India Today Editor Kaveree Bamzai on the unreasonableness of the 'reasonable' man

Kaveree Bamzai  New Delhi, February 13, 2014 | UPDATED 23:28 IST

 

Dinanath Batra who filed a petition against Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History is an old hand at attacking anything he believes is ''un-Indian''.  It is not surprising that he has objected to the book cover of the remarkable work of the University of Chicago professor, and considers her interpretation of the shiva lingam as being perverse, or that he believes that she has no academic credentials to question the factual existence of The Ramayana.

India Today Editor Kaveree Bamzai.

Now President of Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (SBAS), a right-wing organisation close to the RSS, Batra has a history of questioning the modernising of the curriculum. In 2007, I had written in India Today how Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had to wind up the Adolescene Education Programme in Class 1X and X because of pressure from Batra, who was then chairman of RSS offspring Shiksha Bachao Andolan which advocates against sex education in schools.(Also read: Penguin agrees to axe Wendy Doniger's controversial book )
But even before that he was a fixture in the NDA government when Murli Manohar Joshi was Minister of Human Resource Development, who paid a serious amount of attention to him. He was then chairman of Vidya Bharati, an organisation that ran 14,000 schools all over India with a "'nationalist'' curriculum and had got Joshi to include some of his recommendations in a note circulated to state education ministers in 1998 upon which there was naturally an uproar.
Some of his recommendations, which I remember him telling me very earnestly at his Naraina Vihar home in Delhi: That education should be "'nationalised, spiritualised and Indianised''.
That Sanskrit should be made compulsory.
That Articles 29 and 30 of the Constitution should be amended to allow the majority to establish specific educational institutions.
That housekeeping should be taught to girls in keeping with their "biological and emotional needs".
That teachers have to be trained to not impart distorted history so we ''tell our students about Mahmud of Ghazni and of what Afzal Khan did to Shivaji''.
He was especially proud of the core curriculum of the Vidya Bharati schools which then had six subjects: physical education, moral and spiritual education, Sanskrit, music, Yoga, and the most controversial, Sanskriti Gyan (cultural awareness).
Not surprising then that he has a successful career is getting "'objectionable"' paragraphs removed from NCERT history textbooks and been one of the petitioners who  moved the Delhi high court in 2008 to rule on dropping A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the many, culturally specific versions of the Ramayana from Delhi University's history syllabus. (Also read: Doniger expresses anger over Penguin's decision to axe her book )
My colleague Bhavna Vij Aurora has reported in the forthcoming issue of India Today how he now plans to set up a ''non-government education commission'' to ensure school syllabus and schoolbooks teach history that "reflects India's pride". He is also working on an "education manifesto" that will promote "Indianness, value education, spirituality and patriotism."
All perfectly reasonable, I am sure, but something about it sends a chill down my spine.

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kaveree-bamzai-dinanath-batra-wendy-donigers-the-hindus-an-alternative-history/1/343361.html

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