By: Shachi Rairikar
September 19, 2004

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It is indeed unbelievable that Akhilesh Mithal in his weekly column 'Itihaas' published in the Asian Age has been pouring on venom on Hindus and Hindu organisations week after week with calculated irresponsibility.

Very often his provocative comments are extremely churlish because writing on several facets of history, he is sometimes making vicious comments on Hindus, unrelated and out of place, solely with a view to cause disharmony in the society. The headings of his columns - Rakshasas Were Hindus, Shivaji in Agra, Hindutva at Agra Red Fort, The Anglo RSS Nexus, Somanatha an Arab Icon? - themselves unravel his prejudiced mindset which are aimed to denigrate the Hindu society sometimes by magnifying its diversity, sometimes by playing Muslim point of view using most unedifying adjectives and epithets about national heroes like Shivaji and several Rajput warriors.

His column published on 26th October 2003 was titled “Rakshasas were Hindus”. In that he writes, "One VHP demonstrator in the procession holding up traffic in New Delhi on 15th October 2003 was made up to look like the rakshasa king, Ravana. Perhaps the VHP did not realise how appropriate his impersonation was in the context of the outrages committed by the parivaar in Gujarat in March 2002".

Overuse of abusive language expresses his mindset, which takes vicarious pleasure every time he spews poison against Hindus in his columns. A fake and half-baked historian, Mithal tries unsuccessfully to prove, in a questionable and gutter language that Hindus' hegemonic prejudices deny or restrict the basic rights of minorities which is quite shameful.

His column dated 7^th September 2003 gives evidence of his lack of knowledge and the editor, M.J.Akbar's indifference (or should we call it deliberate mischief?) where Mithal writes that “The present government of India, led by the Hitler inspired RSS, suffers from a deep-seated inferiority complex in areas like history and culture. They cannot live down the fact that their leaders like Hegdewar and Golwalkar never fought for freedom” (please note that he has even spelt Dr. Hedgewar wrongly). He writes that they and Savarkar after 1911 “were busy plotting and executing communal riots when Gandhi, Nehru, Badshah Khan and Maulana Azad were fighting the British for India's freedom”.

He further writes that “Prithviraj Chauhan, Maha Rana Pratap and Chatrapati Shivaji Bhosle have been given this honoured mummy treatment earlier and it has not added to national integration, gender equality or any of the other national goals……..We need someone who remembers the Allah Bukshes and the Badshah Khans and all those who fought for the dignity and self respect of all Indians and not people who make heroes of dead men of long ago whose death meant burning alive of many, many women” (out of 5000 years of India’s known history Mithal cannot cite a single Hindu who deserves to be remembered; to be remembered the first qualification obviously is that one should be a Muslim).

Though he finds it wasteful to glorify Shivaji and the brave Rajput warriors who gave up their lives to protect the Hindus from the barbaric brutalities of the Islamic invaders, he doesn’t fail to praise Tipu Sultan for his “secular” outlook while narrating a story of Tipu giving grants to temples which appears to be more of a folklore than history. The historical fact that Tipu destroyed temples, killed thousands of Hindus and forcefully converted many more to Islam does not fall within the gambit of Mithal’s knowledge of “Itihaas”.

Another person who earns respect in the eyes of Mithal is Akbar, another Muslim. In his 11^th July 2004 column Mithal cites an example from the best of the Indian tradition of justice and equity. His perverted perception of “Itihaas” does not allow him to talk about Raja Harishchandra or Asoka or Kautilya’s love for justice (their obvious disqualification is that they were Hindus) but compels him to choose his example from the reign of Akbar, emperor of India from 1556-1605. Probably he is unaware that Akbar had a victory tower erected with the heads of the captured and surrendered army of Hemu after the second battle of Panipat. Later, Akbar again slaughtered more than 30,000 unarmed captive Hindu peasants after the fall of Chittod on February 24, 1568.

It seems that Mithal has a compulsion to denigrate anything that is related to Hinduism and glorify anything that is related to Islam. In his column dated 18th January 2004 Mithal writes, "Urdu, closer to Persian, a language used in the courts and also as the medium of cultural exchange amongst the social elite aroused the envy of Hindi. The Hindi waalaas began life with a great inferiority complex which has persisted through the late 19th and the 20th century. It caused the Partition of India in 1947." The Khilafat movement, the activities of the Muslim League and Gandhiji’s appeasement policy are of common knowledge today. But Mithal’s interpretation of “Itihaas” clearly reveals his strategy to misguide the younger generation with such farce.

On 8^th February 2004 his column title reads “Somanatha an Arab icon?” Based on another fraud historian Romila Thapar’s book on Somanath, this column quotes Farrukhi Sistani, a court poet of Mahmud of Ghazni saying that the icon in Prabhas Patan worshipped as Somanath was in fact the very same as the goddess Manat, an ancient Semitic goddess. Mithal narrates how the shrine of Manat, goddess of destiny was probably smuggled to India by sea route to escape the wrath of the Prophet who had ordered the destruction of all temples and idols in Arabia. Instead of acknowledging that pre-Islamic Arabians were, like Hindus, idol-worshippers and the Prophet destroyed all their temples and forcefully converted people to Islam, Mithal calls Somanath an Arab icon. He obviously doesn’t know that Prabhas Patan finds its mention in the Mahabharat and the Puranas, long before the birth of the Prophet.

Apart from distorting history Mithal also exposes his lack of knowledge when he writes, "Banning conversion, like banning divorce, only compels individuals to live in a state they find irksome if not totally unbearable." Hasn't anybody told Mithal that the anti-conversion laws are against conversions by force, fraud, threat, coercion, bribe, etc. and that willful conversion is not objected to?

In the Asian Age dated 21^st September 2003 Mithal discovers the “The Anglo RSS Nexus”. He maintains that the RSS were the agents of the British and claims to have evidence for the same, the evidence being the discovery of blueprints of great accuracy and professionalism of every town and village of a vast area of U.P. prominently marking out the Muslim localities and habitations with detailed instructions regarding access to the various locations, and other matters which amply revealed their sinister purport. These maps, in the opinion of Rajeshwar Dayal, the first Indian Home Secretary of U.P., belonged to the RSS. Owing to the high quality of the maps, Mithal draws inference, “These maps could have originated only in the British Surveyor General's office. The British administration was known for the passionate zeal with which they guarded maps. That these were made available to the RSS is evidence of the link.”

Mithal’s evidence, as is apparent, is an inference drawn on the basis of pre-conceived notions and bias and can hardly be acknowledged as an evidence. When a leading national daily of repute publishes such strong allegations against a very patriotic organization, it is definitely expected that they have stronger support for their argument.  

Another glaring example of Mr. Mithal's lack of research is his 18^th January 2004 column wherein he calls the RSS “the mirror image of the Muslim League” and writes, "The RSS are playing a dangerous game of fracturing India along religious and caste lines.....Making the caste Hindus fear and hate others and develop a persecuted community complex may win the RSS power. It does nothing but harm to the country." Mithal needs to be told that the RSS has always been known for its fight against casteism. Even before independence when untouchability was in vogue, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar praised the RSS for absolute equality and brotherhood and the complete absence of untouchability in its camps. Even today it is the RSS which, through its various wings, is doing tremendous work for the education and the upliftment of the vanvasis and the backward classes.

On the other hand it is Mithal himself who, through his jaundiced version of “Itihaas”, tries to create rifts in the society on the basis of religion and caste as is evident from his 23rd November 2003 column wherein he says that Navratri and Sankranti are caste Hindus festivals and mean nothing to Dalits. Has he gone to Dalit's households to find out which festivals they celebrate and which they shun? Navratri, through Dandiya Raas, has been today transformed into a global festival, in which members of all communities participate with great gusto.

Then talking about Gujarat, he says that the government of an Indian state cannot deploy public resources to celebrate the festival of a particular community (read Hindu). Pray, what does he have to say about the plethora of Iftar parties regularly thrown by various politicians and political parties?

This skewed version of our “Itihaas” will only misguide our new generation. It will keep them oblivious of the great achievements of our predecessors. They will remain unaware of the knowledge of the Vedas, the great philosophy of the Bhagwat Gita, the morals of the Ramayana, the spirituality of the Upanishads, the political science of Kautilya, the mathematics of Aryabhatt, the aeronautics of Rishi Bhardwaj and Agastyamuni, the medical achievements of Charak and Sushruta, the civil engineering of the Harappans and the power of Sanskrit. This will not allow them to have pride in their rich culture, religion and heritage. On the contrary they will develop inferiority complex, seeing themselves as the descendents of the most uncultured, indecent and barbaric people and start looking up to the most barbaric and inhuman people, who in fact destroyed their civilization, as cultured, tolerant and peace loving. This heralds the end of the greatest and the most peace loving civilization in world history.

Such distortion of history and defamation of national heroes only shows that our media is neither concerned about the facts of history, nor the sentiments of millions of people, nor its adverse effects on the future of the nation. The concept of national pride is completely alien to our English media. There are obvious limits of media power, when denigration of a 5000 year old culture is shamelessly resorted to with premeditated irreverence and irresponsibility. It appears that the media will mislead an entire generation by distorting historical facts and stoop down to any level to fill their coffers.

Mr. Mithal should put in more study in his efforts and should not be just a crude anti-Hindu Congress puppet with no sense or awareness about the under-currents of modern history. It is high time that he and his editor M.J.Akbar are taught the real history of India before they write and publish spurious “Itihaas”. If it is a history writer's moral responsibility to present the correct picture of our past, it is also the editor's responsibility to ensure that the "Itihaas" published by him is not distorted and is not against the national interest. The way "Itihaas" is going really makes one wonder, what incentive is so lucrative, which leads the writer-publisher duo to present such stuff? With such fake historians and sold media we do not need the ISI to destroy our country. Our own people will do it.

Shachi Rairikar