In my study of the Ayodhya controversy, I noticed that the frequent attempts to conceal or deny inconvenient evidence were an integral part of a larger effort to rewrite India's history and to whitewash Islam. It struck me that this effort to deny the unpleasant facts of Islam's destructive role in Indian history is similar to the attempts by some European writers to deny the Nazi Holocaust. Its goal and methods are similar, even though its social position is very different: in Europe, Holocaust negationists are a fringe group shunned by respectable people, but in India the jihad negationists are in control of the academic establishment and of the press.

Dr Elst's note on jihad negationism has a perfect echo in Dr Pandey's note about Majumdar's accurate observation about how "the Hindu leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, deliberately ignored the fundamental differences between the Hindus and Muslims..." in their quest to attain an artificial harmony between the two based not on lived, historical realities but wishful thinking. It is this lazy or timid or short-sighted ignoring that eventually led to wholesale distortion, suppression, and even inventing historical "facts" by Communists.

Academics are worried that NBT's decision to discontinue printing Bipan Chandra's book, Communalism- A Primer, signals an authoritarian regime settling in

The story of these realities must be told, at least now, to build a nation based on accepting and digesting even the harshest of historical truths. The story must be retold in every Hindu home. In a manner similar to how grandparents of a past generation inspired their grandchildren with stories of Prahlada, Dhruva, Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh, to cite a few names at random. Our school textbooks are short-sighted, ill-equipped, and incompetent to tell these stories any time soon. These efforts definitely take courage and involve enormous hard work but they are inevitable and urgent unless Hindus are not serious about surviving as a civilization. The alternative is to pretend that these urgly historical truths don't exist. As with people so with problems: at some point, the makeup will peel away.

As a recent example, had our history been told honestly right from childhood, nobody would've even conceived naming a road in the honour of Aurangzeb. That we had to face outrage from these same jihad-deniers and thousands of urban Indians misled by reading such "history" shows what happens when denial and pretence are preferred to avoid facing harsh truths - or to push deadly, imperialist ideologies.

The same - if not greater - damage that the anti-Hindu and the Adharmic Nehruvian state inflicted in the economic space has been inflicted by more than six decades of writing, teaching and propagating Nehruvian history. Only, its toll has been incalculable: with each passing decade, India's accommodative diversity rooted in Dharma has steadily morphed into irreconcilable difference to the extent that significant and influential sections of Indians now see nothing wrong in inviting foreign powers to intervene in India's sovereign affairs. The most glaring example of this in recent years is the shameless manner in which members of these influential sections of the Islamo-Christist-Left-Liberal cabal urged the Kangaroo Court called “USCIRF” to depose Narendra Modi.

Indeed, let’s hear it directly from the horse’s mouth. Here's Dr Dilip K Chakrabarti recounting Romila Thapar's "vision" of India at the end of the 21st Century.

In the case of India Thapar, in an interview to the French paper Le Monde, foresaw (cf M Danino in Dialogue, April-June 2006/vol 7, no 4) that by the end of the 21st century India would break down into a series of small states federated within a more viable single economic space on the scale of the subcontinent.

What Romila Thapar is actually saying: it is my passionate wish to see India breaking up into pieces. And she and her gang members have taught history to and written history textbooks prescribed for our school and college children. The sum and substance of their (nearly) century-long India war to break India is this: the creation of a gated community of three generations of traitors.

K. N. Panikkar (born 1936 in Guruvayoor, Kerala.) is an Indian historian, associated with the Marxist school of historiography

In a more sane world, these eminent disgraces would have correctly remained in the fringes - like the Holocaust deniers in Europe - had honest scholars like R.C. Majumdar not been shunned and hounded out solely because they didn't dance to a specific political - or person's - tune. Indeed, it is very revealing about the person of Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad if they felt threatened by a dispassionate assessment of India’s freedom struggle, of one of the most important episodes in world history. And Majumdar was just one of the hundreds of such Himalayan scholars of the period, who were victimised by an insecure autocrat.

On the other side, it is also true that powerful counters were offered against this all-round assault against Indian history by fierce and courageous intellectual warriors like Sita Ram Goel, Ram Swarup et al but when oppressive regimes tire out of continual hounding, and become helpless in the face of irrefutable facts, they resort to strangling by silence. This among other tactics was how our eminent disgraces silenced the voices of Sita Ram Goel et al: they completely ignored them. They refused to acknowledge that such people even existed much less mentioned their work.

In the end, India had to wait till 1998 for Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians to be published - a book that uncovered in detail after ghastly detail of this multi-layered deception and defacing of the national psyche that has disfigured the minds of at least three generations regarding the vital truths of their own nation.

And thanks to Arun Shourie's seminal contribution, the term “eminent historian” justly become a swearword in public discourse today.

Series Notes: