From: paulchem@tigger.cs.Colorado.EDU (Icarus)
Subject: Some Comments [RSS : Silent Revolution etc.]
Organization: The Net-Anarchists of SCI, Inc.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 05:47:30 GMT


1] Your posts regarding what the R.S.S has been doing in madhya pradesh
   have been interesting to say the least. Your personal experiences with
   the leadership of the R.S.S. may have been very good and you may have
   found the people you met to be very inspiring. Most good leaders are
   charismatic personalities and often believe in what they are doing.
   They would not be effective leaders otherwise.

   I have known several people who have been active members of the R.S.S.
   during my college years and they have been and still remain some of my
   best friends.

   Strength of Faith in a principle or Ideology does not make it automatically
   good or just. Nor is personal conviction a means of verifying the truth of
   a dogma. There are probably some people in the R.S.S. who are motivated by
   the need to "Build India Again.", whose chests swell with pride when they
   imagine the rows opon rows of young enthusiastic souls marching under one
   unified banner, breaking down the obstacles, restoring the pride in our 
   past and forging one nation stepping boldly into the 21st century.
   I am, frankly, one of the many people who hopes to see such a time.

2] You implicitly support the rewriting of history books that is taking
   place in M.P. 
   Arungzeb, must be cut to size, MahaRana Pratap must be glorified.
   The Golden Age of the Guptas must be emphasised, the biographies of
   Marx, Christ  and the Buddha must be dropped.
   
   History, is something that must have only one guiding principle: Truth.
   You qoute the Sarnath Emblem, to say "Satyam Eva Jayathe", and use it
   to say that the wrongs that the muslim invaders did to the populace 
   must be corrected for. 
   And what is the truth ?
   Did Ashoka or the Chandraguptas or Maharana Pratap win their wars by
   convincing their enemies over friendly discussions ?
   What the mughals and the other invaders did was what the strong have
   always done to the weak.
   It is what Ashoka did to the thousands that he slaughtered.
   It is what China has done and is doing to Tibet.
   It is what the Germans did to Poland.
   It is what allowed the British to stand by calmly
   during the the Great famine of bengal.

   If it was the tyranny of the invader that you seek to demonstrate,
   why not emphasize the role that Akbar played ?
   There is no point in beating around the bush here.
   What is implicit in this rewriting of history is not the tyranny of 
   any ruler but his religion.

   Face up to the truth.
   India was invaded and came under foreign rule and the influence of
   foreign dominion because India and its rulers where unable to stay 
   united or lacked the military strength to repulse the invader.
   If you choose to blame these invasions on the evil nature of the
   mughals and mohammed of ghazni, then you fall into the trap of trying
   to change an immutable past.

   To qoute Fitzgeralds translation of Omar Khayyam:

   "The moving hand has written, and having writ moves on,
   all your tears and all your piety, will not wash out one 
   word of it."

   When a generation of people are brought up on false ideas of past
   glory, tragedy is the only result.
   Witness the wars that pakistan has fought with India.
   No one was more surprised by the results of the 14 day liberation
   of Bangladesh war, than the pakistani younger generation.
   A generation fed on the righteousness of 1000 year jihads and Allahs
   country always winning. One pakistani they said was equal to ten
   Indians, and Indians did not know how to fight, pakistanis were
   born of the military races.
   We have seen excerpts from the history books that are now being used
   in Pakistan, posted on the net which talk degradingly of India and
   Indians.

   Rewriting of history is what the German state during world war two
   was all about. The Aryan people who were naturally selected to rule
   the world. The tragedy of the holocaust is an example of what state
   sponsored rewriting of history can do.

   And the history that is taught in India even now has a slant that 
   says that the 1962 war was a great betrayal, and the younger generation
   of Indians believed that the russians helped us and the Americans were
   capitalist villains.

   A cursory reading of John Kenneth Galbraith's
   dispassionate account "The Kennedy Years"
   shows up the extent of U.S. involvement and U.S. culpability in the
   cause of the chinese invasion and the attitude of the russians etc.


3] India has managed to avoid the worst pitfalls of religious 
   fundamentalism that many countries have fallen prey to.

   We have leap-frogged an age of the Church ruling the State and
   directly arrived into a secular state, without suffering periods
   of state sponsored religious favouritism.

   Now that is being changed, insidiously and we regress into 
   the past, where we will begin again to think of ourselves as
   Hindus, Muslims and countless other denominations.


  All religious fundamentalism is backward looking, regardless of 
  its denomination.


4] I have no doubts that India has remained secular only because the
   Majority ie the Hindus have allowed it to remain secular.
   But that is true of all western countries, where the state religion
   by all the previous arguments should be Christianity if one went by
   population alone. Spare a moment to see why modern states have 
   finally fallen into the secular form of democracy. See why allowing
   a religion to permeate the state apparatus, slows down social and
   material progress. 


5] Now coming to the specifics.
   The deletion of the biographies of Marx and the Buddha and Christ 
   etc are retrograde moves, because all of them have had a profound 
   influence on the lives and histories of millions of people. They
   are part of the worlds history. Denying this fact only shows up
   the attitude of these rewriters of history to be insular.
   A history book that claims to tell the story of the world, and
   ignores them is as far removed from reality as a textbook, to
   use a computer friendly example, that studies operating systems
   without mentioning Dennis and Ritchie.
   This is as wrong and hypocritical as ignoring hinduism as a 
   world religion or Mahatma Gandhi or Mao as world leaders.
   We need to teach children the truth, not what we want to be the
   truth.

   Regarding the bringing up of children in the tradition that the
   RSS wants, how is it any different than the generations of russian
   children who were taught that Prof. Popov. invented the radio,
   because Marxism was naturally superior to Capitalism ?
   How is it any different from what the Jesuits did to generations of
   catholics ? How is it any different than the often criticised 
   practice of the Nuns in catholic schools who force children to pray
   in churches or teach them christian parables suppressing hindu myths ?

   The introduction of vedic math may have some virtue in it, if it is
   shown to be practical in its application to modern problems.
   If the advantage to be gained by introducing this system outweighs 
   the cost of overturning the current methods, than this is a good thing.
   If on the other hand it is a pointless exercise in nostalgia, it
   deserves to be laid to rest.

   Atleast the nuns did not force these children to come to their schools.
   Personally, I condemn any form of religious instruction in a instituition
   that is not explicitly set up for such a purpose.
   
   What the RSS is attempting to do, is impose a ideology on a whole 
   populace, by using its influence with the M.P. government.

6] I have written a rather long article.
   I feel very strongly about this.
   I would like to see some discussion on these issues,
   especially from some one who feels what I say here is wrong,
   without trading insults.

   Stay Cool.
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