Witch-hunting in India: Hindu McCartyism

Praful Bidwai, Inter Press Service, New Delhi

India is undoubtedly a success story as an electoral democracy. Not many Third World countries can match its record in stabilizing democratic structures of governance over half a century.

But freedom of expression, so central to real democracy, is being increasingly threatened in India by the Hindu political right aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Pro-BJP groups have in recent years burned books, demolished exhibitions, attacked artists and ransacked newspaper offices because they happen to be secular, defend pluralism, or are critical of hooligans who claim to be acting in the name of the "tolerant" Hindu faith.

Today, India's Hindutva (pro-Hindu) fanatics and their cousins living abroad are retraining their guns on secular-minded writers, academics and scholars too. Their latest target is Romila Thapar, an illustrious historian of ancient India, and one of India's highly distinguished world-class scholars with a truly international profile and reputation.

The professor has a formidable body of original work to her credit, including the classic and widely disseminated text "History of India" and "Asoka and the Decline of Mauryas", "History and Beyond" and "Cultural Pasts".

Thapar has taught at numerous universities, including Oxford, London, Cornell and Paris, besides Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has received honorary doctorates from countless learned institutions.

Thapar was recently appointed to the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the U.S. Library of Congress, the world's greatest library of record. This triggered one of the most malicious hate campaigns against a scholar anywhere, through an on-line petition that now has over 2,900 signatories.

The signatories accuse Thapar of being an "vowed antagonist of India's Hindu civilization who wants to discredit India in the same way as the Europeans discredited the American Indians' land claims". They say that as a Marxist, she represents a completely Eurocentric worldview and disavows that India ever had a history.

The petitioners are not even acquainted with Thapar's work. She has spent half her career arguing against Eurocentric stereotypes, which hold that ancient Indian society was static and lacked a sense of history. She has studied India's civilization with all its multiple traditions -- secular and religious, metaphysical and scientific.

Some of Thapar's most exciting work refutes the Eurocentric notion that ancient Indians only had a cyclical concept of time and shows that they had linear and genealogical notions too.

The petition says that Thapar is engaged in a "war of cultural genocide" only because she rejects the view that ancient India, with its Jain, Buddhist, Christian, animist, and agnostic traditions, was essentially Hindu.

The petitioners are downright abusive. Examples of their comments: "She is a pinko and a fake historian", "this Thapar woman will be a Trojan horse for Islamic terrorists", a "prelude to Hindu Holocaust ", "she is a Marxist who is as fundamentalist as Muslim "jihadists", and "she should be stripped of her citizenship".

This campaign represents the rebirth of McCarthyism, the 20th century worst witchhunt outside Nazi Germany, conducted in the post-World War II United States by Sen Joseph McCarthy against anyone suspected to be a communist.

Indeed, one signatory actually invokes McCarthy: "Fidel Castro would have been a better choice (than Thapar). At least he is not a venom-spitting anti-Hindu. Indian communists have already infiltrated into all the American universities. And now the Library of Congress. McCarthy, where are you?"

There is a strong counter-campaign too, in which a number of accomplished historians and other scholars are signatories.

The Library of Congress is most unlikely to rescind Thapar's appointment. But if similar hate campaigns are organized against lesser-known Indian scholars of secular persuasion, some U.S. institutions might want to play safe and avoid appointing them.

This will further vitiate the intellectual climate not just in India, but in the United States too. Already, a great deal of damage has been done in India to the cause of free expression, the right to which is fundamental in a democracy.

Just two years ago, D.N. Jha, another distinguished historian, based at Delhi University, became a victim of extreme intolerance and outright censorship. He wrote a book called The Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions.

This carefully documented the fact that beef-eating was not introduced in India by Muslims, but that Hindus in ancient India, including Brahmins -- supposedly the purest caste -- regularly ate beef, as did non-Hindus.

Each statement in the text was backed by references because the historian was aware that fanatical Hindu right-wingers would find the book sacrilegious, largely because they are themselves running a campaign to ban cow slaughter in India, and have no respect for the truth.

India's BJP-led government is planning to move a bill banning cow slaughter in the next session of Parliament -- although large numbers of Indians, including Hindus, for instance, in southern Kerala state, and low-caste "Dalits", eat beef, the cheapest source of first-class protein.

Jha's regular publisher, who had handled his three previous books, decided not to print The Holy Cow after it had been fully typeset. Jha then found an obscure publisher. As soon as the book was released in April 2001, a pro-BJP newspaper wrote a lurid, sensational report carrying some lines from the text without mentioning the context or references.

Based on this, two organizations -- one of them linked to Vishwa Hindu Parishad, affiliated with the BJP, moved a court in Hyderabad, which ordered a ban on the book all over India.

Jha eventually managed to get the book published but in Britain, by Verso Books. The ban on the book has since been lifted. But the British edition is priced at over US$25, way above the affordable Indian price.

Not many librarians in India have mustered the courage to buy the book. And as yet, there is no Indian co-publisher willing to print an Indian edition.

This climate of intolerance, intimidation and hate-speech is getting worse.

Recently, an official agency crudely suppressed two volumes of edited essays on India's freedom struggle, because the editors are well-known secular historians of modern India.

Under the BJP, school textbooks are being doctored and rewritten to promote Hindu majoritarianism and Aryan supremacism. The situation is fast approaching a point where Ayatollah-style "fatwas" might be issued against writers and academics who see India as a multicultural, pluralist and secular society.