Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist†anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians†like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as “saffronization†was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a “coup d'étatâ€. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin “at least as ruthless as Hitlerâ€. Such are the true concerns of the “secularists†warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum.
Koenraad Elst
