CONTROVERSY

Agendas and appointments

A clutch of appointments by the Human Resource Development Ministry under Murli Manohar Joshi raises disturbing questions.

T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi

MURLI MANOHAR JOSHI cleared two crucial appointments just two days into his renewed tenure as Union Minister for Human Resource Development. M.L. Sondhi, a former Professor at the School of International Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), was appointed Chairperson of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), and B.R. Grover, who was nominated a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) in 1998, earned a promotion to the Chair.

Sondhi was a young and highly regarded official of the Indian Foreign Service when he dramatically quit for a career in politics. His best-remembered political feat still remains the shock defeat he inflicted on Congress(I) stalwart Mehr Chand Khanna in New Delhi in the 1967 Lok Sabha elections. Having served out a term as a Jan Sangh Member of Parliament, Sondhi sought a career in academia after being defeated in the 1971 elections.

Grover served for long as Director in the ICHR, although he achieved renown after a fashion only in his post-retirement advocacy of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's (VHP) claim to the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. He was a leading member of the panel of historians constituted by the VHP at the Chandra Shekhar Government's suggestion, to establish the historical veracity of the case of the Ram Janmabhoomi. Post-Ayodhya demolition, Grover has remained an unrepentant votary of the view that vandalism in the distant past can be justification for acts of retribution today.

Grover and various other historians and archaeologists associated with the Ayodhya campaign of the VHP earned the censure of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), when it held a session in New Delhi in 1994. His nomination as a member of the ICHR in June 1998 was, for this reason, occasion for a bitter controversy within the profession of historical research. His elevation as Chairman is unlikely to be any less acrimonious.

In contrast, Sondhi has not been conspicuously linked with any overt political campaigns in the domestic arena. He has been a courtly and soft-spoken participant in the seminar circuit in New Delhi, particularly those concerned with less popular causes such as the "liberation" of Tibet and friendship with Israel. His appointment to the apex position in ICSSR represents a quantum shift in the ethos of the institution.

Grover and Sondhi do not collectively match the absurdity of another nomination by the HRD Ministry. K.G. Rastogi, an obscure Professor from Delhi, has been appointed to the search committee for faculty appointments in the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Far from his academic credentials, Rastogi is best known for a lurid autobiographical account of Partition, in which he acknowledged that he shot dead a Muslim woman at close quarters to save her from a rampaging mob of Hindus. He subsequently took up a career in academia, though never with great distinction. In his participation in shakhas of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), though, he was very consistent.

IT is learnt that these appointments had been decided well before their actual announcement - the delay being entirely on account of the intervening inconvenience of the model code of conduct for the electoral season. The HRD Minister, associated with the more extreme ideological fringes of the BJP, has once again been true to form. These apprehensions were reinforced when news emerged of the omission of Marxist theory from the political science syllabus in Central Board of Secondary Education-stream schools. Agitated members of the Left parties raised the matter in Parliament, accusing the Government of seeking to stop "the free flow of ideas" and bringing in a phase of "intellectual fascism".

While other major political theories of Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism and Gandhism were as usual present in the syllabus for "Concepts and Theories in Political Science", Marxism was conspicuously absent. But for an alert teacher from a school in Delhi, the supposed omission would perhaps not have been detected. The CBSE, for its part, held that the Hindi version of the printed syllabus contained Marxist theory, which made the omission in the English version at worst a printer's devil. Yet the faculty of education in the Delhi University is reluctant to accept this as an "inadvertent error". There seems to be too strong a pattern evident in Joshi's decisions as HRD Minister to permit this kind of a casual reading.

The Minister, however, seems unfazed. Grover, he argues, has served as director of the ICHR for 12 years and has otherwise been associated with the organisation for over a decade. This alone should be adequate to establish his credentials for the Chairman's post.

While none of his critics dispute the fact that Grover's long stint in the ICHR as Director was relatively uncontroversial, they have chosen to question his unrelenting commitment, since 1986, in opposing any resolution relating to the preservation of cultural heritage in the Indian History Congress. His interventions have since shown a persistent bias. In 1992, at the Calcutta session of the IHC, the then Secretary, V. Ramakrishna, took cognizance of communal disturbances in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Grover objected, stating that it should not be part of the Secretary's speech.

Later, as a member of the Delhi session of the WAC in 1994, Grover opposed a resolution moved by liberal historians condemning the demolition of the Masjid. Further, in a conference of the WAC at Croatia in May 1998, he opposed a resolution condemning the "manipulation of archaeological evidence to justify destruction of historical structures". He led a group, including B.B. Lal and three others, out of the Congress, rather than be party to the adoption of the resolution.

In the IHC, Grover has chosen to oppose various important policy resolutions, including the defence of unbiased textbooks (Hyderabad session, December 30, 1978), the promotion of translations in Indian languages (Bombay session, December 28, 1980). In the Annamalainagar session in December 1984, he opposed a resolution against communal strife. At the Goa session in 1987, he voted against a resolution criticising the biased representation of legend and history on television.

Further, in comparison to previous incumbents in the ICHR, such as R.S. Sharma, Niharranjan Ray, Irfan Habib and Ravinder Kumar, Grover's academic credentials are far from impressive. He has to his credit two articles in the Indian Economic and Social History Review - one on the village community published in 1971 and the other on land rights in Mughal India, published in 1976. And while he served for long as Reader in History at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, he has neither a Ph.D nor the title of Professor to his credit.

AKHILESH KUMAR
Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi.

HISTORIANS of a liberal and secular persuasion are alarmed at the prospect of the nodal agency for sponsorship of historical research passing into the control of a person who has opposed every resolution condemning the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Delhi University historian Sumit Sarkar feels that the current practice of packing institutes with people conforming to the Hindutva ideology is qualitatively different from all that has been seen in the past.

Sarkar points out, for instance, that Irfan Habib was the ICHR Chairperson during the Rajiv Gandhi regime, although he is affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a party that consistently opposed the Congress(I) during that period. There was no systematic packing of academic bodies, and people known to be RSS sympathisers too were appointed to positions of responsibility.

Again, there are questions of basic academic stature involved. Irfan Habib and R.S. Sharma were historians of international repute even before the ICHR was set up. If the Hindutva lobby has been unable to appoint persons amenable to it earlier, it has been due to a sheer paucity of serious scholarship within their ranks. Sarkar argues that since the 1992 demolition, a variety of historical thinking has gained ground that reinforces old and discredited stereotypes, reversing the progress achieved over the years in charting new vistas of scholarship. Joshi's appointments in the ICHR clearly are designed to deepen this regressive trend.

Illustrations are not lacking. The ICHR decided in July this year to publish all the titles of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on History and Culture of the Indian People, the General Editor of which was R.C. Majumdar, who is considered by Left historians to be a Hindu revivalist historian. Although this decision was taken during the tenure of former Chairperson S. Settar, there is little doubt that it may have been influenced by the BJP-led government in power.

Surpassing all this, however, is the nomination of K.G. Rastogi to the Selection Committee of the NCERT. In his 190-page autobiography published in 1998 and dedicated to the RSS, Rastogi devotes three chapters to his life in the RSS. Called Aap Beeti (My Life Experiences), the autobiography carries a foreword by RSS ideologue K.C. Sudarshan. In the section about the author, it is mentioned that Rastogi was an RSS pracharak for ten years. In one chapter, where he talks about his days with the RSS, he narrates how he learnt to use rifles, tommy guns, sten guns and hand grenades in the period following Partition. He was in Bharatpur at that time and was anointed the district security chief by the RSS - ostensibly to protect the lives of Hindus. Anti-socials and Kshatriyas were trained to take on the enemy.

Rastogi writes that in one such skirmish in a place called Puran Kaliyar near Hardwar, a beautiful woman was sighted in one particular house where killings were going on. Some of the attackers (read the Hindu mob) began to waver in their resolve and, unmindful of their objective, began to assert their rights over the woman. "Then an idea struck me. I threatened the attackers, even abused them and then shot dead the woman, who was the root cause behind the fight. I thought that I had killed two birds with one stone. Everyone was shocked at this extraordinary spectacle, but got back to their work." (page 46, Aap Beeti by K.G. Rastogi). Rastogi goes on to express his regret for having done this inhuman deed, but he does not stop to ponder why he could not have shot the attackers.

In another chapter, where he describes his first visit to the United States, he speaks glowingly of his late wife who "asked him to fulfil his needs in the period that he was away from her." This permission to act freely apparently helped him control his wayward senses. Sudarshan too highlights this particular statement by Rastogi's wife in his foreword to emphasise the sacrificing and noble character of Hindu women.

In another chapter titled "Professor Ho Hi Gaya" (I finally become a Professor), Rastogi records how one of his friends approached an expert in the selection panel to recommend his name for the post of a Hindi Professor. However, it appeared that the expert had already promised the post to another candidate. This was during the years Rastogi was at the NCERT. He served in the Council between 1964 and 1988, and to that extent, he is no outsider.

After 1988, he went back to the RSS, apparently to serve as a full-time pracharak, only to resurface in 1999 as Joshi's nominee to the Selection Committee. Previous nominees include noted sociologist S.C. Dube and historian Bipan Chandra. As the Minister's nominee, he will have the clout to influence key appointments. His hand has apparently been detected in a number of top appointments, notably that of the Director, NCERT, and the Chairman, National Open School. Rastogi is also known to be the convener of the Akhil Bhartiya Vidya Bharati Shiksha Pratisthan, a self-proclaimed affiliate of the RSS in the field of education.

Rastogi's candid confessions have sent an expected tremor not only in the NCERT, but in other teaching and research institutions too. What academics within and outside the institution fear is that the Council's credentials would be used to push forth the very kind of curricula that were rejected by it in some States. It may be recalled that in early 1993, a National Steering Committee on textbook evaluation had, after considering the History, Hindi and Mathematics textbooks of Uttar Pradesh and those of the Saraswati Shishu Mandir Prakashan, found them full of inaccuracies, distortions and communal bias.

Ever since the new Director of the NCERT took over, there has been much talk about changes in the curriculum. A Curriculum Committee which has been set up received feedback from various departments in the Council, but has kept everybody ignorant about the nature of its deliberations. "It is not a confidential thing and does not call for this hush-hush attitude," said a senior faculty member.

Rastogi is reportedly advising the NCERT in designing a new curriculum. Academicians feel that he will, as a member of the vital Programme Advisory Committee, be able to push the Hindutva agenda in the field of education. The HRD Ministry plans to announce several new programmes over the next 100 days, including one on reviewing school curricula and making them "relevant to life".

Evidently, the criteria of competence has been set aside in Joshi's recent appointments, as also the inclination towards fostering a democratic and secular mindset. As a bemused observer puts it, the BJP's slogan in education, as in many other respects, appears to be "forward to the primitive past".