Half Truths and Nehru

{My first blog was “Life is a Random Draw” which I started writing sometime in 2000 or so. Before blogs, we used to waste spend time on the usenet. Anyway, I hauled this bit from my Berkeley blog.}

Half truths. That’s what interests me today.

And when half truths are dished out by half-wits for the consumption of the totally witless, the result is curiously fascinating. That is of course a general statement and one would like a ‘fer instance’ at this point. And I am about to illustrate that general statement.

Jawaharlal Nehru, often celebrated as Chacha Nehru, wrote a history book (if you use a very generous definition of the word history) called Discovery of India. Replete with half-truths, the book valiantly attempts to whitewash certain aspects of the history of India. Nehru was a half-wit. But he got away with it because his intended audience was totally witless.

Cha-cha Nehru’s bhatijas and bhatijis lapped up that sanitized version of Indian history and having internalized the half-truths, they institutionalized the production and dissemination of half-truths in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

More about JNU later. But first, allow me to quote an example of a half-truth that Nehru confidently includes in his ‘history’ book. Here on page 253 he is refering to the tyrant Mahmud of Ghazni.

Buildings interested him (Mahmud of Ghazni) and he was much impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi. About this he wrote: ‘There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many million of Dinars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of 200 years.’

Urvashi, a usenet friend, pointed out the other half of the truth. Her comment on Nehru’s half truth:

The topic ends there. Here was Ghaznavi the tourist, smiling, admiring, snapping pictures if he had his Kodak camera in hand. Then he tips the guide, rides off, promising to visit again, this time with his wife. At least that is what you conclude from the “Discovery.”

Now compare this with what a real historian wrote on the same topic. Let us go to Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization”, page 460:

“At Mathura he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars, and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.”

I have added the emphasis in the quoted bit because that the bit that Nehru deliberately neglected to mention. Mahmud of Ghazni was not an admirer of architecture as Nehru would lead you to believe. No, he was as part of his religious duties destroying what idol-worshiping Hindus valued.

Did I say that Nehru was a half-wit? No, he was a lying half-wit POS.

Leave alone forgetting history, Indians don’t even know history. How in the name of god almighty are they supposed to learn from history and thus avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

We are caught in an endless cycle of making the same mistakes and paying for them. And the Chacha Nehrus furiously paper over the truths so that the country suffers. Why do the Chacha Nehrus do this?

It is all karma, neh?

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey