NEW DELHI:October 22, 2019 Rewriting Indian history to replace what it believes is a distorted version has been a pet project of the RSS movement. So many thought home minister Amit Shah was speaking under Sangh pressure when in a recent seminar at the Banaras Hindu University, he said Indian history should be rewritten from a nationalist point of view. To illustrate this, he said the 1857 mutiny would not have been seen as India’s first war of independence had Veer Savarkar not made it the title of his book. Shah’s statement came days after the controversy over conferring the Bharat Ratna on the Sangh ideologue, something the Maharashtra BJP included in its poll manifesto.

Shah may not have been speaking under Sangh pressure as he himself firmly believes that Indian history has to be written from a nationalist perspective. But he was certainly allaying the RSS’s most serious complaint against the BJP since it came to power: that it had not done enough to right Indian history in the first five years of its rule.

Shah’s views on history are fairly clear-cut. For instance, he is dead against playing up figures like Tipu Sultan as the heroes of Indian history just because they opposed the British. According to him, if there was any ruler apart from Aurangzeb who committed atrocities in the name of Islam, it was Tipu Sultan.

Tipu is said to have killed thousands of Kodavas in Coorg and converted Catholic Christians in Mangaluru at the point of sword as well as destroyed innumerable temples in the Coorg and Malabar regions of the South. Tipu’s persecution of Hindus is something even a Left-oriented intellectual and historian like K.M. Pannikar has condemned.

The Sangh Parivar and Shah are also unhappy with the under-projection of revolutionary heroes in the current history of the freedom movement. Except for Bhagat Singh or Chandrashekhar Azad, other revolutionary heroes like Rash Bihari Bose, Bagha Jatin, Khudiram Bose or revolutionary movements like the Anushilan Samiti of Bengal have not got their due in history, they feel.

Shah also takes issue with the repeated projection by anti-RSS forces that the RSS and its leaders never took part in the freedom movement. RSS founder Dr K.B. Hedgewar, it is pointed out, was a Congress member before he was disillusioned with its policy of Muslim appeasement at the cost of Hindu rights. He broke away from the party and floated the RSS to devote himself entirely to the Hindu cause.

In fact, many in the Sangh Parivar feel that Hedgewar, who was inspired by revolutionary Babarao Savarkar and his younger brother Veer Savarkar, needs to be projected as a great visionary in India history. It was he, they say, who saw the dangers of Islamist separatist movements and Hindu caste perversions and started a movement for the preservation of Hindu culture.

Hedgewar, they feel, was vindicated when the nation was partitioned in 1947. The Congress’s Muslim appeasement created the Frankenstein’s monster that was the Muslim League which gradually fed on the nation itself, and partitioned it.

Likewise, Shah and others believe, Savarkar too needs to be projected not merely as a revolutionary but also as a great political and social thinker who led the movement against untouchability in the Konkan region between 1924 and 1937 and who was also the first to predict that Muslim appeasement by the Congress would prove disastrous in the long run.

So far, Muslim rulers have had no place in the revised script of history that the RSS wants. It has often been a self-defeating task. For example, the Sangh is silent on Emperor Akbar who made a serious effort to end the persecution of Hindus by withdrawing the religious jiziya tax on Hindus and ending temple destruction that continued under successive Muslims rulers in India before him. In doing so, the RSS has left no room for the country’s inclusive Muslims by denying them liberal medieval Muslim role models. That could be changing now. A few days ago, RSS joint general secretary Krishna Gopal participated in a two-day seminar on Dara Shikoh in Delhi where he shared space with Muslim scholars.

However, the RSS’s larger project of rewriting Indian history remains. In fact, this is one of the main reasons behind the induction of Ramesh Pokhrial ‘Nishank’ in the Union cabinet. Pokhrial is an old RSS loyalist who is expected to do the job with skill and to the RSS’s satisfaction.

(CURTSY:INDIA TODAY FORESIGHT.)