The purpose of my essay is not to support Shankaramurthy. Neither is it to condemn historical Muslim personalities. All Muslims in India are our brot… - S. L. Bhyrappa

When the Leftists began to occupy the Government’s Education department, the History department, and the departments of history, sociology and literature, the media adopted a studied ignorance. When Murli Manohar Joshi, the NDA’s HRD Minister began to introduce changes that emphasized Indianness in our education, these Leftists raised a shrill cry. His changes included things like teaching the contribution of ancient India to science, and beginning classes with the Saraswati Vandana. The media projected this as a major calamity. Congress party workers and social-equality champions took out rallies and raised slogans predicting doomsday for India. Now, when the UPA Government’s Arjun Singh has embarked on a project of severely re-Marxifying education, none of these worthies have raised a word of protest. The media, especially the English media, has been highly supportive of this. The Congress party, whose only aim is to remain in power, has completely lost even the semblance of intellectualism. It remains in blissful slumber content and secure in the knowledge that it can borrow intellectualism from the Left if and when required. However, it has followed the policy of economic liberalization because of its realization that its past experiment with socialism brought India to the brink of bankruptcy. However, the Communists who have accepted this have been unable to break away from Marxism from which they derive their very identity.

Western historians who began to write India’s history by following the European historical method have paved us a good path. But their scholarship was fuelled by an ulterior motive. They had already developed the following narrative: Indian culture is the Vedic culture. The creators of this culture were Aryans, who came into India from abroad. They destroyed the native culture and established themselves here. Thus, everybody who came thereafter were alien invaders. At one stage the Muslims came. Now, the British have come. Therefore, if somebody argued that the British weren’t native to India, they had a readymade response: neither are you. This was institutionalized in universities, and the media. English-educated young men and women carried this perception, too. This narrative also informed that the Rg Veda, held sacred by the Aryans was composed by them when they were outside India. This narrative severed the spiritual bond that connected Indians with India. The result was that over hundred years, Englisheducated Indians suffered a sense of alienation. This narrative also germinated and escalated the discord among some Indians who saw themselves as the native Dravidians whom the invading Aryans subjugated. Those who understand human nature well know that it is easy to beget enmity and that when it is proved that the enmity is based on false reasons, it is still difficult to let go of ill-feeling.

The National Book Trust put out a proposal to translate these 11 volumes into all Indian languages. The proposal was forwarded to the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) because it pertained to history. The ICHR formed a Committee to examine the proposal. The Committee was headed by S.Gopal and included Tapan Roy Choudhury, Satish Chandra and Romila Thapar. By then, the ICHR was completely under the control of Marxists. Expectedly, they recommended that the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan volumes were unsuitable for translation into Indian languages and that the proposal should not be carried forward. And it didn’t stop at just that. It suggested an alternative works that had potential for such a translation. These alternative works were authored by the selfsame Committee members and their other Marxist comrades. Five books authored by the Chairman of ICHR, R. S.Sharma, three books by S. Gopal (son of the renowned scholar and philosopher, S.Radhakrishnan), three by Romila Thapar, two by Bipan Chandra, two by Irfan Habib, two by his father Mohammad Habib, one by Satish Chandra, works of the Communist Party of India’s leading light, E.M.S Namboodiripad, and one book by Rajni Palme Dutt, who was guiding and controlling the Indian Communists in the 1940s. Not a single book by Lokamanya Tilak, Jadunath Sarkar or R.C. Majumdar! (In this connection, it is worth reading Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, ASA 1998. Arun Shourie is hated by different groups for different reasons. A defining characteristic of Arun Shourie’s writing is the fact that it delves into the deepest roots of the issue it discusses. Eminent Historians provides the complete list of the remuneration that each person took for the aforementioned translation project.)