The currently sensational news in Karnataka politics happens to be centered on Education Minister Shankaramurthy who said that Tipu Sultan was an opp… - S. L. Bhyrappa

Sultan Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’s exploits in slave-taking was infamous even in faraway lands. Shihabuddin Ahamad Abbas notes the Sultan’s enthusiasm in this regard as follows: “the Sultan’s ardour in waging war against Kashmir was unabated. The number of prisoners that he took was so staggering that everyday, thousands of slaves were sold at abysmal prices (Masalik-ulabisar fi Mumalik-ul-amsar. Translated in E.D. 111 Pg 580, S.A.A Rizvi, India in Tughlaq’s Time). And it was not just in war. Tughlaq had a fancy for buying and collecting a huge number of foreign and Indian slaves. In every war or an expedition to put down rebels, the number of Kafir female-slaves that the Sultan rounded up was so huge that, as Ibn Battuta writes, “on occasion, a large number of female prisoners were rounded up in Delhi. The Nazir sent me ten of them. Of them, I returned one to the person who brought them to me. But he was not satisfied. My companion took three small girls. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them (Ibn Batutta, ibid).

Truth for the Communists is the position the Party takes. This holds true for values like art and ethics. We don’t need to explain this to people who have read books published by Communist Russia on these topics and sold at dirt cheap prices.

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.)