Peace chapter: Unlearn history first

This is not surprising. When the Cold War was on, America and the Soviet Union also fought their textbook wars. Soviet textbooks presented a blatantly doctored history and were exposed to ridicule in the Western world. But there was subtle misrepresentation in the projection of ‘‘the evil empire’’ in American textbooks too. Indeed, there were two kinds of ‘‘consensuses’’ in the United States: ‘‘history is really what we have in our textbooks, and that the Soviet textbooks are all propaganda’’.

A similar ‘‘twin’’ consensus exists in India about Pakistan. Just as a human child is ‘‘socialised’’ by his parents through a certain process of conditioning to elicit obedience from him/her, so too nation-states undertake conditioning to produce obedient citizens. They use history to create a uniform mind (national identity) and contrive a carefully ‘‘cultured’’ version of it in their school textbooks. Thus India and Pakistan have ‘‘defined’’ each other forever in their textbooks and citizens in both are inclined to forestall knowledge by claiming that they already know each other.

As Indian scholar Krishna Kumar (his Pakistani counterpart is historian KK Aziz) wrote: ‘‘Both countries live with the assumption that they know each other. The ‘‘other’’ after all is a former aspect of the ‘‘self’’. There is no room for the curiosity that ‘‘foreignness’’ normally awakens. Physical vicinity compounds this feeling. If India and Pakistan were geographically apart, there might have been a chance for the kind of anxiety that lack of news about a hostile relative residing far away causes. India and Pakistan are politically so far apart and culturally and geographically so close that there is no room for an ‘‘epistemic’’ space between them.’’

Here are some examples of how textbooks distort history. The Indian side focuses on the earlier part of the lives of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Iqbal, while the Pakistani side looks only at the later parts. Looking at Sir Syed as a ‘‘reformer’’, the Indian textbook ignores his campaign for the ‘‘other nation’’ while the Pakistani side looks away from his religious work because rationalism is heresay in its master narrative. Both sides ignore how he felt about the Mutiny of 1857 because both have looked at it selectively to peg their theory of ‘‘independence struggle’’ to it.

The historian, Majumdar, wrote that there was ‘‘an absence of nationalism’’ in the revolt of 1857. But who has listened to him? The biggest nugget of the two master narratives is the Partition of Bengal. The Indian version is that it was the most blatant example of how the British practiced the doctrine of ‘‘divide and rule’’. The Pakistani version says the Bengali Muslims were united in their support of the division effected by Lord Curzon and that it was the protest against it by the Hindus which united the Muslims against them. The Indian version takes no account of the Muslim reaction to Curzon’s measure and gives the impression that Hindus and Muslims were united in their opposition to the Partition. Pakistani textbook historians ignore the fact that Jinnah attended the 1906 session of the Congress and wrote the speech of its president, Dadabhai Nauroji, that called Partition a ‘‘bad blunder’’.

The same kind of loss of focus happens to Indian textbook historians when they write about the Khilafat Movement and ignore what happened to Gandhi’s Muslim followers after Gandhi called off the movement following the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922. Neither do they note the not-so-smooth tenor of relations between the two communities during the heyday of the Khilafat Movement. The Indian textbook highlights history selectively. Up to the Lucknow Pact of 1916 and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, all is well, but after the call-off of the Khilafat Movement, the account is skimpy. The period from 1922 to 1930 is missing because this is when Hindu-Muslim relations worsened.

The Nehru Report of 1928 is glossed over in India while the Pakistani textbook focuses sharply on the Report because it triggered Jinnah’s response in his Fourteen Points. The Civil Disobedience movement called by Gandhi is skipped by Pakistani textbooks which focus instead on the Round Table Conferences in London, which Indian textbooks ignore. Surprisingly, the 1935 Government of India Act is not the most discussed item in Indian textbooks because it retains separate electorates. The year 1940 is a purple patch in Pakistani books but Indian textbooks focus on Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience once again to blink the Lahore Resolution.

In modern times, the history of wars and conflict has been equally ‘‘distorted’’ by both sides. For example, Pakistani children are taught that India was solely responsible for dismembering Pakistan in 1971 while Indian kids learn that Pakistan is solely responsible for stirring militancy in Kashmir and that there is no indigenous resentment against India. And so the falsehoods go on.

In India and Pakistan, the ‘‘master narratives’’ clash because the stories are moulded by a sense of the end result. A kind of teleology impinges upon events. India looks at independence with ‘‘a teleological sense of achievement along with a terrible sense of loss and sadness’’ whereas Pakistan’s master narrative contains ‘‘a sense of self-protection and escape’’. Thus the two nations go on fighting each other because their textbooks teach antagonistic versions of history.

There is a SAARC resolution on record about the purging of lethal textbooks in all member states. This is the time for India and Pakistan to appoint a joint commission of neutral and objective experts to disinfect their textbooks and reintroduce truth in a region where war would have been impossible without lying to the people.

The Friday Times