India in California Text books - Hindutva influence

I have supported the rights of Indians to correct the wrongs of the written history. It is not good for Hindu American children to grow up reading negative things about their heritage, The question is can we change the facts of history, while the facts continue to happen?

For children growing up in the United States, it is embarrassing for them to read about the mistreatment of Dalits, and now the others who are not Hindus.  It does not fit with the American way of life. Of course,  Muslims are not free from it either with Triple Talaq and polygamy and other practices going on in India.

Caravan paper writes, 

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“The camp led by the HAF and HEF, which claimed to represent the Hindus in the US, had criticised the textbooks for content that was deemed derogatory to Hinduism, including a flippant question that was criticised as mocking (“How’s Your Karma Doing?”), and a photograph of cows eating trash.” 

Almost all of the edits that came from the Hindu side—many of which sought to erase or whitewash more unsavoury aspects of Hinduism and South Asian history, such as patriarchy and caste—were rejected.

In one proposed edit, the report reads, “This is a subject of controversy, not settled fact. Correction: Remove mention of ‘Sarasvati’ and refer to it as ‘Indus Valley Civilization.’” In another comment, the panel was even more emphatic: “The Sarasvati River has never been proven to exist.””

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Anyone visiting India sees the cows eating trash, I was there in August last year and took several pictures with disgust. The cow we ‘claim’ to revere so much has to endure such humility.  That is a fact of life and we cannot whitewash it unless we change how cows are treated in India. India is one of the top three exporters of beef and the owners of the slaughterhouse are Hindus and Jains, the ones who oppose beef in India, but the bulk of the sellers of cattle to slaughterhouse are Hindu farmers, it will hurt their livelihood. If non-Hindus quit eating beef, the Indians farmers will be committing mass suicides as selling the cattle is their livelihood and the numbers are rising.

If there is a proof of the Sarasvati River, and references to it, it should be called Indus Sarasvati Civilization, if there is no proof, no need to change facts of history.

Almost all of the Muslim, Christian and Dalit Indians are for Hinduism, but not for the Radicals among Hindus in the guise of Hindutva, an extremist political ideology whose founder believed in Hitler and many members of the RSS continue to praise Hitler. These men, in the name of Hinduism (not really) are harassing fellow Indians, and the man on the top does not say much - all he has to do is say that there will be punishment for anyone who harasses or discriminates fellow Indian. Hinduism does not teach one to discriminate, harass or lynch, then the PM claiming to be Hindu should speak up. Can the HAF and HEF speak about the values of Hinduism that goes against the very organization they have been supporting?   

If Hindus are harassed in America, you can count on Muslims to speak up, would the HAF guys do it? Do they represent Hindus or the radical Hindus? HAF has to come out clean with statements as to whose interests they represent - Hinduism's or Radicals among Hinduism?
 http://standingupforothers.blogspot.com/2012/04/standing-with-hindus.html and this petition urging Toyota to be inclusive, exclusion splinters the society, inclusion bonds people and nurtures goodwill.  The petition - http://chn.ge/2sc6e7v 

If the Dalits and non-Hindus are treated like what India’s constitution calls for; that is Dalit women are not the object of sex for the upper caste Hindu men; and they are not entitled to the Dalit women and they are not raped and hung on trees, and if a Dalit groom rides a horse and the upper caste accepts it instead of beating the groom up; if a Muslim is not lynched for eating meat (suspecting it beef) and if Christian nuns are not raped and harassed. If HAF and HEF can focus on correcting this non-sense in India, then the California textbooks should be corrected.

The extremists assume that they can destroy others, but in the end, they are part of the destruction. If the corporations see the injustice, discrimination, and mistreatment of Indians by Indians, they will stop investing in India and start backing off. All of us will lose. 

Sam Brownback, the new Ambassador for religious freedom said it in one sentence if a nation oppresses a minority, they will take it for a while, but eventually, revengeful minds will start scheming and everyone will be hurt. Justice is the foundation of successful societies. America is a shining example of it. It is in the interest of every Indian to be just and seek justice for others.

We cannot dupe our children, teach them one thing but when they visit India, they see it differently. The Indians parents look stupid to the American Indian Children. Over the years, I have asked some of my extremist fellow Indians to show their comments to their children and ask them honestly to grade them on the scale of the stupidity of their statements.

I expect the communalists at SAJA to pounce on me, and will try to give my comment a communal color, their brains are trained to be communal, I hope someday God helps clean their minds and start thinking Indians as Indians and not Dalits, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhist, Bahai, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Tribals.

Mike Ghouse
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Reference - http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/californias-textbooks-war-reveals-mounting-influence-hindutva-united-states

Courtesy Caravan

The Latest Skirmish In California’s Textbooks War Reveals The Mounting Influence Of Hindutva In The United States

By ARIA THAKER | 7 February 2018

COURTESY SOUTH ASIAN HINDUS FOR ALL

SAHFA criticised the textbooks for not complying with a set of curricular guidelines—called the “framework”—that the California board of education had finalised in May 2016. The review of the framework, too, saw a tussle involving largely the same players, and SAHFA’s camp had then come out ahead.

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Early in the morning, on 9 November 2017, hundreds of people flooded the headquarters of the California department of education. They lined up in the building’s glass atrium, waiting to testify before the members of the state board of education. That day, the board was scheduled to vote on whether various new history and social-science textbooks were going to be adopted for use in California’s government-run schools. The board president reportedly stated that the hearing was “the longest in the history of the state Board of Education.”

A point of contention before the board that day was the material in these textbooks that referred to South Asia. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, an anti-caste activist who testified that day, estimated that of the roughly 500 people present, 470 were there to discuss concerns related to this material. A key concern—among others, such as the description of the Indus Valley Civilisation and the origins of Sikhism—was the representation of caste in Hinduism.

The people present, and their concerns, can be divided into two broad camps. One camp was led by South Asian Histories for All, an inter-caste, multi-faith group of activists that Soundararajan founded. SAHFA cited inaccuracies regarding caste and other issues in the textbook material, and called for a delay on the books’ approval so that they could be submitted for further editing. The other camp, which Soundararajan said greatly outnumbered SAHFA, was led by the Hindu American Foundation(HAF), a non-profit that claims to advocate for Hindus in the United States, and the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF)—an outfit affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh, the US-based wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. This camp, too, was heavily critical of certain parts of the textbooks, which they felt denigrated Hinduism. They did not, however, ask for the board’s decision to be delayed.

After the public hearing, the board voted to reject two of the 12 textbooks up for discussion, both published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The camp led by the HAF and HEF, which claimed to represent the Hindus in the US, had criticised the textbooks for content that was deemed derogatory to Hinduism, including a flippant question that was criticised as mocking (“How’s Your Karma Doing?”), and a photograph of cows eating trash. The board approved the rest of the books, which had been released by other well-known publishers, among them National Geographic, Pearson and McGraw Hill.

Even the textbooks that were approved, however, had at least some material that Hindu groups had called derogatory. Nevertheless, the Hindu camp celebrated the board’s decision as a victory. HAF and HEF both posted an identical statement on their respective websites, titled “Hindu Americans Win Historic Victory in California Textbooks.” SAHFA, meanwhile, posted a press release titled “History Under Attack: New California Textbooks Fail to Protect Targeted Minorities, Cave to Hindu Nationalists.”

SAHFA criticised the textbooks for not complying with a set of curricular guidelines—called the “framework”—that the California board of education had finalised in May 2016. The framework was determined after many months of edits submitted by members of the public, and a review process facilitated by a team of educational experts called the Instructional Quality Commission, or IQC. According to state procedure, the framework dictates the content that should appear in textbooks.

The finalising of the framework, too, saw a tussle involving largely the same players: HEF and HAF on the Hindu side, and SAHFA and many leading South Asianist academics in opposition to them. In the final framework, SAHFA’s camp had come out ahead. Almost all of the edits that came from the Hindu side—many of which sought to erase or whitewash more unsavoury aspects of Hinduism and South Asian history, such as patriarchy and caste—were rejected. Several of SAHFA’s edits, including ones that affirmed the existence of caste oppression, were accepted. SAHFA’s assumption at the time, Soundararajan said, was “that our job was done.” But in early 2017, when she saw the textbooks, “it was just like night and day from what was approved in the framework and what got implemented.”

The state board’s decision in November marked a dramatic reversal of fortunes between the two camps, which, if the board had more diligently followed its procedure, would likely not have occurred. An examination of this procedure reveals the pressure that Hindu groups exerted on the publishers, such as directly participating in their review processes and embroiling them in litigation, to influence the final outcome. Soundararajan noted, “Our assumption was that the State Board of Education was going to be protecting the adherence to the frameworks, and they were negligent in that.”

A clear example of the influence that the Hindu groups exerted over the publishers is that Murali Balaji, HAF’s director of education, is credited in the National Geographic textbook as a “reviewer of religious content.” During the debate on the framework, HAF had asked that the phrase “communities outside the jati system, the ‘Untouchables,’” be changed to “socially ostracized and economically disadvantaged communities”—a revision that would have scrubbed the sentence of any reference to caste. The proposed change was officially rejected, and SAHFA’s request to have the line edited to include the term “Dalit” was incorporated into the final framework.

But the final textbook matches HAF’s suggested edits more closely than it does the framework text. For example, while the framework had described the Dalit community by name, the approved National Geographic textbook fails to do so. It notes, “At the bottom were slaves, laborers, and artisans … Many centuries later, another group developed that was considered even lower.”

The Hindu camp’s edits, particularly on issues concerning the representation of caste, appeared to mirror the positions adopted by Hindutva groups in India. For instance, Sanskar Bharti, a cultural affiliate of the RSS, was reportedly seeking to “correct the lies” about ancient Hindu scriptures being “anti-Dalit and anti-woman.” The outfit sought to remove references to caste discrimination from the Manusmriti, and noted that interpretations of the text arguing that it was anti-Dalit were “propaganda.” The Hindu camp’s edits during both the framework and textbook review sought a similar erasure of references to caste.

A similar deviation from the framework was evident in National Geographic’s discussion of Sikhism. The framework makes clear the fact that Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikhism, “was a social reformer who challenged the authority of the Brahmins and the caste order.” The National Geographic textbook, however, does not include any mention of Nanak’s opposition to the caste system.

During the framework review, HAF, HEF and the Uberoi Foundation—another Hindu group—had all submitted edits for this line that would have erased its reference to caste. According to Jaideep Singh, an academic who specialises in the study of Sikhs in the United States and is active with SAHFA, Nanak’s opposition to caste was “very central to Sikh identity.” The Hindu groups, he added, “viewed it as a personal attack on Hinduism, when in fact it’s who we are as a people.”

National Geographic did not respond to questions about Balaji’s involvement in the textbook-drafting process. When I asked Suhag Shukla, the executive director of HAF, about Balaji’s role as a reviewer on the textbook, she told me that not only had HAF worked with National Geographic, but they have “worked with most of the major ones”—publishers—in California and in other states. “California, being the largest purchaser of textbooks, is an important state, but these narratives are found in textbooks across the United States.” Samir Kalra, a senior director of HAF, affirmed that the foundation had worked directly with all the publishers except for Studies Weekly and McGraw Hill.

A similar influence seems to have been exercised over Pearson’s textbooks. In several instances, the textbooks used the phrase “Indus-Sarasvati Civilization” instead of the term “Indus Valley Civilization”—the phrase used in the framework, which holds the current academic consensus. “Sarasvati” refers to a river from Hindu myth, whose historical existence has not been documented in reputed scholarship. California’s framework contains no usages of the phrase “Indus-Sarasvati Civilization.”

During the adoption process, the drafted textbooks undergo an initial review by a panel of experts, followed by a final review by the IQC, which takes the review panel’s recommendations and the publishers’ responses into consideration in its decision. In its report, the review panel flagged Pearson’s mentions of the Sarasvati River and requested they be edited or removed. In one proposed edit, the report reads, “This is a subject of controversy, not settled fact. Correction: Remove mention of ‘Sarasvati’ and refer to it as ‘Indus Valley Civilization.’” In another comment, the panel was even more emphatic: “The Sarasvati River has never been proven to exist.”

Pearson doubled down in the face of this criticism, and in doing so, revealed that they had received extensive input from Hindu groups on this matter. In a hearing held at the department of education in late September, where the review panel’s suggestions were discussed, Luess Sampson-Lizotte—the vice president for product development for humanities and science at Pearson—requested that the panel’s recommendations about the Sarasvati be rejected. Sampson-Lizotte said, “We worked closely with national and local Hindu scholars to ensure that we created the highest-quality program for California students. The requested changes are supported by the Hindu American Foundation, the Hindu Education Foundation, and Hindupedia.” (Hindupedia is a website that also submitted detailed feedback to the textbooks. In one edit, they claimed that a description of the caste system was a “very stereotypical and negative remark, because these rigid customs were observed only in a few parts of India in late medieval times.”)

The IQC was unmoved by Pearson’s appeal. In a report by the commission in October, they upheld all of the review panel’s requests to have references to the “Indus-Sarasvati Civilization” removed or changed to the “Indus Civilization.” Pearson subsequently revised its textbook in accordance with the commission’s directions.

While the IQC may have been successful at removing the term “Indus-Sarasvati Civilization,” it retained a lot of commentary that perpetuates caste erasure, similar to the type that the Hindu groups pushed for during the framework-review process. For example, one Pearson textbook notes that the caste system

brought both costs and benefits. For instance, the system limited people’s individual freedom. The patterns of their lives were fixed at birth. However, some believe that the caste system helped India develop. They feel that it brought stability to Indian society. Indian goods became famous because caste members perfected their skills. The system also allowed different groups to follow their own beliefs.

It is difficult to imagine such apologia for oppression being peddled in a US textbook’s chapter about chattel slavery or South African apartheid.

The Hindu camp has also pressured the publishers by involving them in litigation. A key player in this aspect is the group California Parents for the Equalization of Educational Materials, or CAPEEM, which describes itself as “a group of parents residing in the state of California” that is “deeply concerned about the indoctrination of Abrahamic religions and the negative descriptions of Hinduism in the History and Social Science textbooks of our state.” CAPEEM has been active for over a decade—in 2006, it filed a lawsuit against many members of the board of education and the department of education, alleging that the adopted history textbooks put forth “derogatory and unequal treatment of the Hindu religion.” The case ended in a settlement in 2009, with CAPEEM withdrawing the suit, but receiving $175,000 from the department of education and the board.

HAF, too, filed a suit against the state board of education in 2006. The foundation claimed that the process that the board had undergone to review textbooks for sixth-grade students was not “fair and open,” and the judge ruled in HAF’s favour.

In February last year, CAPEEM filed another lawsuit, alleging that Hinduism received “unfair and unconstitutional treatment” in the textbooks. In its press release about the complaint, CAPEEM noted that the adopted framework “devotes almost half the discussion of Hinduism to the caste system, which it portrays as a supposed Hindu religious belief.” Last year, the board of education moved a motion before a California court to dismiss the case, but the judge declined to dismiss one of four claims against the state.

Soundararajan said that the CAPEEM suit had been an effective way for the Hindu camp to apply pressure to the process. “Their goal is to basically hang the threat of litigation over this round”—the editing of the textbooks—“so that the state board of education is afraid to actually advocate on behalf of people that aren’t Hindu,” Soundararajan said. “When the publishers would ask the state of California for verification about what was happening, they wouldn’t respond.” She continued, “I think that was specifically because they don’t want any correspondence on the record saying that they may have helped in addressing the issue of caste, because they don’t want to be sued later.” While reporting this story, I reached out multiple times to several individuals affiliated with the department of education—including people on the board and in the IQC—but never received a response.

CAPEEM and HAF’s abilities to initiate such suits, which generally involve paying handsome legal fees, point towards the steep differential in resources between the two camps. While SAHFA is a coalition of volunteer activists, HAF and HEF are both tax-exempt non-profits that receive considerable money in donations. According to HAF’s 2016 tax return, the organisation had net assets of over $3.2 million—a jump of $1 million from the previous year. HEF is not a registered non-profit, but the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh is, and HSS’s tax returns state that the organisation is “doing business as” the Hindu Education Foundation. The HSS’s 2016 tax return shows that the organisation has assets of over $3.1 million. Curiously, HEF seems to have minimal staff managing these funds—according to its 2016 return, the organisation’s only salaried staff member is Saumitra Gokhale, who supposedly works an average of 40 hours a week and makes $30,000 as a “yoga instructor.” (In an article on the website of Organiser, the RSS’s English-language mouthpiece, Gokhale is listed as a “Pracharak for America continent.” A January 2016 article in the Indian Express identifies him as the current global coordinator for the HSS).

Although Shukla and Kalra told me that HEF has also long been a major player on the California textbooks issue, it is difficult to pinpoint the on-the-ground work that the organisation has done, and who has been executing it. What is visible, though, is the organisation’s virulent digital footprint. For instance, a post on HEF’s website calls SAHFA “a fringe Hinduphobic group” that “tried to derail the textbook adoption process.” HEF also compiled a list of responses to SAHFA’s requested edits, in which it demonstrates even more fervour to whitewash caste than HAF. The list states, for example, that “The ‘caste system’ itself, as many scholars of colonialism have shown, is a product of Europe’s colonial encounter.” In response to a requested edit that would detail the fact that Dalits were “forced to do work considered impure,” HEF wrote that “the suggested edit has political overtones and also is not age appropriate for middle school children.”

HAF seems keen to hide, or at least wash its hands clean of, the fact that HEF is closely linked with the HSS. When I asked Shukla, HAF’s executive director, whether the organisation had ever worked with the HSS, she said no—and that, at the most, the HSS might have signed one of HAF’s many open letters. “We’ve worked with HEF,” she added. Kalra, the senior director, described HEF as “a community-based group” that HAF had worked with “throughout the years.” I then asked him who I should get in touch with from HEF, but he was not able to give me a single name. When I asked him whether the HSS was involved with HEF, he said, “I have no idea about that.” Shukla and Kalra seem to be either woefully ill-informed about their close partners, or intent on remaining evasive about any connections that HAF might have with the Sangh. HEF did not answer my request for an interview.

During the dispute over framework content, academics played a particularly influential role. Unified under the banner of the “South Asian Faculty Group,” many professors signed a letter that detailed the reasons why many of the edits proposed by the Hindu groups were ahistorical and ideologically motivated. A similar letter, with over 90 signatories, was submitted this year, endorsing the specific edits requested by SAHFA.

The Hindu camp, too, assembled a team of academics this year, who submitted their own letter. It was written primarily by Jeffery Long, a professor of religion and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College, who has previously worked with HAF on a report about anti-Hindu bigotry online. With almost 40 signatories, Long’s letter criticised some of the textbooks for their “underlying Orientalist narrative” and their tendency to put forth “inaccurate and unfavorable comparisons of Hinduism with other religions.”

But over a lengthy Skype interview with me, Long took a far more moderate tone than that used by HAF, HEF and many others in the Hindu camp. Long said while he thought some of SAHFA’s edits were “Hinduphobic,” he also found some of them “quite reasonable”—in particular, their requests to include descriptions of caste oppression. He also criticised the Hindu camp for not engaging in productive dialogue with the opposition. “I think one thing that militates against dialogue is when any critical discussion of Hinduism or Hindu practices is immediately dismissed as Hinduphobic,” he said. “That’s not the way forward. The way to cure a problem is first to acknowledge you have a problem.”

As this controversy unfolded, other Hindu organisations also came to the fore to express that HAF and HEF did not speak for them. Sadhana, a non-profit that describes itself as a “coalition of progressive Hindus,” posted a statement announcing their solidarity with SAHFA, noting, “Sadhana rejects attempts to erase or minimize caste in accounts of Hinduism.”

Hindus for Justice, a “network of Hindu progressives across the United States,” posted a statement titled “Just Say No To Hindu Fragility.” It read, “Many Hindus aren’t thin-skinned and afraid. Many of us are able to find pride in what’s best about Hinduism, while still respecting others, acknowledging our faults, and embracing complexity.” The statement continued, “That’s why we’re proud to stand with South Asian Histories for All … We’re proud to stand on the right side of history.”

Aria Thaker is a copy editor at The Caravan.

Whose Hinduism Is It Anyway?

Excellent piece, my comment at the post. 

America does it to everyone. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and others have all Americanized thier religions, that is bring thier traditions on par with human rights, freedom, liberty and justice for all. A new version of each religion will evolve that won’t be recognized back home. Each group is embarrassed by the antiques of thier traditions and want to run from it, hence the fight. I’m all for RE-interpreting religions to reflect human rights and rejecting misogynistic attitudes.  Mike Ghouse with Center for Pluralism 

Mike Ghouse

Courtesy of thewire.

https://thewire.in/197024/whose-hinduism-anyway-rights-improved-version-lefts-warts-one/

Whose Hinduism Is It Anyway? The Right’s ‘Improved’ Version or the Left’s ‘Warts-And-All’ One?

BY SEEMA SIROHI ON 14/11/2017 • 1 COMMENT

The trials and tribulations of modern India – and especially the present-day – are affecting the debate on ancient India, even on the other side of the ocean.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Washington, DC: The battle over how to depict Hinduism – or the various vedic, bhakti, folk and now the newly minted Hindutva versions – is serious and emotional.

It is also not a simple contest between Hindu “fundamentalists” and “fringe” scholars, as the two sides have labeled each other. Shades of opinions, compulsions, aggressions – both micro and macro – and agendas are at play.

One side clearly considers itself superior to the other with acres of scholarship boosting its learned interventions. The other side has numbers, fiat, funds and general support from the community. It also has Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu member of the US House of Representatives, who is close to the BJP-RSS leadership.

In between are thousands of Indian Americans, mostly Hindu, who want a more positive experience of India in textbooks for their children, not one that is exoticised, essentialised and simplified into stupidity. They don’t necessarily want a fairytale but they do want a fair tale.

They are not Hindutva supporters for the most part, nor fundamentalist, but they do get exercised every time some unthinking American businessman decides to put the picture of Ganesh or Shiva on slippers and toilet seats.

And they did not like it one bit when last year the politically correct South Asia scholars wanted to change the word “India” to “South Asia” in the textbooks to reflect today’s reality. The idea was rejected after such big names as Diana L. Eck and Nathan Glazer intervened, calling the proposal ahistorical and anachronistic.

The battle has been playing out in California – a present-day Haldighati of sorts – through textbooks for middle school students. As in Rajasthan, where Class X history books were revised this summer to say that Maharana Pratap conclusively won the battle of Haldighati, defeating Akbar and thus doing away with the ambiguity of a truce, so in California, school kids will now read about a kinder, gentler Hinduism where the stigma of caste is softened, even erased and where Sikhism and Buddhism didn’t necessarily develop in opposition to the worst practices of Brahminism.

Last week, California’s State Board of Education approved changes in 10 textbooks based on inputs from the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), 38 academics and other Hindu American community groups. The “positive edits” – as HEF called them in a statement – related to descriptions of caste, the Indus Valley civilisation and the “Aryan” migration among others.

There are many publishers and many textbooks in question and both sides have made hundreds of suggestions over time. The search for a fair, accurate and honest portrayal of ancient India and its history has raised tempers, led to accusations of intimidation and generally left much debris in its wake.

Activists opposing the changes accuse Hindu groups of corrupting the state’s “history and social science frameworks” with their half-baked scholarship. They say HEF members bullied them at the last public hearing and security guards repeatedly sent them to the back of the line. To be sure, Muslim and Jewish groups too are fighting similar battles over words and depictions of their respective religions and histories.

Why California? It has the largest and the oldest Indian American community in the US. It is also where new ideas are tested and tried. It is said what California does today, others may do tomorrow.

The war of words first erupted in California in 2005 when HEF became a medium of anger – some genuine, some ideological – for many community leaders who were outraged at some very obvious and egregious errors.

One textbook said Hindi is written in Arabic script, another described Hanuman as a “monkey king” who “loved Ram so much that it is said he is present every time the Ramayana is told.” The book then asked the students to “look around—see any monkeys?” A description of vegetarianism was titled “Where’s the Beef?” Was it a provocation or just a bad joke? You have to wonder at the authors of these textbooks because one contained a picture of a mosque while talking about Hinduism. A photo of a Muslim doing namaz was captioned “A Brahmin.”

Over time, HEF, the Vedic Foundation and the Uberoi Foundation, all of which share the agenda of promoting Hinduism and are ideologically aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement in India, decided it was not enough just to eliminate obvious errors.

What California does today, others may do tomorrow. Credit: Reuters

They wanted to fight bigger fight – of conflation of Hinduism with the caste system. They also targeted the baggage of colonial interpretations, including what they considered the myth of Hindus being the invaders of India. They said it was no longer the only acceptable theory. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) filed a lawsuit against the California Board of Education in 2006, saying the textbooks portrayed ancient India’s religious traditions in a negative light.

The court ruled mostly against the HAF and denied an injunction against the publication of the textbooks. The most contested language around the place of women in Hindu society, Dalits and Aryan migration/invasion remained. Last year, a new campaign was launched by HEF and HAF as the six-yearly review of textbooks approached.

This time they mobilised the larger Indian American community, most of which is Hindu but not fundamentalist, and got 12,000 letters and 14,000 signatures on a petition asking for “accuracy and equality in textbooks,” according to Suhag Shukla, executive director of HAF. She said in an email that immigrant Hindus from Fiji and the Caribbean, including Dalits, joined their coalition. Her list also included the NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the most respected and the oldest organisation representing black Americans, and the Anti-Defamation League, one of the most prominent Jewish groups fighting anti-Semitism.

The other side, represented by a coalition of Dalits, Muslims, Sikhs, regional experts and university professors called “South Asian Histories for All”, or SAHFA, dismisses the massive support for the rival coalition as a Hindu revisionist conspiracy and does not consider their concerns valid.

It also accuses them of using pressure tactics. “The State Board refused to enforce its own framework (guidelines for textbooks) and allowed discriminatory and inaccurate content to get in. They listened to the mob and created a platform for alternative facts,” Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a SAHFA member and a Dalit activist, told The Wire.

Dolly Arjun of the Dalit American Coalition said, “Upper caste Hindu nationalist lobby groups have been putting tremendous pressure to erase our history. They’ve been operating off the White nationalist playbook when they fight to erase uncomfortable historical truths.”

Some textbooks will now refer to Indus Valley as the “Indus Saraswati Civilisation” while others will teach that Indo-Aryans were “India’s original inhabitants.” HEF and its supporters, which also include many professors in various US colleges and universities, say the term “Aryan” is inappropriate to describe “ancient Indians” in school textbooks because of the racial connotations now associated with it.

Even scholars on the other side agree that the Aryan Invasion theory is not taken seriously anymore by most academics but they insist on an Aryan “migration” theory which implies that Hinduism is not indigenous to India but “migrated” to India.

In another contradiction pointed out by Vamsee Juluri, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, these scholars insist that Hinduism wasn’t an organised religion until the 13th century but at the same time they reject “any changes that suggest that caste wasn’t rooted in religion.”

Juluri said that this group in “cruel irony” opposed including the names of Valmiki and Vyasa as the authors of Ramayana and Mahabharata because the text would have noted they were not Brahmins. But that would have contradicted the scholars’ beliefs about caste and birth.

“The scholars, it appears, would rather lose the chance for thousands of children to learn that the two greatest epics of Indian civilization were written by people born into lower-caste all in the name of empowering them,” he wrote in March this year.

To put it simply, the debate is complicated.

In another major development last week, the word “Dalit” disappeared altogether from some textbooks while one textbook retained the word “untouchable,” a term now considered a slur just like the N-word for African Americans, according to Dalit activist Soundararajan.

School children will also learn that Hindus do not bother about caste anymore. A sentence, which attempted to explain the continuation of the caste system over millennia describing how millions of Hindus continue to observe the tradition of marrying within their caste, has been deleted from one of the textbooks.

But Shukla insists that roughly 30% of the sections on Hinduism and ancient India in textbook drafts contain discussions dedicated to caste. “Thus the assertion that caste or its history are being erased is simply not supported by facts,” she said. “Our diverse coalition, which has Hindus from all backgrounds, including Hindu Dalits, only asked that the complexity and evolution of caste be explained.”

While Shukla may want to paint a positive picture, Hindu groups such as the HAF have tried to discredit Dalit activists as “Christian missionaries” during the textbook campaign. The Internet is a cruel reality check.

Soundararajan, an impressive spokesperson for her side, calls Shukla’s group “an angry mob” that browbeat the Board. “The Board got suckered into it. One member in the end called it a “family dispute” which it clearly it is not.” She is enraged that the “structured interventions by 100 South Asia scholars” from SAHFA lost out to HEF activists, many of whom are computer engineers who claim scholarship just because they might have self-published a book. The Board by treating the two sides as equals created “parity” between two unequal groups, she said, an equation that clearly hurt.

“The Hindu fundamentalists’ message is clear: if you cross us, we will intimidate you. What’s dangerous to the Hindu eco-system is that we have the facts. They are making a mistake if they think we are going to roll over. California is considered the Blue (Democratic Party) wall,” she said, adding that her group was exploring legal options. “We will expose them as right-wing forces. They present themselves as neutral, as bearers of yoga but they want to Hindu-fy Sikhism and Buddhism. They want to portray Islam only in the context of the narrative of conquest.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The trials and tribulations of modern India and especially present-day India are partly informing the debate on ancient India. The distrust and distance among various Indian American groups has grown enormously since Narendra Modi became the prime minister.

Multiply the distrust and the uber confidence of Hindu groups by political correctness infecting American university campuses and you have a chasm that will not be bridged. Both may want a layered, nuanced portrayal of India and Hinduism in the end but what should be the composition of that picture eludes them.

If the Hindu right is adamant and boorish, the Left is insular and out of touch with what resonates with a vast number of people and why. But this is not the first time, nor will it be the last when sensible solutions will be deliberately avoided. And all on the backs of sixth grade students.

Seema Sirohi is a Washington DC-based commentator.