The family residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s independence architects and confidant of Mahatma Gandhi, is now a museum that preserves his memory. But 75 years later, Hindu nationalists are rethinking history as they please.
“Visitors used to come here, full of deference,” recalls Vinod Mishra, a museum employee in memory of India’s prime minister.
“Now we are talking about his house, his property, suggesting that he has become very rich like so many” corrupt “politicians”, criticizes the one who has worked at the museum for 15 years.
Nehru’s Congress party and the dynasty he founded – his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv also served as prime minister – have dominated Indian politics for decades.
But since 2014 Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been in power and do whatever it takes to stay there.
Mr. Modi often criticizes Nehru, holding him responsible for the ongoing conflict in Kashmir and the defeat of the war against China in 1962, to better discredit Congress, now the main opposition party.
According to historians and rights defenders, the BJP is committed to revising history in order to give pride of place to its ideology.
– The Mughal emperor against the Hindu king –
Mughal Akbar, emperor from 1556 to 1602, had defeated the Hindu Maharana Pratap, king of the province of Mewar, in the battle of Haldighati (1576). But in some Indian history books, he is now given the loser.
As in “Maharanas: A Thousand Year War for Dharma”, a work by Omendra Ratnu that aims to rewrite history to the glory of Hindu kings and warriors, denying the greatness of the Mughal Empire.
“What have the Islamic invasions done to this country in 1,400 years of assault?” the author told AFP.
“They built three buildings – the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and the Qutub Minar – all three challenged by Hindu claims,” he says in support of his thesis.
Amit Shah, Minister of the Interior, Narendra Modi’s fundamental ally, personally defended this work, stating that “no one can prevent us from writing the truth”.
“Now we are independent. We can write our own history,” he said.
Many BJP leaders describe the Mughal dynasties that ruled India as invading barbarians to foment hatred against 210 million Muslim Indians.
Of the 1.4 billion Indians, 98% are Hindus.
The history of traditional India is, according to Omendra Ratnu, “a scam”, welcoming the current revision of the textbooks as “a small step, but a step in the right direction”.
Following the same principle, Allahabad where Nehru’s residence is located, was renamed Prayagraj, its ancient Hindu name, lost just under the reign of Akbar.
Hindu nationalists accuse historians of glorifying these Mughal emperors, forgetting the achievements of the Hindu lords.
According to them, historians have also exaggerated the role of Congress in the struggle for independence, overshadowing the nationalist figures revered by the BJP.
As a result, contemporary history is also being scrambled, says a local newspaper, accusing an administration of having obscured, in some school textbooks, any reference to the interfaith uprisings that took place in 2002 in the state of Gujarat. Was by Mr. Modi. They killed around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
– Education “with the taste of saffron” –
The BJP-ruled states of Haryana and Gujarat have added a Hindu holy book to the school curriculum, proselytizing within the alleged secular education system itself.
The revisionist efforts of the BJP are primarily aimed at “shaping its role today for decades to come,” says New Delhi historian S. Irfan Habib.
“It’s dangerous because these books train young minds who will grow up with a very different understanding of India,” warns Habib.
But, he told AFP, “the government has an absolute majority, there isn’t much to do”.
A speech by the founder of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the ideological source of the BJP, appears in a Karnataka school textbook.
Rahul Gandhi, Nehru’s great-grandson and leader of the Congress party, criticizes an “attempt to provide children with saffron-flavored teachings (…)”, in reference to the emblematic color of Hinduism.
It is “an insult to India, the cradle of diversity”, he denounces.
Au Karnataka, un autre manuel scolaire raconte que Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, révolutionnaire nationaliste et idéologue de l ‘”Hindutva” (hégémonie hindoue), faisait, lorsqu’il était prisonnier des Britanniques, de fréquentes excursions hors de sa cells sur les ailes des petits birds.
Vikram Sampath, Savarkar’s biographer, protests against this “stupid insertion”. With other young historians working for the “decolonization” of the history of India, he still hopes for quality reviews.
But India “is slowly maturing as a democracy,” he says, hoping that “historical figures will not be held hostage by the race for success of contemporary electoral politics.”
