West Bengal: Reckless revisionism

Three years after the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) routed the CPM (Communist Party of India)-led Left Front government in the West Bengal legislative assembly election of 2011, ending 34 years of uninterrupted communist rule in the state, the much awaited poribartan (change) in the education sector is limited to ad hoc changes and ill-conceived policies. Apart from tinkering with school and college syllabuses and banning selected newspapers from government libraries, chief minister Banerjee™s education reform initiatives are centred around flushing out communist doctrine and hagiographies from school and college textbooks.
In April 2012, the TMC government expunged chapters on Marx, Engels and Bolsheviks from class VIII history textbooks; in September 2012, it withdrew stories and poetry written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894), a renowned Bengali author and Sukanta Bhattacharya (1926-1947), a revered poet deeply influenced by his communist experience, from the Bengali medium K-12 syllabus on the grounds that their prose and poetry is old-fashioned and difficult for students to grasp.
And in July this year, Partha Chatterjee, the newly appointed education minister, suggested expurgation of the name of Kabir Suman from a class XII Bengali language text. Suman is a former TMC MP who fell out with the chief minister on several issues. More recently, the TMC government has generated another controversy by labeling the activities of freedom fighters Shahid Khudiram Bose, Jatindranath Mukherjee and Prafulla Chaki as œextremism and terrorism in the class VIII history textbook prescribed by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE).
Educationists, particularly historians, are intrigued by this latest diktat of the TMC government because none of these freedom fighters had any connection with communism.
Prafulla Chaki (1888-1908) was a Bengali revolutionary who fought against British Rule. He was associated with the Yugantar group (estb. by seer-philosopher Aurobindo Ghosh in 1906) of revolutionaries who plotted assassinations of British officials to secure India™s independence. Khudiram Bose (1889-1908), the youngest Bengali revolutionary in the Indian freedom movement was hanged to death, and Jatindranath Mukherjee (1879-1915) aka Bagha Jatin, was a revolutionary philosopher and principal leader of the Yugantar party.
The description of the Yugantar revolutionaries as extremists and terrorists has prompted several well-known historians to condemn them as gross distortions of India™s freedom struggle. Several intellectuals in Kolkata have accused the TMC government of taking the side of British imperialists. œThe writers of these textbooks are not only distorting facts, but disparaging heroes of our freedom movement, says Atish Dasgupta, a well-known historian.
Ironically the TMC government™s school texts revision and rewriting spree has united the entire opposition ” Congress, Janata Dal-United, BJP and Shiv Sena ” against it. All of them have urged the chief minister to direct the state board to revise the references to Yugantar revolutionaries. According to BJP leader Tathagata Roy, the re-written class VIII history text is reflective of the œchaos that has engulfed the state after the new TMC government assumed office in 2011.
Comments Sukanta Bhattacharya, associate professor of economics at the University of Calcutta: œThe people who constitute the WBBSE™s textbooks committee and the board itself have shown themselves up as thoroughly negligent and incompetent. Quite obviously WBBSE officials have not read the textbooks themselves or considered their implications seriously. Appointing inept people to such crucial positions sends wrong signals and can totally warp the minds of millions of students, he warns.
A timely warning. But in the tower of Babel which is contemporary Bengal, there are few listeners.
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)