Gandhi’s Key Role in Securing Independence Erased from Indian Textbooks
WHILE REWRITTEN INDIAN SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS STATE HINDU NATIONALISTS WERE KEY TO INDIA’S INDEPENDENCE, NEW TEMPLES DEIFY MAHATMA GANDHI’S KILLER
This article, first published September 9, 2022, is being re-published since Global Indian Times has also begun posting on Substack.
https://www.globalindiantimes.com/globalindiantimes/2022/9/9/india-mahatma-gandhi
September 9, 2022
The defining moment in modern Indian history was the country’s independence from British rule on August 15, 1947, following a largely peaceful, nation-wide struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi. This history of Gandhi’s key role was taught in school textbooks in India up until 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi assumed power.
Today, while Indians celebrate the 75th anniversary of the country’s independence, a major, coordinated effort to rewrite history, especially in school text books, continues under Prime Minister Modi.
If the BJP, and its ideological mentor the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), could, “they would just wipe out the true history of the Independence movement," Nitesh Kumar, the Chief Minister of Bihar said this month, according to NDTV. A “day will come when the Father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, Bapu, will also be cast aside... see what they are doing for the killer of Bapu," Kumar added. Kumar governs Bihar, India’s second most populous state and a key state to winning parliamentary elections, as leader of a coalition of parties opposed to Modi’s BJP.
Nathuram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi's killer, “has been hailed by Hindu nationalists,” including some members of the BJP, “as a martyr and a patriot,” The Atlantic reported. Godse was a member of the RSS, “a Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organization” that seeks the creation of a Hindu rashtra (nation.) “This idea of India posed a direct challenge to the secular and inclusive vision of the country championed by Gandhi and India’s other founding fathers.”
Several temples, statues and memorials honoring Godse have been set up across India. For instance, a temple with Godse as the presiding deity, was opened in Gwalior, India, in 2017 - on November 15, the day when Godse was hanged in 1949 for killing Gandhi. The Hindu Mahasabha, “the rightwing outfit” which set up the temple, observes November 15 as Balidan Diwas (sacrifice day), India Today reported.
In 2014, even before Modi was formally sworn in as Prime Minister, the RSS formed a committee, the Bharatiya Shiksha Niti Aayog, to suggest reforms for the education system, Rediff.com reported. One major focus of the committee is rewriting passages in previous history textbooks which ascribed “too much importance to Gandhi…to the detriment of Hindu nationalist heroes,” note Christophe Jaffrelot and Pradyumna Jairam, in The Indian Express. These flaws “have all been attributed to the secularist or Westernised nature of history textbook authors.”
Between 2014 and 2018, according to The Indian Express, 1,334 changes were made to 182 textbooks. Since then, the rewrites of textbooks has continuted at a rapid pace.
The history rewrites assert that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founder of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) ideology, was the most celebrated “freedom fighter” and a “great patriot, great revolutionary and great organizer.” Savarkar figures in every history textbook from class 8 to 12 as someone “whose contribution to the cause of (India’s) independence cannot be described in words,” note Jaffrelot and Jairam.
Christophe Jaffrelot is a CERI-CNRS Senior Research Fellow who teaches at Sciences Po in three different schools, in France, as well at the King's India Institute, London. His book, Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, analyzes how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance. It was published by the Princeton University Press.
Christophe Jaffrelot interviewed by Barkha Dutt; on YouTube
As reputed historians have pointed out, Savarkar and other Hindu nationalists did not join the popular struggle to free India from British rule. In fact, Savarkar reportedly earned a pension from the British government.
An admirer of Nazi Germany, Savarkar wanted the Hindus to deal with the Muslims in India in a manner similar to how the Nazis treated Jews, according to several studies. “Indian Muslims are on the whole more inclined to identify themselves and their interests with Muslims outside India than Hindus who live next door, like Jews in Germany,” Savarkar wrote, according to research published by Marzia Casolari, an Italian historian.
Savarkar, who was suspected of being involved in the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was acquitted in a trial because of insufficient evidence.
“Today, at rallies of Hindu nationalist hard-liners, Gandhi is routinely vilified as feeble in his tactics against the British and overly conciliatory to India’s Muslims…On social media and online forums, exaggerations and falsehoods abound about Gandhi’s alleged betrayal of Hindus,” The Washington Post reported last month.
Modi’s government “has been trying to project itself as a government that is macho, defiant, strong, and won’t take nonsense from anybody,” Tushar A. Gandhi, an author and Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson told Jaffrelot and Jairam. “There is an ongoing campaign to eradicate (Mahatma) Gandhi from the psyche of the Indian people, or at least reduce his qualities to the point it is trivial and meaningless.”
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