The Final Solution

The rewriting of history and the creation of an alternate reality

Swords and knives can’t be regarded as weapons, says BJP national secretary

NCERT Drops References to Babri Demolition, Gujarat Riots

Before: “Many cases of human rights violations in diverse fields, for instance, Gujarat riots, are being brought to the public notice from across India.”

After: “Many cases of human rights violations in diverse fields are being brought to the public notice from across India.”

Before: “More than 1,000 persons, mostly Muslims, were massacred during the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002.”

After: “More than 1,000 persons were killed during the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002.”

With reference to the dropping of “mostly Muslims” in the second instance, the NCERT has a ‘clarification’: “In any riots people across communities suffer. It cannot just be one community.”

In May 2005, the AB Vajpayee-led government released its official body count in the post-Godhra riots, and “told Parliament that 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, 223 more people reported missing and another 2,500 injured.” But according to NCERT, it cannot be that one community was disproportionately affected.

The proposed changes are not limited to airbrushing the more disreputable acts of the saffron brigade — they also seek to rewrite the origin story of the sub-continent and its people. It is part of a grand design to remake the country, its history, and its institutional memory — a carefully calibrated long-term project aimed at recasting India in a Hindu majoritarian image.

IN February 1998, on the last day of campaigning for the general election of that year, I spent the day touring Baramati in company of Sharad Pawar (and Girija Vyas) in the former’s Pajero. As was his norm, Pawar spent the last day of the campaign touring the outlying villages of his constituency before culminating his campaign in a public meeting in the city.

He was in a chatty mood, willing to address any question I cared to ask. The result was a wide-ranging two-part interview (Part 1 and Part 2) that stands the test of time. Inter alia, the NCP chief said something that I didn’t see the full significance of at the time, but which resonates now. Follows an extended quote (Emphasis mine):

Talking of mistakes, a very senior BJP leader said that the Congress made a big one when it didn't allow the Vajpayee government to survive the vote of confidence... Why?

The argument I heard was that if the Congress had abstained, the Vajpayee government would have survived the vote of confidence. But being in a minority, it would not have been able to achieve anything at all, and in time it would have fallen. And with its fall, the stability plank would have been lost to the party for ever.... The BJP should never be allowed to rule, it is too dangerous. For instance, Advani was a minister during the Janata government -- and in his short tenure, he managed to fill his ministry with RSS people, and that gave us a headache when we came back to power.

The BJP and the RSS practise the politics of infiltration. I'll give you an example. Before the fall of the Babri Masjid, Bhairon Singh Shekawat and I were negotiating with the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janambhoomi people, for three days we had intense negotiations. We reached a stage where, in one more day or maybe two, we could have come to an agreement. But at that time, the senior RSS person involved in the discussions said he had to leave for three days.

I asked him why, I argued with him, told him nothing could be more important, but he was adamant. So finally I asked him where he was going, and he said Hyderabad, to attend the seminar of the Indian History Congress. I was quite shocked that he thought a seminar was more important that this.

That is when he explained. The IHC controls the way Indian history is written and studied, it approves syllabus and textbooks, it has total control. And the key weapon of the RSS is education, its goal is to rewrite Indian history to suit its agenda. In fact, the RSS is already doing it -- the portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as anti-Muslim is only one example, they talk of how Afzal Khan tried to trick him and how Shivaji killed Afzal Khan, that is the story the kids read about, but conveniently, no one menions that Shivaji's chief army commander was a Muslim, that he personally constructed three mosques for Muslims... one of my candidates in the state is a direct descendant of Shivaji Maharaj, and his family still pays money for the upkeep of these mosques, but this is never mentioned. Shivaji maintained that all communities and religions should live in harmony, but look how that is being distorted today!

Sorry, but how does all this tie up with the IHC?

To be a member, you have to do post graduation, and masters, in Indian history. So over the years, the RSS has been systematically selecting students, instructing them to study history, and getting them into the IHC, at last count the RSS-oriented students are 46 per cent of the society. Another five per cent, and the RSS will control it, and then it will write Indian history to suit its own ends. That body is like that, it plans ahead, and works systematically to achieve its goals. In fact, I must say that though the RSS and the BJP are my political enemies, I admire this quality in them, they plan for the future and they work steadily towards a goal.

26 years ago, Pawar saw — and warned — of what was coming. And it is not just in the field of education — the RSS has used the same model to infiltrate handpicked people into the police forces, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, into every single pillar that holds up the edifice of democracy.

Pawar was not the only canary in the political coal mine. Subramanian Swamy has changed political affiliations at will (as I wrote in this 1998 profile of the maverick politician) — but through it all, he remains remarkably clued in to what is happening both within the government of the day and the opposition, thanks to an extensive network of bureaucrats he has assiduously cultivated, and who to this day provide him with information the powers that be would like to keep hidden from the public gaze.

Back in 2000, Swamy wrote an essay for Frontline titled the RSS Game Plan, which reads like a blueprint for the times we are now living through. The RSS blueprint is titled, appropriately enough, The Final Solution, and it is to be accomplished through the following incremental steps (partial quotes):

• THE first component of the game plan is to discredit the RSS' opponents but protect its converts… By a series of such sham prosecutions and managed associate media leaks, the RSS expects to undermine the democratic Opposition in India. They hope to tak e full advantage of the factions of democratic parties as they did with the Janata Dal recently.

• The second component of the RSS game plan is to shake public confidence in every institution that can circumscribe or act as a speed-breaker for the RSS juggernaut. The Law Minister has already initiated moves to emasculate the Supreme Court via the judicial commission…

• The Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister has elevated an RSS activist to the post of a selector of teachers in the National Council for Educational Research and Training…

• Christians are being targeted by the front organisations of the RSS in order to terrorise and ghetto-ise all minorities.

• The third component of the RSS game plan is to ready the blueprints for implementing the agenda. Of course they cannot implement it in the present Parliament, but it will be their USP (unique selling proposition) for the mid-term poll. They have already scripted the new history texts; they have sent into circulation amongst the faithful how the new Constitution of India should be structured.

• The RSS game plan also has proposals to bridle the electoral system. Adult suffrage is out, but furthermore, the electoral college for the Lok Sabha will not vote for candidates, but for parties under a List System.

• Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) will be used in all the constituencies. Perhaps it is then easier to rig the outcome. After all, in the 1999 general elections, the BJP and its allies won 34 out of the 45 Lok Sabha constituencies which had EVMs.

There is more, and every point Swamy made 24 years ago, and which was then dismissed as the ranting of an opportunist politician whose ambitions were thwarted, is now our lived reality.

In a recent interview to TimesNow, Tamil Nadu’s IT Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan suggests that what we are heading into is not the death of democracy — democracy, he says, is already dead, the upcoming election is all of us participating in the wake.

I can see his point, but I retain sufficient optimism (at times, despite the evidence of my senses) to believe that we as a nation have been given this one last chance to turn the clock back, to at least begin the process of undoing the damage the saffron brigade has inflicted on us over decades of meticulous planning and implementation.

PostScript: My copy of Ece Temelkuran’s How To Lose A Country is heavily annotated; the parallels between what she saw happening in Turkey and what we are seeing in India are many, and unmissable.

Among the optimists, the belief is that the BJP will fail to win a majority in the upcoming election, and that will be that — we can all return to at least a semblance of normalcy.

To believe that is to miss the real danger, which comes not from the men at the top who can and will be changed, but from the poison that has seeped deep into all sections of society. I’ll leave you with one passage from Temelkuran that lays it out in stark terms:

It doesn’t matter if Trump or Erdoğan is brought down tomorrow, or if Nigel Farage had never become a leader of public opinion. The millions of people fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves. It is better to acknowledge – and sooner rather than later – that this is not merely something imposed on societies by their often absurd leaders, or limited to digital covert operations by the Kremlin; it also arises from the grassroots. The malady of our times won’t be restricted to the corridors of power in Washington or Westminster. The horrifying ethics that have risen to the upper echelons of politics will trickle down and multiply, come to your town and even penetrate your gated community. It’s a new zeitgeist in the making. This is a historic trend, and it is turning the banality of evil into the evil of banality. For though it appears in a different guise in every country, it is time to recognise that what is occurring affects us all.

Cover image of children marching with arms at a Ram Navami rally organised by the RSS, courtesy The Hindu