The cover says it all. An ostrich made of the hammer and sickle burying its head in sand to gloss over inconvenient facts! But there is more to it, as Arun Shourie narrates in very fine detail. Scholars having strong bias towards the Left control our premier institutions and media even to the level of hijacking it. They produce history of India in conformity to Marx’ ideas stated way back in the 19th century such as the human past is a long story of class struggles. This has gone to ridiculous l

The cover says it all. An ostrich made of the hammer and sickle burying its head in sand to gloss over inconvenient facts! But there is more to it, as Arun Shourie narrates in very fine detail. Scholars having strong bias towards the Left control our premier institutions and media even to the level of hijacking it. They produce history of India in conformity to Marx’ ideas stated way back in the 19th century such as the human past is a long story of class struggles. This has gone to ridiculous lengths as when one historian lamented that the hardships of village folk were not reproduced in the paintings of Ajanta caves! This book flays them alive, showing their true colours and how they have lost anchor when the socialist system humiliatingly collapsed in the 1990s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This book attempts a three-pronged approach to isolate the politicized historians – Shourie calls them ‘eminences’ derogatively, always in inverted commas – for their misuse of public funds earmarked for research, whitewashing of the medieval period in Indian history and reviling the ancient period and thirdly, for blindly following the outdated political ideology of Marx and Lenin. None other than Shourie can produce a work of this sort, which is full of vitriolic but effective diatribe against opponents. Having served as an economist, journalist, parliamentarian and a minister, Shourie’s credentials are impeccable.



The leftist historians and academics act as a clique to malign the country’s cultural heritage and the author tries to expose their stranglehold on the nation’s academic institutions and media. They unabashedly produce work committed to Marxist theories that reek of totalitarianism and irrelevance to Indian conditions. The leftist academics became fashionable during the time of Nehru. Our first prime minister was overly susceptible to the latest intellectual ‘fashions’ in Europe. Unfortunately for India, the latest fad going on in the thinking circles of London was Fabian socialism. So, Nehru anointed these people on the higher echelons of state organizations concerned with education and historical research. The historians thus appointed found it expedient to propagate Marxian propaganda through the text books taught in India’s schools and colleges, thereby poisoning the minds of impressionable childhood and adolescence. The Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital became a hotbed of armchair revolutionaries in this way. The masters selected and pruned their descendants carefully. Meanwhile, the Congress party which continued its rule in Delhi chose to ignore this contentious phenomenon as the party didn’t have an alternate ideology to put before the people. All this changed with the advent of BJP to power. For right or for wrong, the party has an ideology that is diametrically opposite to that of the communists. The Sangh Parivar wanted to control those institutions which the leftists had made their personal fiefs.



Shourie exposes a typical element of the leftist tirade that may be labeled misinformation. The guiding principles contained in the Memorandum of Association of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) propose to ‘give a national direction to an objective and rational presentation and interpretation of history’. When the BJP reconstituted the ICHR in 1998, the notification was found to include the word ‘national’ appearing for a second time in place of ‘rational’. This was trumpeted as an affirmation of the Sangh Parivar’s ‘wicked’ attempt to saffronise history. On the first look, it looks like what the critics say is correct. Omission of the word rational could only come about by a deliberate attempt. However, Shourie made a detailed analysis of previous notifications and comes up with the startling observation that the term rational was changed to national in 1978 as the result of a typing error. For two decades, nobody paid any attention till the time when the leftists raised a hue and cry. Communism thrives by selectively masking information or withholding it in its entirety from the public eye.



The so called ‘eminent historians’ show a reverential attitude to Islamic fundamentalism. Shourie produces copies of instructions issued by the West Bengal government’s education department asking teachers not to mention in the classrooms the brutalities committed by medieval sultans and their soldiery like forced conversions and destruction of temples. Historians follow a set procedure to deal with acts of a violent kind. If the sultan had destroyed a temple, it is obviously to get at the jewels and gold heaped there and not for religious reasons. If he imposed Jizya on the Hindus for the right to live as second class citizens in their own motherland, it is for economic reasons the tax would bring to the state treasury. If he forcibly converted Hindus, it is because in a battle, the sultan cannot afford his enemy ranks to swell and not for any religious motives. Thus, the historians find all of their actions quite justified. But what about the wanton destruction of temples and placing the smashed remains of stone idols on the walkway in the nearby mosque so that believers can tread on it every time they worship there? What about desecration of the temples of the defeated by butchering cows inside them? This carnage cannot be explained by economic reasons, so the ‘eminent historians’ choose to censor them and teach a sanitized version. The author reproduces numerous quotes from texts with the original and sanitized versions which prove his case.



Besides these, the ‘eminent historians’ are experts in the grand old art of financial embezzlement. Several occurrences are pointed out where they collected considerable sums from ICHR for producing books on various projects, but end up with neither doing the work nor returning the money. Foreign seminars and conferences form another milch cow for the unscrupulous politicized historians. Since these people form the cream of the hierarchy, such theft could be concealed effectively. It is only when the government effects a major overhaul of the apparatus on radical lines do the chance of exposure arises. One of the reasons for raising the slogan of saffronizing may be this secret agenda of keeping their embezzlement secret. When the project for translating the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on the history and culture of India was initiated, the committee of ‘eminent historians’ distributed the task among themselves and appropriated many lakhs of rupees in the bargain. Even the work of EMS Namboodiripad, a Marxist politician from Kerala was masqueraded as learned opinion, showing the ideological tilt of the nation’s premier institutions on historical research which are expected to steadfastly remain impartial.



The book sums up the issues by revealing the real motive behind such deliberate falsifications. Shourie coins the term ‘religiofication’ to explain the curious case of even intelligent people making a dumb following of the teachings of Marx and Lenin. They demarcated five stages of social development that every society must pass through, such as primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism before it reaches the promised land of communism where milk and honey flow. Everywhere in the world, left-leaning historians attribute the history under their study to follow this dictum by the Master, just as in a religious discourse. It has been established that Marx’ observations themselves were on many occasions – such as the extent of slavery in ancient Greece – found to be in error or based on insufficient material, since many later findings from the field have supplemented the edifice of knowledge on this issue. Scholars who follow the party’s official line are not expected to express any divergent opinion, however slight the differences may be. Opinion of those who are believed to be against the party is not taken into account at all. This blind adherence to commands from authority figures is the hallmark of religion and hence the word ‘religiofication’. Shourie hints that the striking resemblance in obedience to the Master may be what prompts the leftists to defer to Islamic hardliners who follow their religious precepts with equal ardour.



A serious drawback of the book is that it has assumed that whatever is severely criticized by the ‘eminent historians’ is inherently good. The charge against them is that they unduly berates the ancient period while keeping mum on the acts of violence perpetrated during the sultanate and Mughal periods. But the remedy to this malfunction is not to eulogize the ancient past, but to continue the investigation with the same critical sense during the medieval period as well. The inquiring mind should be free of slavery to any political or economic ideology. Historians use the term Brahmanic to the ancient period, that is also being taken offense of. However, this may be treated as an attempt to distinguish it from modern Hinduism. Shourie’s assertion that Buddha, like the tenets of Islam, asked the idols of other faiths to be pulverized (p.89) does not seem to be based on solid evidence.



The book is highly recommended.

