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Many politicians are asking for a rewriting of Indian history, especially ancient history, to reflect the ‘right’ ideology. The latest to join this chorus is Subramanian Swamy. Last Sunday, he asked that Indian history be rewritten to enable the country to emerge as a powerful nation, and that doing so in the right perspective would allow the younger generation to get rid of their “low self-esteem” and would pave the way for India to emerge as a great power.
Very thoughtful. But I hope Mr Swamy understands the intended and unintended consequences of such a project. Many ideological regimes in the past such as the Nazis and the Soviets in particular rewrote their history textbooks to provide the right mindset to their younger generation. The consequences, as the world has seen, were not pretty and both regimes ended up destroying themselves and millions of lives.
But Mr Swamy doesn’t need to go as far afield as Europe to understand the consequences of his history project. A live experiment to provide the “right historical narrative” to the younger generation is on in our immediate neighbourhood.
Pakistan has been rewriting – or should I say ‘inventing’? – its history for over 30 years now. But the project has neither made Pakistani kids the brightest in the world nor has the country become a great power.
If anything, it has radicalised society and messed up the Pakistani sense of self. The results have been devastating for Pakistan's society and for its economy.
In Pakistan, history textbooks are used to provide a standard narrative of the country at the cost of its multi-cultural past and diversity. They talk of millennia of war between Hindus and Muslims, and portray the former as villains who destroyed the ancient Islamic heritage of the sub-continent, necessitating the creation of a fortress of Islam – Pakistan. Foreign invaders such as Ahmed Shah Abdali, who ravaged Mughal cities such as Lahore, Peshawar and Delhi, are given a hero's treatment.
Look up the names of Pakistan’s various missiles and warships and you get my drift.
In Pakistan, history begins with the conquest of Sindh by an Arab general named Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 AD. There is little or no mention of the sub-continent's common ancient history – of the Indus Valley Civilisation, the Aryan invasion, the rise and spread of Buddhism and Jainism, the Greek conquest of the North-Western part of the Indian subcontinent, or Ashoka’s empire.
The narrative jumps from one Muslim regime to the other and ignores other regimes that co-existed in the sub-continent. They ignore the fact that, often, the fight for supremacy was between Muslim rulers. For example, the Mughals fought Ibrahim Lodhi of the Delhi Sultanate. For Pakistani kids the fight is always between a brutal Hindu ruler and a great Muslim warrior.
They also pick and choose rulers to suit their own narrative. Akbar is widely acknowledged as the greatest Mughal ruler for consolidating Mughal power by secularising it and ending discrimination against non-Muslims. In Pakistani textbooks, though, Aurangzeb gets maximum mileage, as a leader who established the spirit of Pakistan.
Never mind that it was Aurangzeb who hastened the fall of the Mughal empire, starting with a fratricidal battle with his elder brother, heir-apparent Dara Shikoh. A liberal in the mould of Akbar, Dara was popular with the public but disliked by the Muslim clergy.
Aurganzeb proceeded to Islamise the Mughal regime and re-introduced the Jizya (a tax on non-Muslims), alienating Hindus, including many regional Hindu allies. Not surprisingly, when the Europeans came, they were welcomed by many as saviours from the unjust Mughal regime. The Mughal empire was over for all practical purposes within a generation of Aurangzeb’s death.
The idea in Pakistan is to manipulate its citizens’ self-identity. Pakistani identity has been divorced from the larger South Asian one and is now part of the larger Arab identity. This plays into the Pakistan state's and its army’s eternal war with India.
The result has been a radicalisation of Pakistani society, and the country now faces an internal rebellion. At the larger level, the state’s mindless focus on creating an ideological society has left it with little resources or creativity to forge a coherent and inclusive economic agenda for the country.
The result? Once South Asia’s most prosperous, that country is now an economic basket case, consistently underperforming the rest of the region. Over the past 40 years, Pakistan’s GDP in US dollar terms grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 6.8 per cent, lower than India (8.4 per cent) and even Bangladesh (7.4 per cent).
In the early ’70s, Pakistan’s per capita income was double that of India and Bangladesh and ahead of Sri Lanka. Now, it is one of the lowest in South Asia – only Bangladesh and Nepal are worse.
A deadly mixture of social & political instability and suppression of ideas has impeded the rise of new industries and there has been a virtual collapse in long-term investment. Until the early 1970s, there was only a small difference in the investment rate in India and Pakistan. Now, the investment rate in India is two-and half times that in Pakistan. In 2013, Pakistan invested 14.2 per cent of its GDP, against India’s 31.4 per cent and Bangladesh’s 28.4 per cent. For the sake of historical perspective, Pakistan’s current investment rate is similar to what India’s was in the early 1950s.
In fact, the resourceful Pakistani now invests more overseas than in his/her own country. In 2013, the governor of State Bank of Pakistan (the central bank) said that $25 million was being ‘smuggled’ out of the country daily. That’s around $9 billion a year -- for an economy a ninth of India.
Coming back to Mr Swamy’s history project, what will the new history of India be? It will be the mirror image of what has been taught across our western border. If Pakistani books glorify Islamic invaders and vilify Hindus, Swamy’s ideal books will do the exact opposite. But the end result will be the same. Our young minds would be radicalised in the same manner as their Pakistani cousins. Initially their anger and hatred will be directed at the ‘other’ -- but sooner or later they will turn against the state itself.
Lastly, whose “low self-esteem” is Mr Swamy talking about anyway? Surely not the members of the Indian cricket team or the founders of dozens of start-ups that are shaking up the old business order, or Indian CEOs and promoters who are busy conquering the global market.
But if he is talking about himself and the fellow members of the Sangh Parivar, then I have no fight with him. Sanghis are so unsure about themselves and fearful about the present and the future that they run to the safety of the past at the first opportunity. But then who has ever reached their destination by looking only in the rearview mirror?
