New ICSSR chief’s views on Modi, caste and JNU are a sign of our troubled times
The appointment of Braj Bihari Kumar, the 76-year-old editor of Sangh-inspired quarterly journals Dialogue and Chintan Srijan, as the new chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), is both revealing and expected in terms of what’s in store for the social sciences in India. Kumar takes over from SK Thorat, an economist who was heading the ICSSR since April 2011.
A report in the Indian Express lays out the eminent “views” of the new chairman of ICSSR, on topics as integrally interconnected as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, origin of caste oppression in India in medieval invasions, influence of Marxism and left-liberal secular schools of thought on India’s higher education.
Suffice to say that the smorgasbord of opinions that have been culled from Kumar’s various signed editorials for Dialogue and Chintan Srijan, both run by a society called Astha Bharati, fits the current bill for the head of an institution like the ICSSR, which despite limited intellectual contribution to the social sciences in the country, has nevertheless important symbolic value for the state of higher education in India, particularly the humanities.
Modi is the best, invasions led to caste
As reported in the Indian Express, Kumar’s editorial titled “Learn to tolerate Modi”, published in the 2015 October-December edition of Dialogue, claimed that PM Modi was the best prime minister ever and is the worst victim of liberal intolerance.
The editorial says:
“Narendra Modi has proved himself to be the best Prime Minister. The economy of the country was in bad shape, when he came to power; in the brief period, we have overtaken China in GDP growth; steps have been taken towards economic empowerment of the people, foreign investment is coming in a big way, no cases of corruption or scams have come up…”
“The problem with the adversaries of Narendra Modi, is that they lack the realisation that while trying to harm Narendra Modi, they are harming the country. Narendra Modi became PM in spite of more than a decade long warnings, and lodging court cases against him. Obviously people of India did not believe Modi-baiters…”
Similarly, on the issue of caste and untouchability, Kumar’s views are equally baseless.
“Aggressive anti-Hindu agenda of conversion of the Muslim rulers, their capture and sale of Hindus as slaves, etc., led lakhs of Hindus to run away to the forests for saving themselves; many started taking pig’s flesh to avoid becoming Muslims; they, eventually, become Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes… A point, needing emphasis, is that caste in the present form, untouchability and intra-Hindu societal exploitation are entirely non-Hindu factors. Dominant JNU type scholarship in the field of Social Sciences has neither the tendency nor the will and understanding to put the discourse in proper perspective.”
Marxism, Macaulayism led to intellectual decline
Kumar, in the July-September 2015 issue of Dialogue, wrote:
“The British knew that the Marxism was helpful for British Empire; and that was the reason that they used to supply Marxist literature to the freedom fighters in jails, and the latter used to come out from the jails as Marxists…
“We are gradually losing the capacity to generate original ideas, and the reason behind the same is the continuance of Macaulayist education system and dominance of Marxists and leftists in the Indian academia. It is precisely the reason that the intellectual decline is visible everywhere now a days.”
JNU versus national security
In the January-March 2016 issue of Dialogue, Kumar wrote:
“The happenings in JNU campus have made some facts clear: (i) The belief that the partition of India brought the end of Pakistan ideology on Indian soil is a myth. (ii) The destructive role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in India tenaciously persists…
“The Naxalite support, for every secessionist cause in India, is a well-known fact, needing no elaboration. The only shocking addition is the brave show of Pakistani face of some Indian Muslims, boldly declaring the destruction of India. The question is: Does India need to tackle a Pakistani jehadi activist and ideologue, when his replica in flesh and blood is present in Delhi itself?”
The ecosystem of fake views
Kumar’s appointment to ICSSR is one more example of how the RSS-imbued worldview of the ruling regime is attempting to rewrite India’s intellectual and lived histories, both pre- and post independence. As reported in the Indian Express, the society founded and run by Kumar, Astha Bharati, aims to “work towards correcting/righting the distortions and colonial misinterpretations of India’s past and present, its traditions, culture, social structure and social institutions, racial interpretations of society, colonial myths of exploitations and hegemony”.
It’s also interesting that both Dialogue and Chintan Srijan – the two journals edited by Kumar – have received funds from ICSSR in the past. However, what’s extremely disconcerting but hardly unexpected is the fact that such fringe publications, which hitherto had neither any academic gravitas, nor had any influence whatsoever on the mainstream politics of/on higher education, are being systematically positioned as the new centre and locus of learning.
Just like the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan to head the premier Film and Television Institute of India in 2015 led to the massive student protests against intentional sabotage of secular creativity and scholarship, the choice of BB Kumar as the head of ICSSR has enormous symbolic aggression attached to it. Kumar’s antipathy towards JNU and its consistent academic excellence and moral courage to stand up against a vindictive government is also the commonest stance against the university that has so far acted as a bulwark against forces of intellectual and political authoritarianism.
Just like school textbooks in several BJP-run states, particularly Rajasthan, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, have been found to be teaching distorted and frankly fraudulent versions of glorified Hindutva in their history lessons, airbrushing the uncomfortable bits such as India’s entrenched caste system that have nothing to do with medieval invasions by Arab and Turkic rulers, the Sangh intends to systematically hijack university education through painstaking rejigs of the faculty, top administrative appointments, the curricula and the modes of funding.
In effect, Kumar’s worldviews are symptomatic of the classic Sangh-influenced ideological takeover of the Indian academia, by debasing staunchly pluralist, Marxist and postcolonial strands of intellectual inquiry, which are sensitive to both Eurocentric biases in scholarship as well as nativist impulses among the likes of those inspired by the RSS.
Creating an ecosystem of “fake views” is exactly what the Sangh and its countless little organisations aim to achieve. Anointing an unabashed Modi apologist who has zero academic credibility barring laughable treatises bordering on the absurd is very much part of the larger Sangh-driven agenda to reorient India’s collective mind towards misguided Hindu glorification at the expense of invented “others”.