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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.