History, abridged

Given how seriously the RSS insists that history is serious business, it is extraordinary that it should display such naiveté in dealing with a pretender claiming to possess science-backed historical insight. Or maybe it is not surprising at all. As our story on Sunday made clear the RSS was most impressed because Puneesh Taneja, holder of creatively forged visiting cards, was telling it what it wants to hear — that the Sethusamudram project is not history-neutral. To be discerning and circumspect when dealing with like-minded interlocutors is not a common political trait. Still, the RSS has reason to be especially embarrassed. First, it is always lecturing politicians about their superficiality. And, second, wasn’t there anyone in the RSS who thought of making a simple background check? Put it this way. How could the sangh really think that an officer from the UPA PMO could spend two years in Nagpur and hope to rejoin office?

That is definitely worth a chuckle or two. But it is also terribly worrying. We do not subscribe to the view that there is or even that there should be only one kind of history. Let ideas and ideologies contest. But let that battle be informed by minimum standards of scholarship and competence. The religious Right in India has a problem in this regard, although it will never admit it, not even after being led up a mythical bridge by a very ordinary fraudster. The Left, on the other hand, has produced most of India’s good historians. Rather sadly, India hasn’t produced any historian of note who is an uncompromising economic liberal and intelligently politically conservative.

Such laments, of course, are not a luxury policymakers tasked with planning the Sethusamudram project can afford. Their job is unenviably tough — not even the most solid geological explanation can dissuade those mixing mythology and science. And of course the BJP, which enthusiastically did survey work for the project when in power, can’t now see facts. Puneesh Taneja, ex-pracharak, would approve.

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