In efforts to please their political masters secularist 'scholars' have brought disgrace on academia.
A little noticed aspect of the disease called Secularism is the moral decline that has crept into the intelligentsia, especially academia. While they use high-sounding words, 'saving secularism' above all, the Indian academic finds the lure of position and the privileges that go with it irresistible. Many of them are willing to sacrifice hard-earned reputation, dignity-in short everything that a true scholar should hold dear-for the sake of government largesse. They behave more like courtiers and servants than scholars.
As a former academic whose career has been in the West, I cannot but wonder if this craving for government patronage is a holdover from the colonial era when the British rewarded faithful servants with titles like Rao Sahib, Khan Sahib and the like. Some Secular academics do not hesitate to accept positions that they are wholly unqualified for. To take an example, a well-known Marxist historian K.N. Panikkar), had no hesitation accepting the position of Vice Chancellor of the Shankaracharya Sanskrit University, despite his complete ignorance of Sanskrit.
No self-respecting scholar should accept such a position. It is an insult to scholarship. But the real question is, what drives such behavior, behavior unbecoming of a true scholar? It is something that may be called "secular correctness," which promises material benefits as long as one is prepared to sacrifice standards of ethical and moral behavior. No behavior is considered disgraceful as long as it is secularly correct. (I have turned down offers of position from government bodies like the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Archaeological Survey of India. So I am not asking anyone to do the impossible.)
It is not just that they accept such positions, but how they are willing to disgrace themselves and the office they hold for the sake of position and perks. For example, a recent chairman of the ICHR was removed not for any scholarly reasons, but for financial irregularities. Still more recently, a committee appointed by the HRD Ministry to review the NCERT textbooks, recommended changes without consulting the authors but in deference to SAHMAT, a Marxist-Islamist outfit with a blatantly political agenda. The committee chairman, a historian with a distinguished record, was willing to sacrifice his professionalism to please this motley political group simply because it is believed to have some political influence.
The Honorable Chairman of the committee (S. Setar) appointed to review the NCERT history books went on record about the "substandard" quality of the textbooks put out by the organization. Accepting his charge for the moment, the question to ask is- who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs? It is not hard to answer the question. The Secularist establishment gained control of the academia during the late Nurul Hassan's regime. It has since ruled the history establishment with an iron hand that was loosened, even if only slightly, only during the NDA Government. During its forty-year academic monopoly, its record is undistinguished, but it has managed to exercise near dictatorial control over how history is taught and covered in the media.
This was brought home to me when I recently visited the Oriental Research Institute (ORI) in Mysore and contrasted its work with what goes on in the name of research at the lavishly funded Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. I learnt that the ORI conducts courses in epigraphy to train students to read ancient inscriptions. It is also engaged in a project to record the manuscripts in its collection on microfiche to make them widely available to scholars. Its best-known achievement is the discovery of Kautilya's Arthashastra, without which our knowledge of ancient India would be seriously deficient.
The Jawaharlal Nehru University has nothing even remotely comparable to boast. It has no epigraphists. Even worse, its eminent historians, known more for propaganda campaigns than any discoveries, don't even know Sanskrit. As a result, a historian like Romila Thapar, who is considered an authority on ancient India, has no direct knowledge of ancient inscriptions or original Sanskrit texts. In the circumstances it is natural that she (and others like her) should be hostile to Sanskrit and Sanskrit scholars. I have noticed a similar attitude among some of my engineering colleagues who were weak in mathematics: they hated mathematics and mathematicians with a passion. It is hatred born of envy, rooted in knowledge of their scholarly inadequacy. Here is where Secularism comes in handy: slogans can be used to suppress debate.
In the circumstances, one can have some sympathy for the Chairman of the Review Committee (S. Setar), whose own book on world history had been withdrawn some years ago because of its coverage of Islam. Predictably, some Muslims groups objected to the book, forcing its withdrawal. So the Honorable Chairman's conduct is understandable though one cannot condone his professional discourtesy towards fellow historians while bending over backwards to please his political masters and the screaming mobs of SAHMAT. (He could have turned down the appointment, but such rectitude seems almost unknown in Secular India.)
An unfortunate consequence of this is that by their combination of timidity and political opportunism, Setar & Co have allowed political organizations like SAHMAT to hijack the nation's educational agenda. This has led to a climate of fear in education, not unlike during the Macarthy era in the United States. It is also tailor-made some Secularist historians to push political propaganda in the name of Secularism. (See for example, Somanatha by Romila Thapar, which whitewashes Mahmud of Ghazni's record of vandalism, while disregarding they eyewitness accounts of men like Utbi and even Al-Beruni who accompanied him on his campaigns.)
This is only the first step. Following Setar's capitulation under SAHMAT's propaganda, a so-called Educational Advisory Council has been formed made up supposedly of eminent persons. These include the likes of Shabna Azmi, Javed Akhtar and other sundry Secularist activists.
As noted earlier, at the heart of the problem is of scholars of little substance occupying prominent positions in academia due to their political influence and media publicity. Even though there have been several major developments in history-like the discovery of the Vedic Sarasvati and the Vedic-Harappan connection-prominent Secularist historians like Thapar and Irfan Habib have contributed nothing to it. One hears of them only when they are engaged in some political stunt at SAHMAT, not because of any new discovery. This serves the double purpose of concealing their failure and suppressing debate.
What the country really needs to come out of their stranglehold is not de-saffronization, but de-Secularization. Otherwise, the Secularists will drag India into a Dark Age.
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N.S. Rajaram is a mathematician
and historian. He was nominated to be member of the Indian Council of Historical
Research (ICHR) and also a review committee of the Archaeological Survey
of India (ASI) both of which he declined for personal reasons.