Amrit Kaal: Hindutva regime 'dislikes' India’s history since 1920, marking rise of Gandhi

By Harshavardhan Purandare, Sandeep Pandey* 
One of the topmost priority ideological projects during the Modi regime has been rewriting Indian history and to paint it in saffron color. The famous Maharashtra ideologue of Hindu Rashtra, Bhide Guruji, once said, “Muslim invasions, British capture and Gandhiji’s rise to become father of Modern India are three big historic assaults on our great Hindu culture.”
The saffron think tanks are now working relentlessly to promote ideas which will erase all three so called assaults on the ancient Hindu culture that happened in last eight centuries.
The recent ‘rationalizations’ of National Council of Educational Research and Training books in which chapters on Mughal empire are deleted and story of Gandhi’s assassination is curtailed to hide ban on Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in those times, is nothing but a smart manipulation of Indian history and continuation of cleverly twisting the narrative of our history to suit the present political project.
Gandhi’s killing by a Hindutva terrorist had sobering impact on the communal situation and the Hindu-Muslim riots subsided as nation went into mourning; Hindutva folks don’t like that mention in the text books either. They want Gandhi as “cleanliness” icon at best, as his principles of truth and non-violence will stand in a way of untruth and violence by which Hindutva fanatics are always blinded.
The crimes of Mughal invaders from centuries back are attributable to present day Muslim population for Hindutva fanatics; they forget the fact that Muslims in modern India are constitutionally equal citizens.
They do not like the colonial buildings of British era, and are constructing the new “Hindutva era” parliament house spending crores, ignoring the growing hunger and unemployment of very people who are supposed to be represented in that parliament.
What we receive these days through WhatsApp are white lies about our history, but these false whispering campaigns had ears in RSS shakhas since many decades, Modi regime has socially unleashed them since 2014 . But what can be said on WhatsApp cannot be written in official history books.
One requires smarter saffron manipulations to distort the perception through text books. Gandhi’s assassination by Hindutva forces is one historic fact that saffron lobby wants to erase from text books.
It is the biggest blot on their history that they hatched a conspiracy to murder the most well regarded sanatani Hindu as well as the most well known Indian worldwide, that too an apostle of peace who symbolises the highest values of human civilization.
It is Gandhi who shaped the modern notion of Indian nationalism which now the RSS desperately wants to hijack and replace by one based on an aggressive Hindutva ideology. RSS’s appointees want Gandhi out from public conscience, the best way is to curtail and dilute the Gandhi history, which actually is a glorious chapter in India’s journey forward for which every Indian feels proud.

Our rulers are rewriting history because they know they have nothing original to contribute and more to hide from people

The historians and intellectual vigils have criticized and are playing the role of whistleblower against this NCERT book manipulation attempt. We live in the era where ‘lies’ are called ‘perception management’ and ‘political frauds and crimes’ are called as ‘strategy’.

In order to evade the question of veracity of Narendra Modi’s university degree, the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir tried to create doubt in people’s mind about Gandhi’s law degree. The very Gandhian ideals which are attacked by saffron brigade will have to sooner or later come into play to prevent the moral decline that is happening around us.
Hindutva regime specially dislikes India’s history since 1920, the year that marked rise of Gandhi. Their Amrut Kaal begins in 2014. Idea of modern India, with all its limitations and setbacks, kept evolving in various ways between these two milestone years of 1920 and 2014.
A third world nation born after systematic imperial loot, which nobody gave a chance to become a mature democratic country, actually managed to sustain its imperfect system. Its seed were sown in freedom movement led unquestionably by Gandhi which first time broad based the political action for large masses of India.
That spirit of diverse nation ruled by modern laws was immortalized by Dr. Ambedkar’s Constitution. And Nehru led India to a stable, beyond religion, developing polity during his long tenure as India’s premier laying a solid foundation for sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.
Now if you get WhatsApp from RSS shakhas, now upgraded into multi billion dollar Information Technology cells, you get to know that Gandhi was actually a British agent and all his national political movement was a drama. You get to know through forwards that Constitution is sham and Ambedkar just ‘copied’ it from the British. And Nehru, the most favorite punching icon, was a womanizer and his clothes were washed in Paris.
This is going to be the scholarly level of our modern history in coming years. We all know rulers write the history, but these rulers are rewriting the history, probably because they know they have nothing original to contribute and more to hide from people, like their insignificant role in freedom movment.
The politics of Hindutva is based on mere exploitation of people’s religious sentiments and polarization of society. Sowing the seeds of hatred is much easier than building amity. Disinvestment is much easier than building blocks of economy and creating jobs. Manipulating data and facts is much easier than producing real results.
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*Associated with Socialist Party (India). A version of this article first appeared in The Wire