Intro: Secular principle is simple, beat Batra, ignore Google if not glorify it.
When the whole of Indian media, secular intellectuals and historians fight 85-year-old Dina Nath Batra calling him names than all the issues of morality are kept aside. They are pulled out again to defend Sonia Gandhi when another 83 year old named Natwar Singh exposes her.
Batra Serves Notice to TOI Dina Nath Batra served a legal notice to The Times of India for publishing an defamatory, derogatory and insulting editorial on August 2. The notice, served on August 5, demanded an apology on the front page prominently published proportionate to the size of the editorial. |
S. Irfan Habib on Dina Nath Batra's books in a daily said that the issue should not be reduced to a debate of left versus right. “The point here is whether the person has any semblance of scholarship, any track record.” But the same Irfan Habib never questioned the semblance of scholarship, any track record of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi when it comes to govern India.
Such historians have never answered the facts exposed by Arun Shourie in his book Eminent Historians: Their Techniques, Their Line, Their Fraud like “The deputy director of ICHR gives a project to Dr Paramatma Saran, one of the great medievalists in India. He translates and sends it to ICHR. After his death, the deputy director takes that manuscript and gets a PhD for himself from Rajasthan University without changing anything and publishes the book dedicated to Nurul Hasan, and thanks Irfan Habib who wrote a laudatory foreword to it. Was this not just like milking the state?”
Left wing historians and scholars have many problems with Batra, one of them being getting Bhagat Singh’s name removed from NCERT books which referred to him as terrorist, in the year 2011. The same Bhagat Singh whom they never miss an opportunity to claim as theirs?
Irfan Habib, leading historian and Professor Emeritus at Aligarh Muslim University, was also scathing in his criticism while speaking to English daily. He said, “The contents of Batra’s book are so absurd that any reaction would seem superfluous … I don't know what they will teach students when they have turned geography into fantasy,” he also said that, “ It was an insult to the people of Gujarat that their children were being exposed to this nonsense.”
Same people don’t have any objection with Google when Google depicts Jammu and Kashmir as part of Pakistan and China and, Arunachal Pradesh as part of China? With them it is perfectly OK if parts of India are shown as part of other nations, while teaching a historical fact becomes a crime. Not only this, these are the same historians who have all along advocated Aryan Invasion Theory because it helped them divide Indians further. Now when all the research all over the world has proved that the Aryan Invasion Theory is a figment of imagination, none of these historians have asked Indian government to stop teaching the “Fake Aryan Invasion Theory with immediate effect”.
Dina Nath Batra has beaten the secularists hands down in their own game. He has used law as defined by Indian Constitution, and precisely this has caused heart burning among the seculars.
Because of him, Penguin decided to pulp Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism. And orient Blackswan decided to review further sales of a book, it had published on sexual violence in communal riots in Ahmedabad since 1969.
All of the above initiatives made the secularist squabble. But no one asked why Penguin and Orient Blackswan are shivering. If they are so sure about the contents of the books published by them; then they should have fought the legal battle. Multinational organisations like Vodafone, Sanofi, Novartis AG etc have never shied away from fighting a legal battle in India. When Penguin and Orient Blackswan refuse to fight legal battle then lot is communicated without communicating.Till then, kudos to Dina Nath Batra, may his tribe rise.
-Sandeep Singh (The writer writes a weekly column ‘Narendra Modi and CXO Leadership’ in his website www.swastik.net.in)
