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The
heavy cost the nation had to pay for poisoning the minds
of young children was seen in Gujarat during the mass
murders following Godhra and in Orissa recently
Wherever they went, they had a sword in their hand.
Their army went like a storm in all the four directions.
Any country that came their way was destroyed. Houses of
prayers and universities were destroyed. Libraries were
burnt religious books were destroyed. Mothers and
sisters were Humiliated.
Mercy and justice were unknown to them.
This is what lakhs of children going to RSS-run schools
will learn. About Islam, at the tender age of nine, from
their textbook Gaurav Gatha for class four published by
Saraswati Shishu Mandir Prakashan (an RSS-run pub-lishing
house)
As visible proof of Muslim atrocities the same book also
teaches:
Delhi Qutb Minar is Even today famous in his (Qutbuddin
Aibak's) name. This had not been built by him. He could
not have been able to build it. It was actually built by
emperor Samudra Gupta. Its real today Christian
missionaries are engaged in fostering antinational
tendencies in Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal, Bihar,
Kerala, and other regions of our country because of
which there is a grave danger to the integrity of
present day India.
Warnings unheeded: The heavy cost the nation had to pay
for this kind of poisoning of the minds of young
children (a poisoning aided by the BJP using state power
whenever and wherever they got hold of it) was seen in
Gujarat during the mass murders following Godhra and in
Orissa recently. For years before the Godhra riots
secular activists like Teesta Setalvad had been warning
repeatedly that if the communal hatred being taught to
Gujarat children went unchecked, then Gujarat was
heading inevitably towards the kind of communal carnage
it witnessed in 2002.
After all the children in Gujarat who were exposed to
the RSS type of education were not only learning to see
the enemy in Muslims and Christians, they were also
learning how to deal with it.
Children reading the Gujarat State Social Studies text
for class IX would learn:
Apart from the Muslims even the Christians, Parsees and
other foreigners are also recognised as the minority
communities. In most of the states the Hindus are in
minority and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are in
majority in these respective states.
In the Gujarat State Social Studies text for Std. X,
which virtually eulogises fascism and Nazism, the
children would learn how to deal with these who are
making the Hindus a minority in their own country.
Internal Achievements of Nazism: Hitler lent dignity and
prestige to the German government within a short time by
establishing a strong administrative set up. He created
the vast state of Greater Germany. He adopted the policy
of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated
the supremacy of the German race. He adopted a new
economic policy and brought prosperity to Germany. He
instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.
That in order to maintain the purity and supremacy of
the race millions of Jews were butchered was not even
thought worthy of mention.After all, the RSS ideologue,
Guru Golwalkar, had categorically stated in We or Our
Nationhood Defined, p. 55-56: German race-pride has now
become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of
the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the semitic racesthe Jews.
Race-pride at its highest has been manifested here.
Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is
for Races and cultures, having differences going to the
root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good
lesson for use in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.
These are only a few samples of the kind of ideological
poisoning that is undertaken by the RSS and its allies.
We have in our book RSS, School Texts and the Murder of
Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project, Sage, New
Delhi, 2008, (authored by Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula
Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan, all Professors of History
at JNU) tried to show extensively how the vicious Hindu
communal propaganda not only led to the murder of one
the greatest living Hindus, Mahatma Gandhi, but even
today threatens the very survival of the great legacy of
our freedom struggle for a secular, multi-cultural
democratic state.
No regulatory frame work: No civilised country in the
world today will permit racism (communalism is akin to
racism and anti-semitism) to be propagated at the
popular level, especially at the child's level. It is
shocking that more than sixty years after independence
hate speeches can still be given during mass election
campaigns threatening to cut off the hands of Muslims.
It is totally unacceptable that our children are still
exposed to hatred towards other communities despite
secular governments making promises about the education
system. A promise last made in 2004 when the victory of
the secular forces provided a historic opportunity to
combat communalism and to restore the civilisational
values of the freedom struggle which were getting
severely eroded under BJP rule. However, more than four
years later, schools are free to choose any textbooks
they please and there is no regulatory framework in
place for whetting textbooks before they can be used.
(The writers are professors of history at Jawaharlal
Nehru University.)
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