You cannot but notice. The most heated history-centred debate in recent times has been ignited not by a professional scholar of Indian history but by an amateur (but by all means serious) politician from a clearly anti-intellectual (certainly anti-free thinking) political party. Compare it with the most prominent recent debate (or spat, if you prefer) among India’s leading historians, over the custody and control of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, an important institutional matter perhaps but hardly an issue cerebral enough for most of our prominent historians to lock horns over. Especially when they have not shown such animation over countless (and contentious) issues of history which still need a vigorous debate in India.

But this is the sad truth of the state of history in India. Historians seem to prefer to waste their time in petty politics rather than spending time not just propounding their own point of view, but also, in a scientific manner, countering views which are to their contrary. History is just too important a subject to be left to the whims and interpretations of political parties alone.

Left to themselves, politicians in India love playing historians, and one isn’t referring to Jaswant Singh. When one writes of politicians as historians, the ones in mind are the ones who fancy dabbling in, and the doctoring of, history textbooks in schools, colleges and universities, more often than not based on their narrow political ideology rather than a rigorous interpretation of history. Remember Murli Manohar Joshi’s tenure as Union HRD minister when all history textbooks, at least in schools, were revised to suit his own and his party’s view of Indian history? Of course, the BJP could have argued that the Congress had earlier imposed its own, usually leftwing/ Marxist view of Indian history in textbooks until the NDA came to power as the first genuinely rightwing government in independent India. But if the BJP wanted to credibly correct the leftwing bias, they needed to do it backed by proper, rigorous scholarship. Instead they chose second rate scholars to rewrite history. Of course, the Congress under Arjun Singh took little time in reversing all of that once the UPA came to power in 2004, but they went back to using their own set of (ideological) cronies. In the midst of this political ping-pong, and ideological bias on all sides, we can hardly expect good historical thinking. But that’s precisely what happens when politicians become historians.

... contd.