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Organised attempt to write history
with slanted agenda: Amartya Sen

In an obvious criticism of the Sangh Parivar's stand on the Ayodhya issue, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen Tuesday said there was an organised attempt in India to "write a history manoeuvred to suit a slanted agenda in contemporary politics."

"History could easily become bunk through motivated manipulation. This is especially so if the writing of history is manoeuvred to suit a slanted agenda. There are organised attempts in our country, at this time, to do just that," Sen said inaugurating the 61st annual session of the Indian History Congress in Calcutta.

Without naming any political party, Sen said such attempts were being made with "arbitrary augmentation of a narrowly sectarian view of India's past, undermining its magnificently multi-religious and heterodox history."

Among other distortions, Sen said, there was a systematic confounding of mythology with history in the Ayodhya case.

"An extraordinary example of this has been the interpretation of Ramayana, not as a great epic but as documentary history, which can be invoked to establish property rights over places and sites possessed and owned by others," he said referring to the recent statement by the director of the Indian Council of Historical Research on the exact site where Rama was born.

The ICHR director's statement asserting that the Babri masjid itself had no religious significance and then an 'embarrassed' dissociation of the ICHR from these 'remarkable pronouncements' illustrated the confounding of myth and history, Sen said.

The Ramayana, he said, was "now being made into a legally authentic account that gives some members of one community an alleged entitlement to particular sites and land, amounting to a licence to tear down religious places of other communities."

"Thomas de Quincey has an interesting essay called Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Rewriting of history for bellicose use can also, presumably, be a very fine art," the renowned economist, who described himself as a non-historian taking interest in history, said.

Condemning the "activist incursions of communal politics in contemporary India like in the Babri Masjid demolition issue," he said: "A heavily carpentered characterisation of Mughal rule as anti-Hindu had repeatedly been invoked by certain political outfits."

"There are many superb historians in India to give these misconstructions their definite due. I am outlining some issues that relate to the truth and falsehood in general history...why is history such a battleground?" Sen asked.

PTI

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