The new McCarthyism
Praful Bidwai

The chickens are coming home to roost. The barrage of campaigns unleashed over the years by the Sangh parivar — against pluralism, secularism and humanism, and for Hindu-supremacism, hyper-nationalism and extremist intolerance — is reaching fruition in a variety of forms and institutions. Thus, unadulterated hate-speech directed at the religious-ethnic minorities has become routine within our public discourse. Vile attacks by chosen pro-Hindutva audiences on secularists and liberals are part of the gladiatorial entertainment fare regularly dished out by television channels.

Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal have rapidly expanding clienteles simply because they never cease to shock — or hog publicity.

Anyone who questions mindless militarism and the BJP’s obsession with mass-destruction weapons, or rationally argues for India-Pakistan reconciliation, is liable to be branded a traitor. Saffronised textbooks peddling lies or whitewashing terrible truths about, say, casteism, or the persecution of Buddhists, are officially endorsed, indeed thrust upon a protesting public.

Distinguished scholars of high integrity are maligned and attacked, never debated, because they disagree with the Hindutva line. Journalists of liberal-secular persuasion are liable to attract the most vicious of e-mails and even face exclusion, especially from the electronic media.

Speaking for myself, I receive between 30 and 250 mails a week for each syndicated column I write. More than four-fifths are downright abusive and defamatory. The abusive bilge doesn’t come at the conclusion of an argument. The mails start and end with calumny and four-letter words.

Significantly, about 90 per cent of such abusers are North American NRIs, remarkable for their ‘long-distance’ or ‘Green Card’ hypernationalism. NRIs have emerged as a major instrument of communalism and torchbearers of intolerance.

Their latest victim is the illustrious scholar and one of the most distinguished historians of Ancient India, Professor Romila Thapar whose accomplishments are rivalled by few others. Thapar has authored many seminal works, including classics like Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, A History of India (Penguin 1966, revised, expanded and just published as Early India), Ancient Indian Social History and Cultural Pasts, besides the more recent Sakuntala, Interpreting Early India and History and Beyond.

Thapar, one of India’s best-known academics around the world, has taught at a host of universities, including Oxford, Cornell, London and Paris, besides JNU. She has received honorary doctorates from Paris, Oxford, Chicago and Kolkata. She was recently appointed to the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the US Library of Congress.

This last appointment triggered what must be one of the most vicious and bigoted attacks ever launched on a scholar anywhere, in the form of an online petition, which now has 1,543 signatories, most of them NRIs. The petition would deserve some scholarly attention if it were drafted and signed by people who have at least read and are minimally aware of Thapar’s work. Alas, it isn’t.

It accuses Thapar of being an ignorant, yet “avowed antagonist of India’s Hindu civilisation”, who wants to discredit India in the same way as the “Europeans discredited the American Indians’ land claims…” It says she “represents a completely Euro-centric worldview” and “disavows that India ever had a history”!

This is breathtakingly ludicrous. Thapar has spent a lifetime arguing against ‘Orientalist’ western and Euro-centric interpretations of history which hold that ancient India lacked a sense of history and that pre-colonial Indian society was ‘static’ and ‘stagnant’.

Thapar is devoted to the study of India’s civilisation with all its plurality of texts and multiplicity of traditions — secular and religious, metaphysical and scientific. How she could be an ‘antagonist’ of ‘Indian civilisation’ defies comprehension except within an illiterate, philistine, and communal framework which holds that all ‘Indian civilisation’ was ‘Hindu’, even when it had Jain, Buddhist, animist and agnostic traditions.

Even worse, the petition says, Thapar is engaged in a “war of cultural genocide”, and the result of her research, ‘Historical Consciousness in Early India’, is “a foregone conclusion. She will of course attempt to show that Early India had no historical consciousness”! In reality, some of Thapar’s most exciting work (e.g. Time as a Metaphor for History) attempts to refute the Euro-centric notion that Indians only had a cyclical concept of time, and to establish that there were a variety of forms of historical consciousness in India.

The petition’s crux is about not ‘wasting’ “our American resources on” a Marxist. This is also the thrust of a huge number of comments accompanying the petition. This is pure McCarthyism, the most shameful witch-hunt in 20th century America against anyone suspected to be a Communist, carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Indeed, that’s the spirit in which most of these vicious comments are made, including: “She is a pinko and a fake historian…” “This Thapar woman will be a Trojan Horse for Islamic terrorists in the US.”

“It is disappointing that the US that once opposed Communism is now in cahoots with one of its practitioners.” “This stupid lady should be stripped of her citizenship.” “Kick her out. Kick should be of such a force that she remains dead on the ground.”

Even Praveen Togadia (might he be the one-and-only?) has added his venom: “Ban Marxist Scholars from the USA… After all, the American communist party was banned.”

What takes the cake is the following: “Fidel Castro would have been a better choice (for the Kluge Chair). At least he is not a venom-spitting anti-Hindu. I am worried about the future of USA. The Indian communists have already infiltrated into all the American universities. And now the Library of Congress. McCarthy, where are you?”

Further comment is unnecessary.

(The above article appeared in Hindustan Times, May 2, 2003)