Undermining of educational and cultural institutions
The important research, educational and cultural institutions and committees whose complexion has been transformed by filling them with people associated with the Hindutva agenda and linked with the Sangh Parivar are:

Committees for Review of Elementary and Primary Education, Committee for Review of the prescribed NCERT syllabi for CBSE, selection committees for appointments in NCERT and NIEPA, the Advisory Committee on Education in Haryana, the specially constituted National Elementary Education Mission (NEEM), the Councils in ICHR and ICSSR and grants-in-aid committees for adult education, have been similarly constituted.

Government funds for Hindutva and changed priorities
Government funds for the Hindutva agenda in education have been managed in many ways. Priorities of research have changed with the takeover of research bodies and academic institutions.

In the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the ‘Towards Freedom’ volumes have been effectively shelved, along with The Economic History of India, On Railway Construction, and Inscriptions of India. The new projects in the pipeline are: three projects on the ‘Indus Saraswati Civilization’ and one on ‘Archaeology and Tradition’. A meeting was held on 29-30 October to sanction grants for the new projects. Projects and grants are being awarded with the aim of establishing the Hindutva view of history.

The Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Documentation Centre, established in honour of their hero within the ICSSR, has been given huge funds. Even the entire campus of the JNU City Centre has been renamed as ‘Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Gateway of Social Sciences’.

The Archaeological Survey of India is similarly preoccupied with funding excavations and publications to prove that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of India and that Indian civilisation is essentially ‘Aryan’ civilisation.

The ICSSR that only funds research is now utilising huge funds for a Shyama Prasad Mukherjee international conference with a view to presenting and generating new data relevant to the shaping of their national and global agenda. The ICSSR has also established a new Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Centre for Social Welfare, whose one major activity was the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Memorial Lecture delivered by the BJP President, Bangaru Laxman.

The Open School texts which were already written, approved and paid for, have been shelved  and have not been published because of the association of secular historians in framing the syllabi for them.

Government funds have also been made available to thousands of RSS schools and the VHP-run Ekal schools under the government scheme of one teacher schools, and to non-formal centres and Continuing Education Programmes being run by sympathisers. RSS-type books are being pushed into the literacy centres and rural libraries established in the last decade under the National Literacy Mission-directed adult education programme. All the old publications have been withdrawn and the old grants-in-aid committees dismantled summarily without notice, with the decisions taken by them not being implemented. Through a directive that makes all schools running for ten years automatically entitled for affiliation and recognition, the BJP has ensured large transfers of funds to RSS schools in the BJP-ruled states.

Since the BJP’s take over, value education, moral science, patriotism and nationalism have become synonymous with Hindutva in the government vocabulary. The NCERT and the UGC, now filled with their people, have followed suit. The NCERT has seriously taken up the task of introducing a course on value education in schools on the model of the ‘moral science’ taught in the RSS-linked Vidya Bharati and Shishu Mandir schools. Enormous funds have been given for a resource library at the NCERT to ‘help towards devising the course’, and although there will be token representation of other religions, the Hindutva line will be inculcated through giving voice to every festival, fast, yatra, writings of so-called sants and sadhus, and so on.

Funds have already been sanctioned for courses on Vedic rituals and astrology in a number of universities and institutions of higher education.

It has been decided to introduce compulsory courses on patriotism in the state universities and science and professional colleges. While its content has not been worked out, it is obvious, given what the BJP has introduced by way of history in the school texts, that this particular course will be Hindutva politics in another bottle.

In the school texts in Uttar Pradesh and in the examinations, Hindutva has so prevaded the system that one can hardly have a simple maths problem in a question without reference to the Sangh propaganda.

Attacks on cultural expression
Cultural festivals are funded by the Department of Culture and ministers are openly associated with promoting the identity of Indian culture with brahmanical myths. The birth centenaries of Ashfaqullah Khan and Udham Singh were totally ignored.

The new Harappan Civilisation Gallery at the National Museum in Delhi seeks to project the Hindutva reinterpretation of this culture as Vedic/Sanskritic, against accepted archaeological evidence and scholarship.

The Lalit Kala Akademi has funded and put up an exhibition on Vajpayee’s visit to the US, which by no strech of imagination can be justified as relevant to the aims and objectives of the Akademi.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi organised a show to laud the government’s efforts on Kargil, and, more recently, a programme to celebrate 50 years of the founding of the Republic. The Akademis are thus being made the cultural PR agencies of the government.

Some examples of communal historiography from school texts
Communal historiography may be quite old in India but the new additions reflect greater contemporary use in dividing society along communal lines. A communal bias is woven into school textbooks with preposterous ‘facts’ in a way that can only have dangerous consequences for the educational standards of this country.

We give some examples of the kind of things that are strewn all over these texts. These examples reflect not merely what books prescribed in the more than 20,000 RSS-linked Shishu Mandirs and Vidya Bharati schools contain. This is what the RSS is trying to force into the entire educational system. The introduction of such texts in the state-funded regular stream of schooling and the rewriting of social science texts in BJP-ruled states have massively increased the number of children who are being made victims of this second-rate and poisonous ‘knowledge’.

Some gems from the ‘Sanskrit Gyan’ and ‘Sanskar Saurabh’ texts
Sanskrit Gyan texts are taught in Vidya Bharati schools and Shishu Mandirs. The RSS-sponsored agenda paper on education that the Central Government tried to present before the Conference of the State Education Ministers in October 1998 suggested that these and similar texts be made compulsory for all schools.

The students are tested on dubious ‘facts’ such as:

In the Sanskar Saurabh series:

The Harappan Civilization: an exhibition in the National Museum, New Delhi
An exhibition on the Harappan Civilisation has been recently organised by the National Museum and the Archaeological Survey of India in the National Museum of New Delhi. The display is governed by the traditional trait-list approach of culture. It includes display of Harappan artefacts such as tools, weapons and utensils of bronze, ornaments, seals and sealings, weights and measures, toys, gamesmen, pottery, human and animal clay figurines and stone subjects. The photographs show excavated features such as structures, tanks and fire-pits or hearths labelled as fire altars from the Lothal, Kalibangan and Banawali sites. An introductory note in English as well as in Hindi, and a brochure based on it for circulation, introduce laypersons and students visiting the exhibition to chauvinstic glory and a distorted picture of the Harappan Civilisation.

The display has clubbed together the non-Harappan pre-Harappan Chalcolithic cultures (c. 3500-2600 Bc) with the Harappan civilisation (c. 2600-2000 Bc), giving little idea about the process of cultural development. The exhibition has nothing to tell about the time-lag in the spread of the Harappan culture all over, its extent and its regional variations. It gives only the urban view of the culture, having nothing to say about the conditions of life in its smaller settlements and villages. There is no attempt to put the civilisation in a historical context by distinguishing the Harappan urban tradition from the succeeding non-Harappan cultures called the Painted Grey Ware, the Black Slipped Ware and the Gandhara Grey Ware cultures, with hardly any indigenous origins. They were responsible for the introduction of iron and the horse, and the evolution of early historic unbanization c. 600 Bc, owing little to the protohistoric Harappan civilization.

What is most disturbing is the distorted view the exhibition gives through its introductory notes, labels and brochures. The organizers have labelled the fire pits as ‘fire altars’, suggesting the prevalence of ‘fire worship’ (of Vedic type) in the Harappan civilization (c. 2600-2000 bc) at Lothal, Kalibangan and Banawali, without taking into account their structural form and without chemical analysis of the ash deposits found in the pits.

The display of the two fragments of terracotta horse-like figurines gives an impression that the domesticated horse was integral to the Harappan civilization all over its content in time and space. The lack of evidence for the domestication of the horse in the early Harappan levels and the recovery of a bullock-driven chariot of copper from Daimabad in late Harappan times precludes any possibility of domestication of the horse by the Harappans locally and its use on a big scale.

The nomenclature of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization used in the introductory note as well as in the brochure distributed has not been accepted by the archeologists. The Harappan civilisation extended far beyond the Indus as well as the Saraswati valleys. In fact, the dry bed of the Saraswati reveals an eastward expansion of the Chalcolithic cultures and the epicentre of the Harappan civilisation still remains the central Indus valley. The upper course of the Saraswati was occupied only in the late Harappan times, as the evidence goes.

The introductory note, as well as the brochure, further mention that the Harappan script was written from left to right, as the Mauryan Brahmi of the early historical era. In fact, B.B. Lal has proved beyond doubt, with the help of inscribed potsherds from Kalibangan and a seal from Harappa, that the Harappan script was written from right to left, unlike the Brahmi script which had an independent origin.

A centrally placed showcase labelled ‘Religion and Rituals’ includes stone objects, small objects, small terracotta spindle-like objects from Kalibangan and terracotta human figurines in different poses. The organisers have treated it without any basis as an evidence of Siva Lingas and Yoga practices in the Harappan civilization.

All these descriptions lack authenticity and at best represent the eccentric views of a few pseudo-archaeologists. The question then arises, why are such unestablished and distorted views being propagated as the official view of the National Museum and the Archaeological Survey of India?

The distortions undoubtedly aim at establishing that the Harappan civilisation was associated with the Rigvedic Aryans. Fire worship, use of the horse, Rudra worship and the Saraswati Nadi, all happen to be associated with the Rigveda. The identification of the Harappan civilisation with the Rigvedic Aryans will push back the antiquity of the Rigveda itself and glorify the simple Rigvedic culture as one of the most developed civilizations of the world. What is more important, it will establish the identity of the Aryans as an indigenous people and the Vedic, Pauranic, Sanatan culture as the real culture of India, as opposed to that of the Muslims and Christians. This is the basis of the Hindu Rashtra theory. It seems that the organization of the exhibition and dissemination of a distorted view of history as stated above will only help to further the ideological cause of the RSS or Hindutva at the cost of the national exchequer.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
The IGNCA was set up as a fully autonomous body by the government in 1987.

The present government, despite issues pending in court, forcibly seized the IGNCA on January 10, 2000. In their unseemly haste to take over institutions, the government appointed a new group of Trustees, announced on January 8, 2000.

The government and the new Trustees seem to be unaware of the following:

Built on an academic foundation, the IGNCA was visualized as a centre encompassing the study and experience of all the arts. The concept is reflected in the precise structuring of its divisional components. This is the only institution which has established a meaningful bridge amongst the domains of the fundamental sciences, technology, metaphysics, the social sciences and the arts. A cursory perusal of their catalogues and publications would reveal the range and depth of the vast body of work accomplished, as well as the nature of the institution of which the performing arts is but one integral part – until its take-over.

As a major repository of reference material, the IGNCA has created an outstanding reference library and cultural archives, with access to multimedia databases and information systems. It has acquired a rich and varied collection of books and material of eminent scholars in the fields of the arts and related studies – apart from a large collection of primary material. It has many rare collections of illustrious scholars who have made path-breaking contributions in fields relating to the arts, and a pioneering attempt has been made to bring under one roof, primary sources of the Indian tradition lying scattered, fragmented, inaccessible, or worse, in danger of extinction. At present the library contains about ten million folios of unpublished Sanskrit, Pali, Persian and Arabic manuscripts. The visual library comprises a wide collection of slides of art objects, etc., in Indian and international collections.

The results of the diverse areas of research and activities are disseminated through publications, films, cassettes and CD Roms, along with multimedia exhibitions on universal themes, international seminars and so on. The performing arts so far built into the initial phase of the IGNCA’s fundamental research programme would find its representation at a large stage as envisaged in the overall plan.

The IGNCA has actively collaborated and networked with academic and other institutions, apart from scholars and specialists in a wide cross-section of fields, both in India and abroad.

The IGNCA was, until its take-over, well into the process of fulfilling its objectives as originally envisaged and laid down in the Trust Deed.

The new Member Secretary, instantly upon taking office, had commented that he ‘was somebody who can now put it back on the rails’. The IGNCA was never off the rails – and this disturbing statement, writing off in one sweep the entire scholastic content of the institution which comprises the contributions of some of the greatest scholars of our time, raises the basic question of academic freedom, and of the ethics of education and the understanding of culture that are now being demonstrated.

As the government and their representatives, the new Trustees, are unaware of the IGNCA as a research and resource institution of this dimension, internationally recognized as a major core institution, the fundamental questions now are:

This take-over is not only destroying the institution and making us look small in the eyes of the world, but is in direct contradiction with all the values our great democratic country has stood for.