By Nikhat Fatima, Siyasat.net
Bangluru: Government of Karnataka has decided to drop the History lesson on the Ruler of Mysore State from the text books of class 7. Justifying this decision, one of the officials of the Education department said, “students study similar chapters in Class 6 and more in the 10th grade.”
In view of the pandemic the syllabus is being trimmed for all classes from class I to class X. But dropping the lesson on Tipu Sultan did not go down well with both the leaders from the opposition and also from the Muslim community.
“It is worth recalling that this decision is not sudden or due to the trimming as the Government claims, in 2019 itself, there were attempts to remove the lesson on Tipu Sultan. So this decision could actually be a planned one” said Syed Azeemuddin a die-hard fan of Tipu Sultan in Hyderabad.
There was a petition to the Chief Minister asking not to drop the lesson on the historic figure Tipu Sultan who is popularly known as ‘Tiger of Mysore’ but the petition has not been considered.
The BJP Government Chief Minister B S Yedurappa as soon as he came to power first cancelled the Tipu Jayanthi that was being celebrated on November 10th. Tipu Jayanthi was started by the Congress party when it was in rule in Karnataka in 2015.
B. S Yedurappa, who had formed his own party in 2012 called “Karnataka Janatha Paksha”, after he had rebelled against BJP and quit the party. At that time, he had not hesitated to don the headgear similar to Tipu Sultan and also held a mock sword lavishing praising on Tipu Sultan. All this was done in an attempt to woo the votes of the Muslims.
But as soon as he re-joined BJP, he took a U turn and went ahead removing Tipu Jayanti from the holiday list of the State Government and at the request of some of his party men was contemplating removing the lesson on Tipu Sultan. And now in 2020 his government has succeeded in removing the lesson on the pretext of trimming syllabus due to shortage of time due to the pandemic.
History enthusiasts are disappointed over this decision. “There are many important historic events and wars like the Anglo-Mysore War, war strategies adapted by Tipu Sultan especially the missile technology, how will the students know all this if a lesson Tipu Sultan is removed. He was not just a ruler but also a reformer and freedom fighter” said Sajeeda Fathima, a retired History teacher from Northern Karnataka.
“Tipu Sultan had his own coinage, he contributed to the growth of Mysore silk industry, introduced land and administrative reforms” she added expressing disappointment over this decision,while talking with siyasat.net
The BJP and RSS have been making allegations against Tipu Sultan that he had killed several people and forced conversions in Coorg and also in Kerala.
“ But this is simply not true, Tipu was never anti-Hindu. He helped construction of several temples. The upper caste Hindus in the Malabar region hate him because he stopped their oppression against the poor Hindus from lower castes and also against poor Muslims. He brought in land reforms and banned inhuman practises against the downtrodden especially the women folk who were treated as property of the Upper caste Hindus. He gave land to the tiller”, said a History student and activist based in Calicut.
While there are records in Persian about all the donations made by Tipu Sultan for major temples and monasteries there are no records of his alleged tyranny except in English writings by the Britishers who after, Tipu was martyred in 1799 in a battle against the British in Srirangapatnam, corroborated with the upper caste Hindus and wrote fake accounts with the intention of maligning him.
Academic Michael Soracoe, a doctoral student in History at the University of Maryland has drawn attention to the extensive phobic material on Tipu created by the English officials, writers, painters, and cartoonists in the last two decades of the 18th century with the intention of creating a rift between his Hindu subjects and capture Mysore state.
Tipu Sultan, chose to fight the British instead of making a deal with them like so many other rulers at that time because he wanted to oust them from his lands.
However people with right wing ideologies prefer lapping up the false and fabricated history recorded by the British ignoring the original historical recordings, which is easily an attempt not just to vilify Tipu Sultan because he was a Muslim ruler but also to demoralise the Muslims.
The revision of these particular topics has brought strong criticism from the opposition in the state.
Karnataka Congress chief DK Shivakumar alleged the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “wants to make their personal agenda as historical agenda and this cannot be accepted”.
“But history is history so the committee that is trying to change the text needs to be debated. You cannot change history. We will not agree and will take this up seriously,’ DK Shivakumar said.
The mention of Tipu Sultan in history books has been a constant source of friction between the BJP and the Congress in Karnataka. BJP MLAs had petitioned the Yediyurappa government to drop academic content on the ruler but a committee had overruled the plea.
Meanwhile, Congress MLA and former minister Priyank Kharge told India Today TV, “Especially when it comes to subjects that do not fall in line with their [RSS and BJP] line of thought such as nationalism, secularism, the constitution itself in certain ways and this is nothing new.”
“The problem is if this continues, you are ensuring that the next few generations will be robbed of the idea of India, the ideals that our founding fathers stood for and more importantly. We are eroding the intellectual capital that we have built over the last 50-60 years,’ Priyank Kharge said.
JD(S) leader Tanveer Ahmed said that the agenda of the BJP is to divide the nation and to fulfil what their understanding of India is. He added, “I don’t think the BJP understands India on a broader perspective. The beautiful thing for them to do is… Christians and Muslims and historical characters of any other community do not exist at all.
(www.siyasat.net is Ahmedabad,Gujarat, India based website)
