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        Soon after taking over as the Human Resource 'Destruction' Minister, Arjun Singh said the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) is likely to finalise the curricula for CBSE after August 2004. He told the national press that his Ministry would 'de-saffronise' the curricula and great care will be taken to see that no one would interfere with the project and that the entire exercise is carried out by academicians. When I first read the statement of secular Arjun Singh, I was reminded of the novel entitled 'Der Prozess' ('The Trial') by Joseph Kafka (1883-1924). 'The Trial ' depicted the hopeless attempts of Josef K to survive the nightmarish events that start at his breakfast table. 'Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning'. Josef K denies his guilt and starts endless investigations of the court system. But there is no truth and he dies 'like a dog'. In the story 'In der Strafkolonie', the truth is the function of an instrument of torture, a machine that kills its victims by writing the nature of their crime upon their body. Kafka's characters are punished or threatened with punishment even before they have offended the authorities. Joseph K encountered the merciless effects of law but no identifiable lawgiver. Finally, Joseph K was subjected to the motions of the due process of law and allowed to have his say before being snuffed out with banal savagery in Franz Kafka's grimly prophetic world-famous novel 'The Trial'.

        Arjun Singh's committee to review NCERT's new history textbooks has surpassed that sham trial of Joseph K in Kafka's novel with its peremptory decision to recommend scrapping of all textbooks earlier commissioned by the NDA government. The Minister calls this the process of non-Talibanisation and non-Saffronisation!

        Soon after becoming Human Resources 'Destruction' Minister, Arjun Singh took care to carefully select men like Prof JS Grewal and Prof Irfan Habib, who have jointly authoured the medieval India section of the Indian History Congress' notorious Index of Errors, which spearheaded the Leftist attack on NCERT. These two historians are to the Hindu 'refugees' of India what Hitler was to the Jews of Germany. It is now widely known that Prof Habib met Arjun Singh's committee, as did the activists of Sahmat, an organisation that hosted the press conferences wherein Leftist academics spat venom against NCERT.

        While no charge-sheet was served nor evidence adduced regarding the so-called 'distorted and communally-biased portions' in any of the books commissioned by the NDA government which were under their scrutiny, the trial was conducted with unseemly haste. In the absence of a formal prosecution, there was, naturally, no defence. Judgment was pronounced at a hastily convened press conference by Arjun Singh.

        I am personally amused by this abrasively blatant partisanship, as it has taken the subject of history out of the closet and into the public arena, where all can see the intellectual dishonesty of Marxist historians, political rascality and chicanery of pseudo-secularists like Arjun Singh & Co and above all the tactful silence of the 'Mother Superior' holding her sway of benediction over the UPA Nigam Limited in New Delhi in her capacity as chairperson of the UPA Coordination Committee.

        I know that I am running the obvious risk of being labeled by the Marxist mercenaries of the CPM, CPI and other Leftist parties on the one hand, and all the shades of pseudo-secular anti-Hindu parties like the Congress, RJD, LJP and many other parties as a saffronised divisive 'communalist', a fascist and an obscurantist. In my view, the real fascists are the Marxists and Nehruvian Stalinists, who are using the coercive power of the State for putsches, coups and intellectual purges. Arjun Singh, HRD Minister, has been on a jihad lately, shouting 'off with his head' at the slightest provocation. He would have been quite at home in Stalin's Soviet Union, happily deleting individuals and events from the history du jour.

        As Rajeev Srinivasan has stated in this context: 'This, however, is what one expects: Each nation and culture pumps up the valorous deeds of its people, as part of its propaganda efforts, and to establish its greatness. India, misled by sundry nattering nabobs of negativism, is the only nation that does the opposite, namely downplaying the real and brilliant achievements of its culture and civilisation and its citizens. The stunning accomplishments of Indian civilisation have been denigrated in a sustained campaign. With Nehruvian Stalinists and Marxists in power, this process has received fresh impetus'.

        What is the upshot of all this attempts at de-saffronisation of history text books engineered by the HRD Minister Arjun Singh? UPA, fully supported by the Marxists, Leninists and the Nehruvian Stalinists rests on an effective denial of the spiritual foundations of Indian civilisation and of its original, sustained, varied contributions to the progress of humanity. How our spiritual culture has had a great cementing and unifying impact on the Indian masses is also passed over in silence.

        An affected author has claimed that the books authoured by him and earlier approved by the NDA government have been scrapped at the instance of a cabal determined to monopolise the rendition of Indian history. Certainly the attitude and the activities of the committee appointed by Arjun Singh lends credence to the view that the Marxists cannot afford an open debate on Indian history, and rely exclusively on State power to suppress facts and impose their Marxist interpretations upon an innocent public.

        What is Arjun Singh's definition of de-saffronisation? The whole world would be shocked by the way in which Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa has been introduced in a text book for children officially produced by Arjun Singh's HRD Ministry through the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The non-communal, cosmopolitan and secular authour of this book is comrade Satish Deshpande. He is part of Arjun Singh's crusade to detoxify the students afflicted by the so-called 'saffronisation'. He has written in this book that 'Sri Ramakrishna was an illiterate and mentally unbalanced person'. This blasphemous statement cannot be casually dismissed as an individual's perversion but driven by a Marxist philosophy of class hatred.

        In this context I have to refer to the great writings of Romain Rolland (1866-1944) who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 for his famous novel 'Jean Christophe'. He wrote the biography of Swamy Vivekananda in two volumes. In one of those volumes he wrote how Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa identified the genius and potential of Swami Vivekananda as a spiritual leader of humanity: 'Ramakrishna Paramahamsa with his intuitive genius for souls, for whom time was not, and who could discern in the twinkling of an eye the whole flood of the future, believed that he had seen his great disciple in the womb of the elect before he met him in the flesh. I will give here an account of his beautiful vision. We know that a mighty vision creates and produces that which it has seen. In a deeper sense, the prophets of the hereafter have been real characters of what was not yet, but which was trembling on the verge of being. The torrent forming the remarkable destiny of Vivekananda would have been lost in the bowels of the earth, if Ramakrishna's glance had not, as with one blow of an axe, split the rock barring its way, so that through the breach thus made the river of his soul could flow'. Unfortunately for us comrade Satish Deshpande cold-bloodedly writes otherwise about Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Arjun Singh and his Marxist comrades would run down Romain Rolland as 'communal' and uphold world-famous comrade Satish Deshpande as 'secular' and transcendental(!) with the full blessings and benediction of de jure Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and de facto Prime Minister 'Mother Superior'.