Red alert

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is serious about what he said to senior bureaucrats a few weeks ago about preserving their independence by, if need be, coming directly to him, he must first emphasise respect for institutions.

Judging by his government's track record in the five months it's been in power, he hasn't done a great job on this front.

First, there was the issue of sacking governors appointed by the NDA that brought back memories of the original Mrs Gandhi's actions; then his government even went to the embarrassing extent of asking an international body (the UNESCO) to hold back an award to the then NCERT chief for his lifetime work as an educationist (not for his changing the country's history books).

While one can still justify the latter since J S Rajput was seen by many as spearheading a saffron education agenda (others saw him as merely correcting the distortions introduced by Marxist historians), surely the same can't be said of Anupam Kher,who was unceremoniously sacked from the Censor Board?

Indeed, if one were to go by CPM leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet's article in party mouthpiece People's Democracy that led to Kher's dismissal, the government is under pressure to sack even bureaucrats who are "RSS men still in key positions".

In one case, of Sarita Prasad in the social justice ministry, Singh's government has faced flak for having promoted her to the rank of secretary!

While apologists have passed this off as routine, as the usual change of guard that takes place whenever a regime changes in countries such as the US, the fact remains that it sets the stage for another round of blood-letting when the next government comes to power.

If this sort of behaviour is to be seen as par for the course, textbooks will have to be changed all over again. While Comrade Surjeet has no hesitation in labelling Professor Romila Thapar as "an eminent historian, whose stature ... not a single person of any hue has dared to deny", it is equally fair to say that her interpretation of historical facts can be challenged.

In her latest book on the Somanatha temple, she says that there was no great concern over Mahmud Ghaznavi's attacks because Hindu rulers also attacked the temples of those they had conquered.

While one part of the (longer-term) solution is to get the government out of areas like school textbooks (why should the government be rubber-stamping uni-dimensional school textbooks anyway?) and to encourage greater private sector patronage of the arts through fiscal regimes to replace government-run bodies like the Lalit Kala Academy or the Sangeet Natak one, the other is to develop the kind of tolerance the UPA claims the BJP-NDA was in short supply of.

While it is possible to argue that an NCERT chief is powerful enough to push through a certain kind of ideology (RSS versus Marxist in this case) to children who are forced to study these books, surely the same can't be said of the Censor Board or bodies like the Lalit Kala Academy or even the Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts?