Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters:
~ African
Proverb
The vast
landscape of News, Information and General Knowledge on modern
history and current affairs is populated in various intriguing ways
in India.
This has
been a well established fact by now that the History taught in our
schools through text-books has very little to do with actual facts
and sequence of events. Contents of history text-books are collated
in a particular way – read slanted, manoeuvred and
distorted. Important and crucial events are suppressed,
ignored & censored from being exposed to the young minds. Idea is
to push the young ones towards rote-learning by cramming up the
historical dates of basic events, mostly birth and death
anniversaries, and to a large extent the chronology. No
wonder History is considered the most hated subject by the young
minds as they do not find any value or interest whatsoever in remembering some
dates and numbers.
This process of systemic distortion of historical facts and data is
called Negationism.
Wikipedia defines the term as follows and I
quote:
Negationism,
as it applies to historical revisionism, is the denial and distortion
of established historical facts, usually related to the denial of war
crimes or crimes against humanity.
Koenraad Elst, a noted Belgian author and historian, explains Negationism in India as follows:
“historians of the Aligarh school (e.g. Irfan Habib) or Indian Marxists (e.g. Romila Thapar) have resorted to history-rewriting: "Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy."
“historians of the Aligarh school (e.g. Irfan Habib) or Indian Marxists (e.g. Romila Thapar) have resorted to history-rewriting: "Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy."
This is the level of quality education that a society evolves with, when the
education system and contents of text-books are controlled by the
State, and outsourced to the Academia & Intelligentsia that lives
off the very same Government.
Only when
the young ones turn into adults, and they start reading on their own
from the vast ocean of historical facts and events, using resources
available to them, thanks to the power of internet. IF, only IF,
they find true interest in the subject. Unfortunately, this number is
extremely negligible as most of us like to pursue interests that
are far more rewarding financially.
Let us very
briefly profile these players who broadly contribute to the process of
resource & content management, implementation, execution and
proselytisation; in short - Negationism.
Distortians:
These are the geneses, highly decorated & well placed
intellectuals, historians, authors and academicians, with foreign
Degrees, Research Papers, Books and National Awards to their long
list of credentials. This comes to them broadly due to the fact that
they are committed to serve the interests of the Dynasty and the
State. Their job is basically to manufacture data, twist facts, write
slanted articles and comment on current events to deflect all of it
to a particular direction.
Tribe of
these include some of the most “respected” names.
 |
| Pic: Outlookindia.com |
Seven Indians among top 100 intellectuals:
"India comes out shining too. Besides familiar names such as Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Umberto Eco, Lee Kuan Yew, the list has some half-dozen Indians: historian Ramachandra Guha, political psychologist Ashis Nandy, and environmentalist Sunita Narain, all of whom live in India, among them...
...Four other Indians based outside India also make the list: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, journalist author Fareed Zakaria, novelist Salman Rushdie, and San Diego-based neuroscientist V S Ramachandran."
Bhadralok (Intellectuals and Civil Society):
Next is the elite crowd of the society that is also known as Socialites – they include the likes of Crony-Industrialists, Editors and Celebrity Journalists, Advocates, Educationists & University V-Cs. These people are well connected, educated, arrived in life and are “high” achievers, thanks to their crony-network and “bhai-chara”. They follow like sheep and draw heavily from the works of Distortians. They form the second line of defence and help populate distorted content, through text-books, Journals, Media, Newspaper articles, TV Debates etc.
I call them
the “Poweratti” and they are briefly discussed in one of
my earlier posts linked
here.
Rajeev
Mantri and Harsh Gupta, in an article India’s
cocooned intellectual elite argue:
“The reason India’s intellectual establishment doesn’t challenge the government’s policies on a philosophical plane is that it is very comfortable with the status quo and in fact is in broad agreement with the leftist philosophy that has directed governance in India almost uninterrupted since independence.”
Political
Spin-Doctors:
This is the single most dangerous tribe that we
have amongst us today. Their work borders around the activities of an
anti-national. They are a huge security threat to the nation and they
thrive under the protection and support of current dynastic politics.
They come in various avatars: NGOs, Bureaucrats (rogue IAS &
IPS), Magicians of Faith industry, Journalists etc. In short, they
are the “foot-soldiers” of Poweratti. They actually carry
out the agenda on ground zero. They are the first point of contact
for the common man. Being “foot-soldiers”, they are the first
head to be rolled in case the heat gets across to the Poweratti.
Shoot the
messenger, as they say! And, life goes on !!
Unfortunately
some of us have been greatly influenced by these spin-doctors, taking
them and their “body-of-work” at face value. While we all are
free to chose our resources for information & data; draw
inspiration from certain people; it has become increasingly important
to carry out a very detailed due diligence on the credibility and
authenticity of such resources & people. The current climate in
India is in such a mess that it is becoming increasingly impossible
to make a clear assessment on “who's who” and their
“internal-alignments” and network-relationships, that also change
by the turn of events.
We will
discuss in the next post, some of these “spin-doctor” resources
to demolish the building blocks of their myths and manufactured
facts.
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