Will
Hitler be the hero for tomorrow's children?
By Pranava
K Chaudhary
28 April,
2003
Dwelling on
Swami Vivekanand's speech at the Parliament of Religions at Chicago,
the new NCERT book "Contemporary India" (class IX) says: "(Swamiji)
established the superiority of Indian thought and culture over the Western
mind."
"Do we want our students
to be brought up on this type of chauvinist and utterly baseless statement?"
asks historian Bipan Chandra.
He clarified that although
Swamiji did make an impact at Chicago, this played an important role
in creating self-respect among Indians and not on the intellectual developments
in the rest of the world.The book, according to Chandra, is a combination
of ignorance and prejudice. "It is not based on research of the
last 50 years," he says. "It is essentially based on older,
pre-1950 textbooks or even made-easies."
On Nazism the book says:
"The ideology of the Nazi party was a sort of fusion of German
nationalism and socialism." This, according to Chandra, is to accept
the self-perception of the Nazis.
Chandra points out that the
book does not refer to anti-Semitism or the killing of over seven million
Jews, nor is the Nazi view that all Africans and Asians, including Indians,
were an inferior race brought out. The Italian Fascists' view is similarly
accepted, he said.
Chandra says that the treatment
of the 19th century Indian renaissance is "utterly onesided";
the role of Lokhitvadi and other Maharashtrian reformers, the reformers
in south India, and Young Bengal is missing.
Instead, there is onesided
emphasis on Bankimchandra Chatterji and Swami Dayanand, both of whom
were important but represented only one aspect of the reform movements.
"The worst feature of
the textbook is the clear effort to introduce a communal bias in the
teaching of history in various ways. The primary effort is to teach
that communalism was born and existed in India only in the form of Muslim
communalism," he says.According to him, the Hindu Mahasabha or
the RSS find no mention; nor their efforts to arouse communal feelings
among Hindus.
The partition is declared
to be the result of Muslim communalism but the responsibility of Hindu
communalism as well, as was brought out by Gandhiji and others and by
later scholars, is not mentioned.
"Jinnah's critique of
Gandhiji as anti-Muslim is brought out but not Savarkar's and Golwalkar's
critique of Gandhiji as anti-Hindu in the same language and manner.
Comment: Polluted air, polluted
food, polluted water. Now we have polluted education which is
perhaps the worst of all.