A recent report on Hindu nationalism in the United States included information on the expansion of the Sangh Parivar’s Ekal Vidyalaya network of schools in India. The report generated the kind of activity that has become usual on Twitter, with many questioning its claim that the schools were indoctrinating children into the ways of Hindutva, and many insisting that there was little basis for alarm about their spread.

Similar arguments followed the appointment of Y Sudershan Rao as the new ICHR chief by the government. While some commenters raised concerns about Rao’s qualifications, and his emphasis on incorporating Hindu views into academia, others defended him, claiming that our understanding of history is shaped by the Left, and needs a course correction. The latter group failed to acknowledge that we can only begin that discussion after we satisfy ourselves that Rao has the credentials to lead it.

These arguments serve to remind us that the country has spent the last ten years under a non-BJP regime, and that thus, the memory of what the BJP is capable of in power has somewhat receded, even as the country as a whole has veered rightwards. This is perhaps why many of the young in this nation, such as those rushing to the defence of the Ekal Vidyalayas on Twitter, are reacting to the Sangh as if the organisation has no history, as if it is a body with impeccable credentials that has sprung up yesterday.

In 2004, I reported on the Vanbandhu Parishad, or the Friends of Tribals Society, which ran the Ekal Vidyalayas. Based on what the organisation itself revealed at a press conference in Bhopal, it was clear that it was closely associated with the Sangh, and that the schools were propagating a Hindu-centric education. I have pointed to these facts on Twitter and in an email interview I recently gave.

I was then the Madhya Pradesh state correspondent for the Indian Express, and I had spent the previous year covering one of the most interesting state elections in our electoral history, at the centre of which was the battle between Uma Bharti and Digvijaya Singh. The Uma Bharti-led BJP campaign was marked by a number of forays into Hindutva terrain, most famously when she organised a function in the full glare of the media at a well-known Hanuman temple in Jamsavli near Chhindwara (though the symbolic significance of that event was somewhat dampened by ensuing allegations that a birthday cake Bharti had offered to the deity contained egg, an issue over which she demanded a CBI enquiry to clear her name).