Frontline
June 1999
Saffron watch

‘626 communal attacks during BJP rule’
The All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) general secretary, Brinda Karat, at a press conference in Mumbai in April, quoted Rajya Sabha figures which stated that 626 communal attacks had taken place in the 13 months of BJP rule. These attacks claimed 207 lives and injured 2,065, she added. It was largely the Christian community that had been targeted and on an average at least seven people were victim to communal assaults daily during the 13 month tenure. The AIDWA condemned the attacks on the secular fabric of the country.

The annual report of the Union ministry of home affairs submitted in late April, however, while admitting that the number of anti–Christian attacks had shown a steep increase in 1998 as against those in 1997, downplayed the incidents as largely coincidental. The report, which devoted only one paragraph to anti–Christian crimes stated, "In 1998, there were 84 incidents as against 30 during the corresponding period of 1997. Some of these cases were crime–oriented and it was a coincidence that the victims were Christians." Only a few of the cases, the report declared, were pre–meditated as in the case of the Staines murders. The report went on to tacitly lay the blame on missionary activities by saying that some religious organisations had accused Christian missionaries of proselytisation, but this did not justify such "retaliation".

The report has in stead highlighted the increasing communal disturbances in the South, perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslim organisations such as the Al–Umma, TMMK, MIM, and NDF and Left–wing terrorism in Bihar, Orissa, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. The high point of the report is the statement that there was a "marked decline" in communal violence during 1998 as compared to the previous year.

The friendly Aryan and other historical ‘facts’
The Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Samiti, formed in 1973 with the blessings of the Sangh Parivar is out to reveal the ‘true’ version of Indian history in order to counter the British bias implicit in Indian history so far. Formed in the memory of Baba Apte, a well–known RSS ideologue, the Samiti intends primarily to put forth two simple ‘truths’. Firstly, it intends to show how the Muslim rulers burnt every document of history testifying to the glorious Hindu past and secondly, it aims to expose how the British inflicted atrocity after atrocity on the Indian population which does not find mention in their version of Indian history. One of the ‘lies’ already exposed by the Samiti is the view that Aryans were a band of light–skinned marauders from some distant cold clime. The Samiti counters this view and asserts that the Aryans were really of Indian origin and spilled out of India to spread their own culture and civilisation rather than to loot and plunder. The negative image of the Aryans, they declare, is simply another lie invented by the British to justify their subjugation of India.

The Samiti has 400 branches all over India and calls itself "an unbiased, a–political association", its only mission being to rectify the alleged harm done by the British and other evils. It has also evolved its own methodology in research. "One should start from the district headquarters and reach the village, the family and the individual", the Samiti believes. Once each of the district studies is complete, all the brief histories written at district, town and village levels are to be put together in order to arrive at the complete glorious picture of Bharat.

At its annual conference in Calcutta, the Samiti declared its intention to set up a special investigation cell to study the partition of India. One of the Samiti’s key achievements so far, is the ‘cleansing’ of Christian influence on historical chronology. The kalgana or the ‘scientific Hindu way of calculating time’ does away with the BC/AD system and works according to the Hindu calculation of time traced from the Deva Yuga to the present Kala Yuga.

UP teachers oppose saffron scheme
Government offices are not the only areas the saffron brigade is infiltrating. The UP BJP government’s move to transfer all matters concerning primary and secondary education to the panchayats also seems to be part of the saffronisation of the system in the most pervasive manner possible. The BJP decision, declared in mid–May, seeks a halt to any new appointments to teaching posts for a period of two years. Those who retire will be replaced by ad hoc teachers and permanent teachers will later be selected by the panchayats.

The proposed move is being seen as a bid to replace the existing cadre of teachers with those sharing the saffron ideology. Another aspect is the fact that the teachers appointed locally by the panchayats will enjoy only 10 per cent of the salaries and perks offered to permanent government teachers.

The teachers however, have decided to oppose the move vehemently. The Primary and Secondary Teacher’s Federation of Uttar Pradesh and their parent body, the UP Teacher’s Association, have scheduled a rally for August 22, where all five lakh government teachers are expected to participate. O. P. Sharma, the Federation convenor said, "The move to transfer powers to panchayats may be part of the 73rd amendment but it does not account for the fact that trained and learned teachers will be replaced by semi–literates." The Federation also fears that the books and courses taught in the primary schools will gradually be changed to tow the saffron line.

Meanwhile, the BJP government at the Centre has taken a tough stand on the curriculum changes in the communist state of West Bengal. The Union government directed the West Bengal state government in April, to purge the secondary school syllabus of what it termed as a surfeit of socialist countries’ history. The state education minister, Anil Biswas has, however, threatened a campaign against such "interference".

BJP says, "Church chalo"!
The UP government has hit upon an idea to counter the negative publicity that the BJP state governments have received after the attacks on Christians in Gujarat and Orissa. It has drawn up short and medium term plans to develop and beautify churches in the state and even build good approach roads to them. Though the VHP and Bajrang Dal are "unhappy" with the move, the UP government has shown great enthusiasm for the idea and has even coined the catch line, "Church chalo", echoing the UP tourism department’s "UP chalo" slogan. Eleven churches will benefit with this new scheme of positioning state churches as tourist attractions. In a new UP tourism brochure, a whole chapter on churches is to be included. The idea comes from Dinesh Sharma, former youth BJP president of UP, currently chairman of Uttar Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation. Sharma, while asserting that the move was commercially sound as the churches in the state would be a major attraction to western tourists, more or less admitted there was a political angle, too: "Whenever we are criticised for allegedly attacking Christian missionaries, we can say that we are not against Christians or their monuments", he said.

This cosmetic move towards proving the BJP’s non–biased stand has been met with amusement from the state Congress and with scepticism from the Catholic community itself. Kuch Bhargava, media co–ordinator of the UP Congress, said that the BJP’s "new–found love for churches" would not fool anybody. Even Father Alvin Moras, the additional parish priest of the Cathedral parish in Lucknow was sceptical, saying they were unsure of the real intention of the BJP behind the move.

In addition to churches, the UP tourism department is also pumping in money to repair several Muslim shrines. It has already launched a Rs.1 crore project to repair the imperious Imambaras built during the Nawabi period in Lucknow; similar plans are in the offing for the Muslim shrine of Dewa Sharif at Barabanki. Election time may prove to be useful to minorities!

‘80,000 RSS workers in government offices’
Early in April, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Samajwadi Party president, accused the BJP–led government of flooding government offices with RSS workers. He declared that the BJP had managed to convert the Raj Bhavans into RSS training centres having packed them with at least 80,000 RSS workers in the past one year and distributed most executive posts to them. This, he asserted was the reason that elected governments in the states where such governors had been appointed were constantly at loggerheads with each other. Further, the governors were appointing RSS activists as vice–chancellors in the state universities in order to promote the RSS ideology in educational institutions. All this, including the rewriting of history textbooks, he declared, was part of the RSS strategy to capture the government from within.

Mulayam Singh Yadav’s claim found a backer in former naval chief, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, who, in his first public address subsequent to his removal, also alleged that the BJP government was trying to subvert the parliamentary system by posting RSS sympathisers in important institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research, the information and broadcasting ministry and Prasar Bharati. The gravest crime according to the Admiral was the government’s attempts to communalise the armed forces. He further alleged that all members of the government were under obligation to one foreign agency or another and called for the urgent restructuring of the country’s intelligence system.

Theatre artists fight back
May 10 saw a protest march, a public meeting and a street play on communal harmony being staged in Anekal town in Karnataka. The protest was against the May 1 attack on ‘Samudaya’ artists by BJP supporters at Anekal. ‘Samudaya’, a theatre troupe, had been mauled when they were about to stage a street play, Kesari, Bili, Hasiru (saffron, white, green), on communal harmony. The troupe went on to stage the play on the 10th. Girish Karnad, the author of the play and filmmaker, M S Sathyu, were present to lend support to the cause. The march was joined by the local Communist Party of India (Marxist) unit, Praja Vimochana Chaluvali (PVC), Student’s Federation of India (DYFI), Dalit Sangharsha Samithi (DSS), Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) and the Bangalore Rural District Powerloom and Handloom workers’ union. The theatre artist who had been injured in the May 1 attack and was still recuperating from his wounds, led the march with a heavily bandaged head. Karnad, who spoke at the meeting, referred to similar attacks that had been made against the Marathi play, Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy. He asserted that he along with other writers and intellectuals had protested the attacks on that play as well, though, he said, "we may not agree with what Godse stood for."


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