The virtually unknown “historian”, Y Sudarshan Rao, who cannot claim to have made any significant contribution to the subject, has left the post of the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) unsung and unlamented. The inadequacies of the B grade filmmaker, Pahlaj Nihalani, have been exposed by the government’s decision to set up a committee under the well-known director, Shyam Benegal, to look into the functioning of the Central Board of Film Certification of which Nihalani is still the formal head.
The “C” grade actor, Gajendra Chauhan’s first day in office at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), six months after he was appointed its chairman, was marked by a police baton charge on the protesting students who do not think that he has the right credentials for the job.
Evidently, the government’s attempt to control the cultural agenda hasn’t been a notable success. When the government chose the saffron apparatchiki for the prestigious posts in the ICHR and elsewhere in the months immediately after the BJP’s general election victory, it presumably thought that the task of cleansing these organisations of their supposed Leftist taint would be easy.
The leeway given to the RSS to plant its nominees in the various “autonomous” bodies might have been a quid pro quo for the Nagpur patriarchs to leave the political field alone for a while.
With the opposition in the doldrums and Rahul Gandhi in silent mode prior to his departure for the 57-day sabbatical in search of his true persona, the government did not anticipate any resistance. Assured of its political mastery – the Delhi and Bihar elections were yet to take place – the BJP apparently thought that a Chinese-style cultural revolution was in order.
But it did not seem to know that culture is a different ball game from politics. Unlike politicians, the denizens of the artistic world, especially the top-notchers, not only enjoy considerable prestige among their lay admirers, but also have a pride in their professions fostered by the long hours of scholarly pursuit and the production of imaginative works which are acclaimed all over the world.
As the choice of non-entities like Y Sudarshan Rao and others showed, the BJP is a stranger in this field. Culture to it means bhajan, kirtan and the Ram Leela presentations. Its selections were guided, therefore, not by artistic or academic merit but adherence to saffron predilections. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for its nominees to be exposed as charlatans.
The worst example of scholarship being sacrificed at the altar of ideology was at the Indian Science Congress last year where saffron “scientists” propounded their theory about aircraft in ancient India, which could fly to other planets.
As the Nobel laureate, Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, has said, “the idea that Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me”. Hence, his view that the previously prestigious occasions where the best scientific minds were present have become a “circus”.
It is possible that in his second year in office, Modi has realised the perils of allowing the RSS any role in the selection of personnel to reputed institutions and celebrated events. This year’s science congress, therefore, was devoid of any extravagant mythological claims except for a “paper” which argued that Lord Shiva was an environmentalist.
In the political field, Modi appears to have succeeded in persuading the RSS to back off from some of its projects like ghar wapsi or a return to the Hindu fold by bhuley-bhatkey (misguided) Muslims, to quote RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, and other such provocative campaigns.
The leeway given to the RSS to plant its nominees in the various “autonomous” bodies might have been a quid pro quo for the Nagpur patriarchs to leave the political field alone for a while.
But the give-and-take ploy does not seem to be working. Sudarshan Rao may have left on his own and Pahlaj Nihalani has been snubbed. But it is obvious that the BJP’s efforts to take over the academia are not going well for it.
The party simply does not have historians of the calibre of Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib to run institutions like the ICHR or filmmakers like Adoor Gopalakrishnan or Girish Karnad to head the FTII as they had done earlier.
Anupam Kher might have made the grade, but the RSS probably did not initially consider him to be saffron enough although his recent energetic campaign against those who returned their awards might have made Nagpur change its mind. As for the others, the Nehruvian-Leftists, to use Arun Jaitley’s term of contempt for the returnees, seem to have a better stock of celebrities.
The 19 months in power appear to have made the BJP aware of the nation’s diversity and the consequent need to leave the cultural field alone lest an attempt to impose the saffron writ revives the ever-present fears of the party’s supposedly real agenda of communal politics.
Arguably, the BJP might have pushed ahead in this field if the political trends had been favourable for it. But, as the Delhi and Bihar elections have indicted, this isn’t the case. The party evidently does not want, therefore, to complicate the scene further for itself.
Also Read
CPI(M)’s volte-face on Congress
