Falsehood in Bharat

One of my old colleagues in Delhi shared the above in his Facebook space today.  I was amused.  I controlled my amusement with a hearty laugh.  I did not comment.  In fact, I stopped commenting on the posts made by many of my Delhi friends because they are not even fit to be counted as jokes.  Blatant lies, that’s what they are.  But my friends in Delhi and other parts of North India believe they are truths.  In fact, these are ‘truths’ fabricated by BJP after it came to power in Delhi three and a half years ago. 

I’m taking this as an example.  Just one out of the innumerable lies foisted on the nation as historical truths by the ruling party.  Knowledgeable people will ignore these.  At best, they will have hearty laughs like me.  I too kept on ignoring them.  But I was aghast when some of my students in Kerala (where I teach now) started taking some of these posts seriously.  This blog post is for their sake.  Beware, my young friends.  There is a lot of falsehood being foisted on us cleverly.  Save yourselves from them.  Learn the real history from scholarly books.

What is the truth behind this new lie about Jawaharlal Nehru?  On 26 June 2015, a series of IP addresses allegedly belonging to the Government of India edited many Wikipedia pages and foisted lies on readers.  On 1 July 2015, Times of India reported this matter.

These lies were later corrected by volunteer editors of Wikipedia.  However, many right wing people in India downloaded screenshots and used other methods to ‘save’ the lies [such as quoting them in certain websites] in order to perpetuate them.  One such lie was that Nehru’s grandfather was a Muslim.  "Gangadhar was born as a Muslim by the name of Ghiasuddin Ghazi but changed his name to a Hindu Ganga Dhar to escape British clutches."  A lot more such lies were put up in Wikipedia. 

A lot of lies are being foisted on the nation today through social media and other means of communication.  BJP is spending crores of rupees on publicity of duplicitous history.  There are thousands of people engaged in this task.  It is the duty of any honest citizen to verify such information that is bombarding us from infinite sources.  Beware.