The Gujarat model

The old literary agents’ hypothesis that everyone has a book in them stands proven, for even the dour Dina Nath Batra has one. Several, actually — school textbooks of the sort that are designed to impart moral values but only create adults who look back on their school days with mingled uneasiness and alarm, and are thankful that they survived. Batra’s thoughts and writings, translated into Gujarati, feature very prominently in a set of nine textbooks introduced by the Gujarat State School Textbook Board. They will be supplementary reading in over 42,000 primary and secondary government schools in that state. The chances of children surviving boot camp brainwashing are minimal because some of the ideas presented are superficially sensible. The devil is in the detail.

For instance, one chapter suggests that ancient India was congruent with the SAARC region, and that modern maps should reflect this. Indeed, progressive lobbies would like to see the region’s borders made permeable to trade, capital, labour and tourism, resisting only the movement of terrorists and contraband. But the textbook suggests that the saffron utopia of Akhand Bharat can be reunited. How on earth? By annexation? While Sushma Swaraj is on a confidence-building visit in Nepal, is the Gujarat textbook board independently pursuing a confidence-breaking mission?

Batra, convenor of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti and restless, ceaseless foe of all things un-Indian and un-Hindu, strives to erase the difference between these terms. Bored with insulting respected academics and authors and harassing their senseless, spineless publishers into pruning their lists, he is now catching ’em young. Indians are a bit new at this game, but Americans are beset by creationists on the one hand and Scientologists on the other. Parents in some US states do legal battle with “intelligent design”. Last year, South Korea buckled to creationist sentiment and removed lessons about evolution from high school texts. Happily, if Batra and his ilk follow the undivided India thread to its logical conclusion, they would reach an unfamiliar and uncomfortable place. Long before Hindutva, even before scripture, India was part of an undivided supercontinent called Gondwana. It is named for the Gond tribe. Would Hindutva’s brave textbook engineers like to go back and live there?