi students of class 9 and 10 at 
MRSD deliver well-rehearsed lines. Manish: "They said Hindus were cow 
eaters. This is wrong." Gaurav: "They said Aryans came from outside. 
This must be changed." Neha: "They have called Guru Gobind Singh a 
looter, when he gave his life for the nation."

"You mean Guru Tegh Bahadur, don't you," corrects Om Prakash, the 
principal who runs his school of 300-odd students from a building 
that also houses the local sanatan dharma temple. A soft-spoken man, 
he is very open about his long connection with the RSS. It was as a 
child at an RSS shakha in the 1950s that he learnt of the "wrongs" 
being perpetrated by modern school education. Before he joined the 
Vidya Bharati school network he was an RSS pracharak. Even today he 
keeps his eyes open for bright students whom he can point out to the 
local shakha as "worth working on".

A more thorough-going venture of "propagating the RSS vichardhara 
through education" is Sewa Dham Vidya Mandir.

A free residential school run under the guidance of Vidya Bharati by 
another RSS-affiliated NGO, Sewa Bharati, funded primarily by 
donations from the Sangh's NRI supporters. Located on the Delhi-Uttar 
Pradesh border the school, with 285 students from 21 States, mostly 
from Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste backgrounds, has results 
that many fee paying schools would envy.

The CBSE schools football trophy sits proudly among other sporting 
awards in the Principal, O.P. Sharma's office. School exam results 
displayed on the notice board declare over 50 per cent first classes, 
and only a tiny number of thirds.

Mr. Sharma hopes that the school will produce future administrators, 
who will "do work to improve their districts having learnt their 
sanskars here". The school regime is a far more rigorous and 
unequivocal induction into the Sangh's way of life than the Vidya 
Bharati schools in cities. Shakha attendance, complete with exercise 
and intellectual `discussion', is built into the school's tough 
regimen that begins at 4.30 in the morning and ends at 10 p.m., with 
television viewing permitted only on Sunday.

Mr. Sharma says the school has an open atmosphere and students can 
`think and speak freely' on any subject. They have a 10,000-book 
library, carefully selected to include books that "speak of gauravata 
ki batein not gulami ki batein". He says they may have to be taught, 
because of the existing textbooks, that the Taj Mahal was a mausoleum 
built by Shah Jahan, but there are enough books in the library, 
including many by P.N. Oak, which will tell them that it was not a 
mausoleum but a Hindu temple.

Mr. Sharma, whose academic discipline is economics, illustrates the 
focus of teaching in his school. He says, "for example economics 
books tell us that India is a poor country... we will not teach this. 
We will teach children that India is a very rich country... it has 
had a green revolution... it has the best record in milk 
production... the best cows in Denmark have gone from India."

Sewa Dham has its particular problems. It is not so simple, as it is 
at an average Vidya Bharati school, to assume that the students will 
find the fact that "Hindus ate beef" objectionable. Many of their 
students come from communities that do eat beef. Mr. Sharma who is 
something of a cow protection missionary and has a cow and calf 
tethered near his rooms on the school campus says, "Christians 
working in areas like Arunachal Pradesh have said beef is the most 
nutritious... we have to convince these children otherwise... we tell 
them that the cow is our mother... that gods reside inside her... 
that breeze from the direction in which a cow turns her head is 
pure... that there is no other treatment for cancer but go-mooth (cow 
urine)."

Outside the formal school system, the Sangh's affiliates are also 
involved in a variety of `educational activity'. Vidya Bharati, 
according to Mr. Batra, is to set up `Sanskar Kendras' in poor 
neighbourhoods and slums. Beyond city slums, he says, they are 
focussing on "sensitive areas" - the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir, 
Bastar, the Bihar-Nepal border, with "50 centres for primitive 
tribes".

Mr. Batra explains the motivation: "Take the Northeast, you can hear 
the voice of disintegration... there are a lot of Bangladeshi 
immigrants. These are areas in which Christian missionaries are very 
active."

The Bihar-Nepal border, border areas with Pakistan? "They are full of 
madrassas funded from abroad... Muslims must be taught that they are 
born in this country, nursed by this country and must live for the 
country." Bastar? "It has naxalwadis and vanvasis."

`Vanvasi' is the Sangh's catch-all term for adivasis, devised to fit 
its thesis that far from being the original inhabitants of the 
subcontinent forced to the margins by later arrivals from central 
Asia, they are lost tribes of Hindus waiting to be reawakened.

Another Sangh affiliate, Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, is already 
involved in running schools in adivasi areas with the hope that they 
will be "awakened to their Hindu heritage". The foundation runs some 
7,000 one-teacher schools in "remote areas where Government schools 
do not exist or are not being run properly".

The three-hours-a-day school is designed to deliver reading and 
numeracy skills, `general knowledge' no different from the material 
in Vidya Bharati's Sanskriti Gyan workbooks, `sanskara' - like 
Sanskrit prayers, touching the feet of parents - exercise and 
personal health and hygiene.

Seema Ajgaonkar, co-coordinator of the foundations Expert Committee, 
speaks with a missionary spirit about the activities of the school 
which "unite the village youth", give them a chance to throw off the 
"dependence created by Government" and "awaken in them the knowledge 
that they are not adivasis but vanvasi Hindus".

_____

#4.

Indian Express
Sunday, February 10, 2002

Modi under court scanner

EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE
RAJKOT, FEBRUARY 9: A local court has asked the police to investigate 
harassment allegations levelled against Gujarat Chief Minister 
Narendra Modi, some police officers and BJP leaders, by the leader of 
an organisation that claims to be fighting superstitions.

Besides the Chief Minister, Jayant Pandya, regional chairman of the 
Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha (BJVJ), has named 21 in his complaint. They 
include Deputy Commissioner of Police A.K. Sharma, BJP councillors 
Dhansukh Bhanderi and Lalubhai Parekh, Jagdishbhai of Swaminarayan 
Gurukul at Mavdi, and Vrujesh Kumar of Madan Mohan Haveli.

Recently, Pandya was arrested twice after two religious groups, the 
Vaishnav and the Swaminarayan, lodged blackmail charges against him. 
He was later released on bail.

In his complaint against Modi and others, Pandya says he has been 
facing trouble since he started ''exposing fraud and criminal 
activities of certain religious organisations''. He claims Modi, in 
particular, was unhappy with him as he had launched a campaign 
against the government-sponsored Bhoomi Poojan that began on January 
26, the quake's anniversary.

Pandya says he had sent letters to the CM and officials, expressing 
surprise that the government was encouraging superstitious beliefs 
when it should be encouraging scientific temperament.

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