Skip to main content

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. 


   

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरNovember 30, 2017 at 1:46 AM

    I agree with you. That's what's being done relentlessly now-a-days through various channels and it's the duty of the readers not to believe any such thing blindly. The editing facility given to all and sundry by Wikipedia is actually a distorting facility which makes a sizable chunk of the information available on that site as unreliable as it's misused by ill-intended people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 30, 2017 at 6:09 AM

      Wikipedia will lose its credibility unless it restricts its editors and contributors. They already have a system. Maybe it needs just a little refurbishing. There are so many other channels, however...

      Delete
  2. Jyotirmoy SarkarNovember 30, 2017 at 8:48 AM

    This post contains some shocking and surprising infos for me,thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 30, 2017 at 9:01 AM

      A lot of people are unaware of the heinous propaganda indulged in by BJP.

      Delete
  3. Pranju chakrapaniNovember 30, 2017 at 1:06 PM

    Wikipedia is incredible, so to say. Regarding the veracity of religious orientation of politicians, don't you think it is high time that we should look at the potential of politicians in governing our nation than in their religious inclinations and orientations?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 30, 2017 at 5:54 PM

      Are they governing? Looking after the welfare of a handful of people (the rich traders) is not governance. Dividing the country into two sections based on religion is not governance. Making people eat only what one political party wants them to eat, imposing a monolithic culture on the entire nation, fooling people with false promises, entertaining them with sarcastic comments on opposition party members... ignoring serious problems of poverty and unemployment... is this governance?

      Delete
    2. Pranju chakrapaniNovember 30, 2017 at 8:48 PM

      Of course not. That is not governance. However, I was hinting at the governing capabilities of Mr. Gandhi.

      Delete
  4. Naina PaulDecember 1, 2017 at 2:48 PM

    10 Piece Christmas Nativity Crib Set
    Rs.1,499
    For Order Call Now - 9713099668 ( 10 Am to 6 PM)
    http://www.shopclues.com/10-piece-christmas-nativity-crib-set-decoration-baby-jesus-3.45-inches-medium-size-christmas-crib-nativity-set-130829452.html
    10 pc. Nativity set- Code-17629, Price-590/-
    12 pc. Nativity set- Code-17634, Price- 1200/-
    09 pc. Nativity set- Code-17628, Price- 490/-
    + Shipping Cost Extra ! ( Bhopal, Indore & Gwalior Next Day delivery with premium Indian Post service, Order before 1PM)
    For Order Call Now - 9713099668 ( 10 Am to 6 PM)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more