:: SECULAR INDIA ::..

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, March 11th 2006:

A 4 month long controversy over 6th class California State history textbooks came to a close when the California State Board of Education (SBE) finally rejected changes proposed by two Hindutva groups. On Wednesday, the Board voted 9-0 to reject the Hindutva ‘edits’ and endorsed an alternate set of recommendations proposed by South Asia scholars and community groups.

These groups had alerted the California Education Board about the communal, narrow and casteist nature of the changes proposed by two Hindu nationalist groups, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) and the Vedic Foundation (VF). Several US based Dalit groups played a critical role in ensuring the defeat of the Hindutva forces.

Saffronization of Indian History in America

When the 6th grade California history-social science textbooks came up for review last year, two groups connected to the Hindutva movement, under the guise of multiculturalism and ‘minority rights,’ clamored for their right to influence textbook content.

They sought to insert an ideological Hindu nationalist agenda into these textbooks. The HEF, founded by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (the overseas counterpart of the RSS) and the VF (closely aligned with the VHP of America) tried to saffronize Indian history in the United States. They were joined by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), also with ties to the VHP, in what appeared to be a repeat of the Sangh Parivar’s attempt to change textbooks in India. Among the alterations they proposed:

Aryans should be represented as being indigenous to India instead of migrating from elsewhere, the harshness of the caste system should be erased and the caste system should be presented as a benevolent institution based on a division of labor, the word Dalit should be eliminated from textbooks, Hinduism should be characterized as a monotheistic faith with belief in one God, women did not have less rights than men but simply “different” rights than men, and so on.

In all, several hundred changes were proposed by these two organizations. These changes were fiercely contested by scholars on Ancient India and South Asia studies from around the world, including well-known historians such as Michael Witzel and Romila Thapar, as well as many secular community groups such as Friends of South Asia (FOSA), Coalition Against Communalism (CAC), Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA), the Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace (ACJP) and the Shri Guru Ravi Dass Gurudwara (representing the Dalit community of Sacramento) amongst others.

Facing intense pressure from the public mobilizations of the Hindutva groups, on December 2nd, the Curriculum Commission, an advisory body to the State Board of Education, approved many of their suggestions over the objections of scholars worldwide. This action caused widespread jubilation in the Sangh Parivar as evidenced in the declarations of one of its activists during the Vishwa Sangh Shibir, a global RSS meeting held in Ahmedabad in December 2005, “Through the Hindu Education Foundation run by the RSS in California, we have succeeded in correcting the misleading information in text books for primary and secondary classes.”[1]

Community groups, legislators, scholars weigh in

The declaration of victory, however, was premature. The Curriculum Commission is merely an advisory body and its recommendations to the Board are not legally binding. Subsequent to the December 2nd meeting, several secular community groups petitioned the Board to reject the Curriculum Commission’s recommendations citing various procedural flaws and noting the factual inaccuracy of these recommendations, as well as their sectarian nature.

On March 8th, after months of intense public debate in print, radio and television media across the US, the Board agreed with the assessment of the secular groups and rejected the Curriculum Commission’s recommendations in toto. Instead, the Board accepted the recommendations of the History Social Science subcommittee which met last week, and whose recommendations reflect prevailing academic opinion against the majority of ideological edits proposed by HEF and VF.

Dalit groups, concerned at the large number of proposed changes that sought to delete references to the caste system in India, have been at the forefront of public mobilization against the Sangh on this issue. Their active participation has challenged the popular media perception of the Indo-American community in California as being professional, middle-class and upper caste.

Hansraj Kajla, a representative of the Dalit community of Sacramento, informed the Board that there was a substantial Dalit community in California and that their actions in California also carry significance for the nearly 200 million Dalits in India. He applauded the SBE’s decision to reject the Hindutva proposals, “The SBE decision represents a major victory for California children, who will benefit from having historically accurate accounts of ancient Indian history.” In an earlier letter to the State Board, several Dalit leaders from India including Kancha Iliah wrote, “Allowing Hindutva advocates to rewrite caste history is akin to allowing white supremacists to rewrite the history of slavery in America.”

This controversy did not remain confined to the South Asian community. In California, a group of 17 legislators from the Women’s Caucus and the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus took the unprecedented step of writing to the Board of Education to voice their concerns over the changes suggested by the HEF and VF, particularly those regarding gender and caste. In a letter released on March 8th, the legislators expressed their dismay that some non-academic groups were influencing the Board into accepting revisionist history.

Signatories to the letter included Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero and Co-Chairs of the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, Judy Chu and Leland Yee, as well as the Vice-Chair of the Women’s Caucus, Patty Berg. They were joined by assembly members Carol Liu, Wilma Chan, Alberto Tricot, Sally Lieber, Lori Saldana, Loni Hancock, Karen Bass, Noreen Evans, Cindy Montenez, Barbara Matthews, and Senators Elaine Alquist, Sheila Kuehl, and Jackie Speier.

The fight for accuracy in textbooks percolated to the echelons of higher education as well. Approximately fifty renowned Indologists, including Michael Witzel (Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University) and Romila Thapar (Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress), registered their strong disagreement with the nature of the HEF’s and VF’s recommendations to the board as being historically inaccurate.

Over 130 South Asian Studies scholars, many of Indian origin, sent a separate letter to the SBE, cautioning that the edits proposed by the Sangh Parivar groups were not supported by respected scholarship. These letters have been followed by dozens more by individual scholars expressing consternation with the HEF’s and VF’s attempts to move textbook content in a communal direction. Moreover, faculty at federally-funded South Asia Centers at universities such as University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia offered their independent recommendations to the SBE, urging that the textbooks not be influenced by the militant Hindu nationalism of the Sangh Parivar.

'No' To Whitewash

Anu Mandavilli, an activist with Friends of South Asia (FOSA), who opposed the Sangh edits, termed the SBE decision on Wednesday “a clear victory for secular historiography” and “a reminder that history is learnt so as to be able to inform the present and not to boost the morale of children based upon a fictitious past.” The Hindutva groups, in contrast, expressed their dissatisfaction with the Board, and two lawyers with the HAF publicly threatened to sue the Board if it didn’t adopt the Curriculum Commission’s recommendations of December 2, 2005. A jubilant Thillai Kumaran of Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA), a community group opposing the HEF/VF changes, dismissed the pending lawsuit. “Threats of legal action are a clear sign of desperation on the part of the Sangh organizations; these organizations are perhaps not aware that the Board deals with dozens of lawsuits at any given time and cannot be cowed by such threats.”

Most of the contentious edits proposed by the HEF and VF, especially those downplaying caste and gender inequalities were dismissed outright by the Board. In other cases, where the Hindutva groups had wanted “gods and goddesses” to be replaced by “God”, the Board merely agreed to replacing the phrase with “deities”, leaving the polytheistic nature of Hinduism intact. The Board also disagreed with attempts to omit references to Aryans coming from outside of India.

Nalini Shekar, a San Francisco based women’s rights activist, expressed satisfaction with the outcome, “The Board’s decision reflects the pluralistic nature of Hinduism and acknowledges the history of oppression of women and Dalits. It sends a clear message to the Sangh that its communal agenda will not be tolerated.”