[Buddha-l] Hindutva california textbook controversy #1

[Dan Lusthaus]

Here's another posting. Because of its size I am dividing it into two posts.

For those unaware of these goings on, a number of
Hindutva groups in the US almost succeeded in having California textbooks
altered to reflect their odd views of Hinduism and its history. An eleventh
hour concerted and sustained effort by an international group of scholars,
who only got
wind of what was happening a couple of days before the changes would have
been official,
triumphed in the end. The stakes were higher than California, since most
states (and some overseas schools) follow California and/or Kansas textbook
standards. There are similar efforts by the Hindutvas to effect such
textbook changes in Europe and elsewhere already underway, though much of it
has been, until this moment, under the radar screen.

I repost this from the Indo-Eurasian email list, whose members were in the
front lines of the battle. Steve Farmer, who posted this, and Michael Witzel
of Harvard are founders of that list.
Dan

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Here's an update on events in California in the last week, including
not only the Board of Education meeting I attended yesterday, but also
a closed meeting that Michael was flown into by the Board of Education
on January 6th, which we are finally at liberty to discuss publicly.
The Hindutva press has already leaked out news of the closed meeting,
but (quite predictably) the picture they paint of the session has been
skewed to turn an obvious defeat into the appearance of a victory. (If
you read the Hindutva Lists these days, it is clear that the Hindutva
movers and shakers know otherwise.)

I'll keep details here to a minimum, since everyone is probably as sick
of this business as we are, and it would be nice to return to research
issues. To understand the background, it will be useful to refer to
List message #2707, which describes the December 2nd meeting of the
(purely advisory) Curriculum Commission that forced the Board to call
the January 6th session.

To access the summary of the December 2nd meeting, you'll have to sign
onto the List:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/2707

*************

1. As noted in that summary, on November 9th the Board of Education was
alerted by our initial petition -- sent out on behalf of a long list of
international researchers (many of them on this List) by Michael Witzel
-- to past Hindutva attempts to alter history textbooks for ideological
reasons. The petition discussed the NCERT case in India and contained
links to US State Department studies that have repeatedly warned about
Hindutva attempts to fictionalize history for political and religious
purposes.

After receiving the petition, the Board of Education voted 11-0 -- 
contrary to previous expectations -- not to accept any of the
previously proposed edits to the textbooks submitted by the Hindutva
backed Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF). Both
groups had represented themselves to the Board as mainstream Hindu
groups that supposedly spoke on behalf of a (quite fictional)
homogenous Hindu-American community. They were supported in their
claims by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which (as noted often in
previous posts) publicly represents itself as a "Human Rights
Organization", despite the fact that its leaders have clear Hindutva
roots and long ties to the BJP party and other rightwing groups in
India.

Rather than accepting the Hindutva edits, the Board sent them back
instead to the Curriculum Commission (CC) for a factual review.
Recognizing that the CC had previously approved the Hindutva edits, the
Board instructed this subsidiary body in clear (and legally binding)
language that it was to approve or reject proposed edits *solely* on
the grounds of historical accuracy. They were instructed as well in
equally clear terms to "accept no additional edits and corrections."

For what happened instead on December 2nd, see the detailed eyewitness
accounts I earlier provided (in message #2707; see the link above). To
cite a bare-bones summary subsequently written by the DOE, the advisory
Curriculum Committee on December 2nd "approved changes beyond the scope
of the SBE's direction". Their violation of the SBE's directives
included accepting additional edits, including some coming from public
(Hindutva) comments at the December 2nd meeting. The CC also included
new language in the texts not previously approved by anyone -- again
violating the Board's unambiguous directives.

2. Reacting to these violations, one week ago today (on January 6th), a
closed meeting was held in Sacramento that was attended by two members
of the State Board of Education, two members of the Curriculum
Commission, the Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Education,
the DOE's legal council, and the Department of Education's professional
staff, which includes at least two history Ph.D.'s who are well aware
now of what is going on. The Board of Education also flew Michael
Witzel into California the previous day for the meeting. Michael had
been appointed as part of an official Content Review Panel [CRP] in
November (along with Stanley Wolpert of UCLA and James Heitzman of UC
Davis), but previously had done all his work for the Board remotely.
The body also asked S. Bajpai in, a retired academic who months earlier
had originally been brought in by the DOE to vet the proposed edits of
the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation.

One of the blackest of the many black-comic elements in this story is
that Bajpai, who has well-known Hindutva associations, was originally
brought in as a consultant on the recommendation of the Vedic
Foundation, which at the time was still viewed by the Department as a
mainstream Hindu group. As a result, before November 9th, the Hindutva
groups were in the enviable position of having one of their own
'vetting' their edits.

3. I won't go into details about the January 6th meeting, except to say
that in a marathon session last Friday the Board and Curriculum
Commission representatives and the Department of Education staff again
went over the long list of conflicting edits proposed by the two
Hindutva groups, which had previously been reviewed separately by
Bajpai and Michael Witzel and his fellow CRP members -- in the latter
case with support from the Department of Education staff.

Summarizing quickly the results of the January 6th meeting: every
important edit from the Hindutva groups that violated historical
accuracy was recommended for removal from the texts. Among the losers:
claims concerning the supposedly indigenous origins of Indo-European
speaking populations (the 'Aryan' issue), the absurd view that ancient
Indian religions were monotheistic even in Vedic times (insisted upon
for sectarian reasons by the Vedic Foundation, whose views of Hinduism
are anything but mainstream), the whitewashing of references to caste
problems (including the unconscionable stripping from the texts of
references to Dalits), the insulting claims about women having
"different" rather than "less" rights in ancient India, the blatantly
nationalist replacement of Hindi for Sanskrit spellings  ("Buddha"
becoming "Buddh", etc.).

In sum, all the critical claims of the Hindutva groups began to be
eliminated on January 6th, following our predictions as to what would
inevitably occur sometime in the California case. (It was a foregone
conclusion that something like this would happen at some point, since
California law explicitly forbids the insertion of sectarian claims
into history textbooks.) The textbooks are still by no means not
perfect, and the publishers and Department of Education staff still
must reconcile remaining inconsistencies in the 10 different textbook
'programs', but all the key Hindutva fantasies at least are gone.

(Continued in the next message)