In the first place, it is not a man-making education; it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education or any training that is based on negation is worse than death. The child is taken to school, and the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all the sacred books are lies! By the time he is sixteen, he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. .. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas”
— Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works, Volume 3, Lectures from Colombo to Almora
Why Irfan Habib denied free speech to Kerala Governor
The monotheism represented by the trinity of isms, Communism represented by Stalinists and Maoists, Islamism experienced in the form of Al-Qaeda or ISIS, and Christianism practised through the evangelical Church, are always selective, monopolistic, coercive and derogatory to the ancient traditions and wisdom. The natural corollary is the distortion of ‘Itihasa’ veiled in the communist vocabulary and whitewashing bigotry in the name of history. The heckling of Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan was not just a protest by any ‘historian’ but a blatant display of frustration by the master of all distortionists of Bharatiya history, Prof Irfan Habib. Was it just about the Citizenship Amendment Act or something else? If we juxtapose the two personalities of Arif Mohammad Khan and Irfan Habib, we will get the answer to this lost plot.
Irfan Habib, the privileged ‘dynastic historian’, a son of original distortionist and one of the key founders of Aligarh School of distortion, Mohammad Habib. Eulogising Islamic aggression, denigrating ancient past and using Marxist lexicon to interpret the history have been the key ingredients of this school. Disagreeing or diverging from this was stamped as regressive, fascist and communal, in a Communo-Jihadi style. Savaging Hindu sects through misrepresentation and saving Islam from any intervention has been the prime object. The absolute denial of temple destruction by Islamic invaders and instigating Muslims on Ayodhya was critical to not just Jr Habib but all members of his exclusivist ghetto who considered themselves ‘eminent’. Continuation of the colonial project of demeaning whatever that is Bharatiya rooted in ancient ethos and disarming Hindus with academic tools has been the mainstay of their eminence. Monopolising institutions like ICHR and manipulating forum like Indian History Congress in tune with the supremacist thinking of their core ideologies was their main business, getting projects without any accountability, acquiring eminent positions and producing books automatically followed with authority to fix their prodigies at will.
On the contrary, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan, another Muslim, is an anti-thesis of Habib and group. He is again from the Jamia and Aligarh legacy and has a political career right from the student days. He changed party affiliations but never compromised with his convictions related to reformation within Muslims. His resignation from the Rajiv Gandhi led Congress Government protesting against the stand taken on Shah Bano case in 1986 is well known. His opposition to triple talaq and articulating it as anti-Islamic is widely circulated. Arif Sahab even as a politician could dare to say, “Ram cannot be separated from the soil of India, and he is an integral part of our culture”. His commitment to internal reforms from within and accepting and assimilating the thousands of year old civilisation is unequivocal. And here lies the problem.
With such a contrast, Arif Saheb dared to articulate his views on Citizenship Amendment Act, on the monopolised platform of History Congress, that also in the communist den of Kannur, was nothing less than an insult faced by Aurangzeb in his own court by Shivaji. As a true follower of Aurangzeb, Prof Habib reacted. This way he did not expose himself but also the entire gang of distortionist who preaches ‘free speech’ and ‘Azadi’ denying the same to others but also expressed the frustration of losing out on monopoly not just over institutions but also on the myth creation in the name of history. It is right time to save Bharatiya Muslims from the Communo-Jihadi bigots and give the space for sane voices who believe in ‘Ekam Sat’ (Truth is one) but at the same time ‘Vipraha Bahuda Vadanti’ (sages express it differently).
@PrafullaKetkar
