The Left-liberal grip may have slackened, but they still call the shots. Remember, how they all ganged up to force Bloomsbury to withdraw a Delhi riots book. And now Sampath is facing a series of coordinated attacks in the name of plagiarism
For a while now, Vikram Sampath has been under attack. His ostensible crime being he chose to write a book on VD Savarkar, a political pariah in the Nehruvian system, though, as Sampath himself told this writer in an interaction, the real process of turning him into a villain began in the late 1990s, when the first BJP-led NDA government came to power at the Centre and proactively started venerating Savarkar. “The old (Congress) generosity towards Savarkar started dissipating,” Sampath said, reminding me of the 1970s when Indira Gandhi called him “the remarkable son of India”.
A few years ago, during a meeting with Romila Thapar at her South Delhi bungalow, the eminent historian disdainfully asked this writer: “But where are Right-wing intellectuals?” There definitely were a few of them, but they were not popular figures. People didn’t know much about them. Their books would not be published in big publishing houses. And this brings us to the second reason why Sampath is being targeted so viciously today.
Sampath, along with the likes of Sanjeev Sanyal and J Sai Deepak, among others, are the new rockstars of Right-wing intellectuals/historians who have enviable mass following and acceptance, thanks to social media. Unlike the Right-wing scholars of the yore like Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant S Talageri, among others (Arun Shourie was an exception), who despite having credible academic titles to their credit, were confined to the margins, this new breed of intellectuals could not be ignored. They are not just competing with the Left-liberals, but also beating them squarely on what was till the other day an exclusive Leftist turf. They aren’t camera shy and are equally articulate as writers. They rule the TV/social media screens and write bestsellers, much more consistently than the so-called public intellectuals. Sampath’s Savarkar biography and Sai Deepak’s India That is Bharat are apt examples.
So, when the first theory of the Leftist manual — to ignore the adversary as if he didn’t exist (and it worked well with the likes of Sita Ram Goel, Ram Swarup, et al) — fails, then invoke the second one: To call names. This has been the standard Leftist modus operandi. Even someone like Subhas Chandra Bose couldn’t escape this and was called “Tojo’s donkey” (People’s War; 19 July 1942) or “Goebbels’ cur” (People’s War, 13 September 1942). So, the idea is to throw as much muck on the adversary, call him illiterate, brand him fascist and communal, and hope some of the muck may stick on him. Does this explain the so-called plagiarism charge against Sampath, whose locus standi, as Sanjeev Sanyal showed through a series of tweets on Sunday, is dubious in nature?
Courtesy: Sita Ram Goel
“First, the evidence doesn’t relate to any of Sampath’s major works but the transcript of a speech he did at India Foundation in 2017. I also spoke at the event, and remember Vikram speaking mostly extempore with a few short passages read out,” Sanyal writes, adding: “Second, the supposedly plagiarised sentences are from two scholars Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle. They are both mentioned in the references, and the former is mentioned clearly in the text. Is it plagiarism when the source is mentioned prominently?” Interestingly, Bakhle had reviewed Sampath’s book on Savarkar, and nowhere, as Sanyal brings out, did she mention plagiarism, or showed any discomfort with Sampath’s scholarship or lack of it.
So, plagiarism is an afterthought. And it’s the result of academic/ideological jealousies too: How dare a “Sanghi” (that’s the standard way these so-called liberals refer to an intellectual they are uncomfortable with) become a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, as Sampath is. The Royal Historical Society is the UK’s foremost society promoting the scholarly study of the past, and the Left-liberals thought this was their exclusive preserve.
Abhijit Iyer-Mitra recently wrote a scathing article in Firstpost on the Leftist manual of targeting opponents (https://www.firstpost.com/politics/want-to-grasp-the-leftist-manual-of-targeting-opponents-just-look-at-sampath-sanyal-saga-10359491.html). “These attacks have a very careful modus operandi. The ‘big names’ of the Left avoid attacking them, but employ the underdogs who fall over each other to please the ‘big names’ in order to ingratiate themselves, get scholarships and possibly overseas academic postings… This time however while largely sticking to the attack pattern, the level of attacks escalated to the ‘middle dogs’, indicating the sheer desperation in the Left camp,” he wrote.
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The three academicians who have cried the plagiarism wolf belong to the “middle” category, with one of them being more active on social media inventing the secular/liberal values in Aurangzeb, besides organising a ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ event in the US at a time that country should have observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11! She is definitely doing a good job in trying to please the “big dogs”, who are yet to come out of hiding!
But then, who are these “big dogs”? And how do they operate? To understand this, one needs to look at the matron of Left-liberal historiography in India, Romila Thapar. Her well-known book, A History of India, was first printed in 1965. Decades later, it was published again with a new name, Early India. (Another feature of most of India’s eminent historians: They don’t write many books; they refurbish whatever they have already written. For, they seem to believe they have already written a perfect and perfected history!)
While reviewing Early India in May 2003 for London’s Financial Times, Edward Luce (yes, the same gentleman who saw the Indian government celebrating Subhas Chandra Bose’s 125 birth anniversary as the “latest exhibit of Modi’s fascist ideology”), wrote: “Romila Thapar’s masterful recent book, Early India, ends before the Islamic era, but it makes it plain that the destruction of temples — a highly combustible issue in today’s India — was also the normal thing for incoming Hindu dynasties to do… Well before Islam appears in India, Hindu dynasties had erased almost all the Buddhist and Jainist temples of early dynasties.”
Courtesy: Sita Ram Goel
Interestingly, American scholar YC Rosser thought to get to the source of the temple destruction information. So, she met Harbans Mukhia, who “has mentioned destruction of temples by Hindus” in an article in the Hindustan Times (19 March 2000). “I asked him what documents on the subject he had in possession. He told me that Prof Romila Thapar has some information to support the proposition”. He also claimed to possess “some references” in a file that he could not locate! After some days, Yasser met Thapar and told her about the Mukhia conversation. “She (Thapar) said she has not written anything but an American research scholar, Richard Eton, has written something recently about it in the preface to his new book”.
It’s a typical Marxist ruse to make wild statements and then point at others when proof for the same is sought! Prof Shankar Sharan, in his book Marxism and the Writing of Indian History, brings to light another saga of Marxist hypocrisy. At the peak of her political career in 1973, prime minister Indira Gandhi decided to bury a ‘Time Capsule’ in the Red Fort complex, glorifying 25 years of India’s Independence in 3,000 words, which in reality was a eulogy of two persons — Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi. No wonder when the Janata party government came to power it dug out the Capsule on 8 December 1977.
However, the most fascinating aspect of the saga was the reaction of JNU historian S Gopal, who is believed to have got the Capsule work moving in the first place. In a detailed interview, as brought out by Prof Sharan, in a Leftist weekly Link, Prof Gopal said, “It was ridiculous to dig up the time capsule as it was to bury it.” This was followed by the typical Marxist double-speak: “It is tragic that we have replaced a Right-wing fascist dictatorship with a Right-wing communal reactionary government.” Interestingly, the government on whose behalf Prof Gopal acted to get a eulogistic history written for posterity was “a Right-wing fascist dictatorship”!
Another reason for Leftist belligerence is they know very well that their scholarship is mediocre, held together by political patronage and institutional grip. Arun Shourie, in his book Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, quotes a JNU lecturer as saying: “A chief characteristic of academic feudalism is that the protégé must not be too good. If he is bright enough to overthrow the master, he cannot ever be anyone’s protégé.” Shourie further informs how Prof Bipan Chandra, another eminent historian, held such a vice-like grip over appointments in JNU that outsiders didn’t even bother to apply there.
So, these intellectuals won’t let any outsider be part of elite institutions, find a seat at high-profile lit-fests, and get published with global publishing houses. In their golden days, Prof RS Sharma, for instance, would call history books written by RC Majumdar inferior as he emphasised how they were “published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, run on the money of Birlas”.
Their hold has slackened since 2014. Today, Sampath and Sanyal get published by Penguin. And Sai Deepak is wooed by Bloomsbury. They are also getting passes into illustrious academic institutions, till a few years ago an exclusive preserve of the Left. Also, thanks to their comfort with social media platforms, these new rockstars of the Right-wing threaten to put these relics of the Nehruvian past where they truly belong: Dustbin!
The Left-liberal grip may have slackened today, but they still call the shots. Remember, how they all ganged up to force Bloomsbury to withdraw a Delhi riots book. And how Sampath is today facing a series of coordinated attacks, questioning his credentials as a historian. The battle is not over yet. But it’s obvious who is on the back foot. Soon, in desperation, the “big dogs”, as Abhijit Iyer-Mitra referred to India’s Left-liberal cabal, will be out in the open to defend the last of their besieged bastions. The country still awaits its ideological freedom, seventy years after it attained its political independence.
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