Identity politics and the many hues of textbooks
The right-wing ruling establishment in Karnataka has unleashed a series of provocations in recent months. It has shaken communal peace and confidence in an otherwise harmonious society—by and large. The most recent site, or rather an additional site of confrontation, has been school textbooks.
As it usually happens, it is not textbooks of science that created a storm but those that had lessons from humanities and social sciences. Strangely, the sciences are not seen as merely another body of knowledge with inherent prejudices, but as truth itself. It is seen as beyond argument and doubt, and in the realm of only an expert. But about everything else there is a tentativeness, an opinion to die for, and an ideology to uphold even among non-specialists. This invites overzealous participation and vigorous debate.
What is happening in Karnataka is a very familiar trick played by those in power to canonise their worldviews and ways of thinking. The colonial and imperial masters have done it in the past, the Marxists have done it, the Congress nationalists have done it, the Socialists have done it, those who cleverly bracket themselves as ‘apolitical’ have done it, and now the saffron ideologists think that the playfield belongs to them. If one looks at it closely, an ideal, perfectly balanced, universally acceptable textbook in the arts, literature, cultures and histories has never been created. They have been projects of different powers with their civilisational goals embedded. The decentralisation of the making of textbooks and the autonomy of learning is a separate debate, which we could keep for another day.
For now there is an eerie calm over the textbook storm in Karnataka not because things have been settled in a certain way, but because the Bommai government has signalled a step back. It did this because the strong currents of the storm threatened to deplete certain caste ‘vote banks’ for the ruling establishment. The ceasefire looks temporary and tentative. There could be another whirlpool of incendiary dust that may pick up anytime soon.
This whole textbook controversy in Bommai’s BJP has been an extension of the Sangh Parivar’s efforts to desperately and hurriedly shift the vote-mobilisation game in Karnataka from caste to Hindutva ideology. It worked to an extent. That is until they confined themselves to targeting Muslims and Christians. But the moment a perception was created that they were threatening to undo a status quo that surrounded the position and pride of dominant castes and their icons, there was a hint of a severe backlash. The BJP’s textbook revision has, at last count, upset the Vokkaligas, the Lingayats, the Dalits, the Jains and the tribes. For a regime that knows how to make one fight the other with some precision, this new genius has helped antagonise everybody at the same time.
The chief minister quickly dissolved the textbook panel headed by a man who was accused of lacking ‘merit’. When the uninformed education minister said that the chair of the textbook panel was an ‘IIT and CET’ professor, the panel chief had to sheepishly clarify that he gave only tutorials to those who wanted to get into the premium tech institutes. The qualifications of the textbook panel chief assaulted the sensibilities of the middle-class ‘merit’ communities that tend to side with the BJP. The passion to introduce ideological content (that includes lessons on the founders of the RSS) was there, but Bommai’s BJP lacked the ingenuity to artfully mask the process. It exposed them to their own constituents as a bunch of loudmouthed ignoramuses who lacked the skill to steer a delicate cultural project. This made them defenceless.
What if an Ivy league or IIT/IIM professor had been made the head of the panel? Would things have panned out differently? Here, the sad truth is that those in the technology departments, sciences or even economics would not have the wherewithal to steer a dubious cultural agenda in school textbooks. Besides, they would still have some professional reputation to guard. Therefore, it had to be the crude moves of a ‘tuition-teacher’. He was a perfect agent provocateur for the right-wing that wants a street fight and not a seminar or symposium.
Literary culture and the social sciences are still the forte of liberals across the globe. The right-wing social science, literature and culture brigades are mired in controversies and do not have the legitimacy of the academia, especially the western ones. In this backdrop, it is interesting that the BJP government led by B S Yediyurappa in 2008 had appointed a former ISRO chief as the chairman of the state’s knowledge commission, and a committed ABVP/RSS person as its member-secretary. The ISRO chief offered a veneer of respectability. In retrospect, there was great tact seen in that appointment. After all, the BJP had just then begun in Karnataka and wanted to go slow.
Those who call themselves ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ may now be claiming victory of some sort, but their victory is a false and a pyrrhic one. It was not their protest and statements that clinched the issue with the government, but the interventions of caste seminaries and their powerful pontiffs that resisted Bommai’s bravado. The public intellectual in Karnataka has long lost his halo and the caste pontiffs have sadly become arbiters of the public space for long. The ‘liberal’ and the ‘progressive’ types have also learnt to operate through them for some time now.
When there was controversy about lessons on Tipu Sultan being dropped or edited, the ‘progressive’ voices were relatively shallow, without conviction, and only politically correct. No pontiff spoke up either. But the moment Basaveshwara, Kuvempu, Ambedkar and other cultural icons started figuring in the debates, the voices grew loud and the pontiffs amplified them. This marks another sad turn in the politics and culture of Karnataka, where protests and public culture appear to be propped up by various identity interests. What has temporarily won is one type of identity politics over another type.
Senior journalist and author