Welcome To The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Pustakalaya)

The BJP's once proud boast to be a political party with a difference has gradually collapsed under the weight of scandals like the Tehelkaexpose, but the party does have one, albeit small, claim touniqueness.

Unlike other political parties, the BJP runs an online book shop, which offers a variety of booksespousing its viewpoint at attractive discount prices.  As far as Ihave been able to determine, this is a first in India.  There is thecaveat that the Irish political party Sinn Fein has an online bookshop,and the Croydon branch of the BritishLabour Party has signed up to be a member of the Amazon AffiliateProgramme, allowing it to collect 15% of the cut on books sold throughits site).

Perhaps, if its enemies and former friends are to be believed,mercantilism is in the BJP's blood.  Kalyan Singh, the former BJPchief minister of Uttar Pradesh, and 'hero' of the Babri demolition, hastaken to repeating the taunt that the BJP is "basically a party ofBrahmins and Banias". 

The party seems to know how to offer an attractive bargain.  The mostexpensive item in the store, a three volume work by Shri Atal BehariVajpayee is on offer at a huge 25% discount (Rs 1500/- marked downfrom Rs 2000/-).  But this storehouse of knowledge tells more aboutthe BJP than just its business sense. 

That Bible of the RSS, the "Bunch of Thoughts" by "Guruji"M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sar Sanghachalak (supreme leader) of theRSS, is on sale (though not at a discount).  Funnily enough, though,Golwalkar's 1939 work, "We, or Our Nationhood Defined", is missing.

Both "Bunch of Thoughts" and "We" are infamous for theirracist views.In "Bunch of Thoughts", the Sar Sanghachalak expounds on his opinionthat Muslims and Christians are unpatriotic and lack "love anddevotion for the nation".  His hatred ranges farther afield.  Hedescribes the Chinese people in these terms: "They eat rats, pigs,dogs, serpents, cockroaches, and everything.  Such men cannot beexpected to have human qualities."

The missing "We" is particularly juicy: in it the author lavishespraise on the atrocious Nazi campaign that had gone on in Germany, formost of the 1930s, against Jews and Gypsies.  "There are only twocourses open to these foreign elements," Golwalkar explained, "eitherto merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or tolive at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do soand quit the country at the sweet will of the national race".  Headded that this was "a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn andprofit by".

The absence of "We" calls to mind a Rajya Sabha debate of last year,at the time of the Gujarat government's decision to allow governmentservants to be members of the RSS.  Kapil Sibal tried to read out astudy quoting from "We", and was repeatedly heckled and shouted downby BJP members.  These worthies decided that since Sibal was notreading directly from "We", but rather from a book which quoted"We",he was not quoting authentic RSS sources.  "He is misleading thenation!" shouted the fervid BJP member T.N. Chaturvedi.

Perhaps "We" is missing to prevent anyone reading directly from it inParliament, and thereby doing away with that silly objection...

There are several books on the BJP bookshop catalogue that deal,curiously enough, not with modern Indian politics, but rather withancient Indian history. They treat the period of Indian historyroughly between 3000 and 1000 B.C., i.e. between 5000 and 3000 yearsold.  These books are:

"The problem of Aryan origins", by K.D. Sethna (Rs 350)
"The Aryan invasion theory" by Srikant Talageri (Rs 250)
"Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism", by Srikant Talageri(Rs 125)
"The politics of History", by N.S. Rajaram (Rs 75) 
"Aryan Invasion of India", by N.S. Rajaram (Rs 15)

These books are about whether the Indo-Aryan languages (spoken todayby almost two-thirds of all Indians) were brought to India some timeprobably during the second millennium B.C., as scholars of ancientIndia believe, or developed indigenously, as authors like Sethna,Talageri, Rajaram and other Hindu nationalists believe.

The BJP has adopted the "Aryan" question as its own, and theappearance of this list in their book shop is one of the many actionsthe party has taken to place its stamp of approval on the particular(and generally rejected by scholars) interpretation of historycontained therein.

Shrikant Talageri, as near as I have been able to find out, is or wasa bank clerk.  N.S. Rajaram is a vitriolic Hindu nationalist whoclaims to have worked for Lockheed in the United States beforereturning to India, apparently to devote himself full-time to writingHindu nationalist works.

(Rajaram was recently the subject of embarassing revelations in themagazines Frontline and Outlook -- ABushy Tail: The Piltdown Horse -- when Michael Witzel, a Harvard professor,andSteve Farmer, a comparative historian, demonstrated that a recent bookof Rajaram's had deliberately falsified evidence to bolster hisarguments.)

What Rajaram, Talageri, Sethna (and friends and co-authors of theirs-- people like David Frawley, a New Age herbal healer; Subhash Kak, anelectrical engineer; and Georg Feuerstein, author of "Yoga forDummies" -- share in common, is a vitriolic hatred of majorityopinions about ancient Indian history in the scholarly community, anda desire to replace it with a completely different view.

The motivation is transparent.  They wish to erase the scholarlyopinion that the north Indian languages (of which the oldest is thelanguage of the Vedas) came to India as a transplant from thenorth-west.  By doing so, they can then denounce Muslims andChristians as followers of a foreign religion, without having the samecharge justifiably levelled back at them.

This is all politically understandable, but none the lessreprehensible.  For a political party to support one side of anacademic controversy -- and that the one without academic support --recalls again the bizarre times of the Nazi or Soviet regimes, whenthe Theory of Relativity was dismissed as an excess of "Jewishscience", and a generation of Russian geneticists were destroyed bythe bizarre ascendancy of the neo-Lamarckian T.D. Lysenko.

Imagine for one moment that the Republican Party were distributingpamphlets attacking the theory that the ancestors of native Americansfirst crossed the land bridge over what are now the Bering Straitsduring the Pleistocene era.  Or that the Labour Party in the UK wereselling books vilifying historians for suggesting that the Beaker folkdid not build the Long Barrows back in 2500 B.C.

This is just as strange.  It points to a lack of maturity in the wayIndian society views academia.  A useful mirror to understand this is,I suggest, the evolution-creation debate which had its last greatflare-up in United States in the Scopes Trial of 1925.

Since well before the Wilberforce-Huxley debates of 1860, opinion inthe West had been swinging away from the Biblical literalist view thatthe world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in themorning.  While scientists accepted the theory of evolution relativelyquickly -- because they understood it -- society as a whole took muchlonger to do so because they had yet to transfer their trust fromreligion, as the arbiter of their philosophy and cosmology, toscience.

Nowadays, for the most part completely, the tribal totem poles havebeen taken away from the West's priests and mystics, and handed to thescientists and other academic professionals.  This may not be idealfrom the complex perspectives of social organisation, but it doesrecognise the principle that for any sufficiently complex subject,professionals who have spent their careers understanding the subject'sminutiae and complexities are, as a group, more to be trusted tounderstand it than any other group who have not done that.

In India, perhaps because academia has never really had the funding(we are after all a poor country) that could enable it to develop thelevel of professionalism and public respect academia has in the West,the idea that all academic scholars of ancient India -- both Indiansand Westerners -- are either deluded or deliberately falsifyinghistory -- and that this can be set right by the government applyingfunding and pressure judiciously in the right areas, appearscredible.

This is crazy, lunatic, and wonky, but that's the way things are.  Theremedy may not be purely within an Indian context.  Fortunately forthe study of Indian history, the BJP government's campaign to team upwith amateur cranks and vilify academic historians only really worksinside India, where the government has vast powers to manipulatefunding, appointments and publications.

But outside India, in the universities of the West, where scholarsprove their academic credentials in the court of peer review arerelatively free of such intereference, the banias lack such powers.

While the vilification campaign that operates at full throttle inIndia against historians like Romila Thapar has also gone intooperation against Michael Witzel of Harvard after he exposed Rajaram'schicanery, it has no effect against a scholar whose publications overthe years in various aspects of Sanskrit and the study of ancientIndia are well read and respected among his peers.  The same can besaid (to take only a few examples) of other scholars like Deshpande atMichigan, Hock at Chicago, Insler at Yale, and Rocher and Cardona atthe University of Pennsylvania.

Long after the politicians have stopped shouting about ancient historyand found something else to get exercised about, it will be thesescholars, and people like them, who will contribute and shape theworld's understanding of ancient Indian history.  Not Murli ManoharJoshi, not Sushma Swaraj, not Navaratna Rajaram, and not any otherpuffed-up self-important pygmy that thinks their ethno-nationalist andpolitical views can trump the sober process of scholarship within thetradition of the academy.