Dear List,

Here's an update on events in California in the last week, including
not only the Board of Education meeting I attended yesterday, but also
a closed meeting that Michael was flown into by the Board of Education
on January 6th, which we are finally at liberty to discuss publicly.
The Hindutva press has already leaked out news of the closed meeting,
but (quite predictably) the picture they paint of the session has been
skewed to turn an obvious defeat into the appearance of a victory. (If
you read the Hindutva Lists these days, it is clear that the Hindutva
movers and shakers know otherwise.)

I'll keep details here to a minimum, since everyone is probably as sick
of this business as we are, and it would be nice to return to research
issues. To understand the background, it will be useful to refer to
List message #2707, which describes the December 2nd meeting of the
(purely advisory) Curriculum Commission that forced the Board to call
the January 6th session.

To access the summary of the December 2nd meeting, you'll have to sign
onto the List:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/2707

*************

1. As noted in that summary, on November 9th the Board of Education was
alerted by our initial petition -- sent out on behalf of a long list of
international researchers (many of them on this List) by Michael Witzel
-- to past Hindutva attempts to alter history textbooks for ideological
reasons. The petition discussed the NCERT case in India and contained
links to US State Department studies that have repeatedly warned about
Hindutva attempts to fictionalize history for political and religious
purposes.

After receiving the petition, the Board of Education voted 11-0 --
contrary to previous expectations -- not to accept any of the
previously proposed edits to the textbooks submitted by the Hindutva
backed Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF). Both
groups had represented themselves to the Board as mainstream Hindu
groups that supposedly spoke on behalf of a (quite fictional)
homogenous Hindu-American community. They were supported in their
claims by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which (as noted often in
previous posts) publicly represents itself as a "Human Rights
Organization", despite the fact that its leaders have clear Hindutva
roots and long ties to the BJP party and other rightwing groups in
India.

Rather than accepting the Hindutva edits, the Board sent them back
instead to the Curriculum Commission (CC) for a factual review.
Recognizing that the CC had previously approved the Hindutva edits, the
Board instructed this subsidiary body in clear (and legally binding)
language that it was to approve or reject proposed edits *solely* on
the grounds of historical accuracy. They were instructed as well in
equally clear terms to "accept no additional edits and corrections."

For what happened instead on December 2nd, see the detailed eyewitness
accounts I earlier provided (in message #2707; see the link above). To
cite a bare-bones summary subsequently written by the DOE, the advisory
Curriculum Committee on December 2nd "approved changes beyond the scope
of the SBE's direction". Their violation of the SBE's directives
included accepting additional edits, including some coming from public
(Hindutva) comments at the December 2nd meeting. The CC also included
new language in the texts not previously approved by anyone -- again
violating the Board's unambiguous directives.

2. Reacting to these violations, one week ago today (on January 6th), a
closed meeting was held in Sacramento that was attended by two members
of the State Board of Education, two members of the Curriculum
Commission, the Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Education,
the DOE's legal council, and the Department of Education's professional
staff, which includes at least two history Ph.D.'s who are well aware
now of what is going on. The Board of Education also flew Michael
Witzel into California the previous day for the meeting. Michael had
been appointed as part of an official Content Review Panel [CRP] in
November (along with Stanley Wolpert of UCLA and James Heitzman of UC
Davis), but previously had done all his work for the Board remotely.
The body also asked S. Bajpai in, a retired academic who months earlier
had originally been brought in by the DOE to vet the proposed edits of
the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation.

One of the blackest of the many black-comic elements in this story is
that Bajpai, who has well-known Hindutva associations, was originally
brought in as a consultant on the recommendation of the Vedic
Foundation, which at the time was still viewed by the Department as a
mainstream Hindu group. As a result, before November 9th, the Hindutva
groups were in the enviable position of having one of their own
'vetting' their edits.

3. I won't go into details about the January 6th meeting, except to say
that in a marathon session last Friday the Board and Curriculum
Commission representatives and the Department of Education staff again
went over the long list of conflicting edits proposed by the two
Hindutva groups, which had previously been reviewed separately by
Bajpai and Michael Witzel and his fellow CRP members -- in the latter
case with support from the Department of Education staff.

Summarizing quickly the results of the January 6th meeting: every
important edit from the Hindutva groups that violated historical
accuracy was recommended for removal from the texts. Among the losers:
claims concerning the supposedly indigenous origins of Indo-European
speaking populations (the 'Aryan' issue), the absurd view that ancient
Indian religions were monotheistic even in Vedic times (insisted upon
for sectarian reasons by the Vedic Foundation, whose views of Hinduism
are anything but mainstream), the whitewashing of references to caste
problems (including the unconscionable stripping from the texts of
references to Dalits), the insulting claims about women having
"different" rather than "less" rights in ancient India, the blatantly
nationalist replacement of Hindi for Sanskrit spellings ("Buddha"
becoming "Buddh", etc.).

In sum, all the critical claims of the Hindutva groups began to be
eliminated on January 6th, following our predictions as to what would
inevitably occur sometime in the California case. (It was a foregone
conclusion that something like this would happen at some point, since
California law explicitly forbids the insertion of sectarian claims
into history textbooks.) The textbooks are still by no means not
perfect, and the publishers and Department of Education staff still
must reconcile remaining inconsistencies in the 10 different textbook
'programs', but all the key Hindutva fantasies at least are gone.

4. It is important to recognize one other key point about the January
6th review of the edits. There were many cases reviewed that day or
earlier that involved little more than linguistic quibbles. In almost
all cases of this sort, Michael (or earlier Michael and his fellow CRP
members) offered no objections to Hindutva-proposed and/or
Bajpai-vetted edits. This has allowed writers in the Hindutva press to
claim, based on counts of trivial edits, that the January 6th meeting
ended in a victory of some sort for their side.

The reality is quite different, and the people in India and the US
coordinating the California Hindutva campaign are well aware of it.

I'll only give here one comic example that illustrates the absurdity
these claims. One of the original Vedic Foundation edits objected with
great vehemence -- quite an odd objection at first sight -- to the
statement in the textbooks that Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were the
"first" cities in India. The Hindutva "victory" claimed in the
rightwing press in this case lies in the fact that in the original
Bajpai edits the word "first" was replaced with the word "early" -- an
edit that no one (including Michael) ever bothered to challenge. What
6th grader would possibly notice the change in language? Michael and
his fellow CPR members let the Bajpai edit here (and in many similar
instances) stand since the change in language was inconsequential.

The humor -- which wasn't recognized by the Board of Education or the
Department of Education staff until Michael pointed it out to them on
January 6th, where he appeared with the VF "Bible" in hand -- comes in
*why* the Vedic Foundation felt so strongly about this odd edit. The
reason becomes clear when you recall the fact (which the VF of course
never revealed to the California Board of Education) that in the VF's
fantasy view of "history" Indian civilization can be traced back an
unbroken 1.972 billion years. See again:

http://tinyurl.com/du4kq

In this "historical" context, with ancient Indian civilization fully in
place over 1.7 billion years before the dinosaurs, how could Harappa
and Mohenjo-daro (which originated a mere 4500 years ago or so)
*possibly* be the "first" Indian cities? (Well, I guess they wouldn't
be all that "early" either, but who wants to argue with Hindutva
experts on history about trivialities of less than two billion years?)

So much for the claimed January 6th Hindutva victory. The 'victories'
were cases like this, while all the important claims about imaginary
Vedic monotheism, indigenous 'Aryans', a harmonious caste world, no
Dalits, a fictional Hindu homogeneity, and women with "different" but
not "fewer" rights than men went down the tubes.

**************

3. Only a little has to be added here to what I said last night about
the Board of Education meeting in Sacramento on January 12th
(yesterday). See here (again, you must be signed into the
Indo-Eurasian_Research List to read this):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/2805

The textbook business wasn't on the agenda, but the Board Meeting
nevertheless opened with a quick motion naming an internal subcommittee
to determine officially what everyone already knows -- whether or not
the Curriculum Commission on December 2nd followed the Board's
instructions given on November 9th. It was also noted that the
subcommittee will work with the Dept. of Education staff to resolve the
edit issue as quickly as possible. Assurances were also given to the
publishers on this point.

After the announcement, public discussion began. One lone lawyer read a
statement from the HAF, ending with a complaint -- repeated with ever
decreasing conviction for months -- that hundreds of further edits (in
fact, massive rewrites) of the textbooks proposed by the Vedic
Foundation were never reviewed by the Board. The lawyer also
suggested, with even less conviction in his voice, if that was
possible, that maybe the whole editing and vetting process should start
all over again.

That was one of the meeting's only comic moments.

When the lawyer trudged away, a long troop of mainstream Hindus,
Dalits, and Tamils told their stories to the Board for the first time.
Any lingering doubts that anyone on the Board had by then that the VF,
HEF, or HAF spoke for a fictionally homogenous Hindu-American community
was gone by the end of the session. We have good reasons to think that
the message was heard and had its effect.

There is more good news to report, but for now let's let this publicly
suffice.

It was very moving to see the Dalits and other non-Hindutva Indians in
action in Sacramento. I have no doubts that now that their groups are
fully awakened and the Board and Department of Education knows who they
are that things will work out well.

Truth can only be defeated by political fiction when people keep
selfishly silent or are bullied into not speaking by the kinds of smear
campaigns that we've seen in the last month. Despite those campaigns,
enough people are standing up now to ensure that the right thing
happens, and that makes the effort worth it.

We were almost blindsided in this case, and if we had learned about the
California situation even a few days later than we did (on November
5th), things would be quite different today. But now that the Dalit
groups, mainstream Hindus, and other Indian-American community groups
are now hard at work together, we are confident that with a little help
from the research community they will be able to shut down this kind of
thing quickly if and when it occurs next time in another US state. And
this should help as well in the battles in India and elsewhere (e.g.,
in Britain) against these extemist groups.

Truth is a powerful weapon, as long as you use it. We'll let everyone
know when new developments in California occur in the upcoming weeks.

Best,
Steve