Bharat by Batra & Co.

If you care about India’s children, prepare to shed a tear now. If you care about Gujarat’s children, prepare to cry buckets now. Because Dinanath Batra, ace scholar, perfervid activist, slayer of Donigers, is a revered figure in the schools of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s motherland.

Mr Batra’s office-cum-residence, however, is not in Gujarat but in Delhi. It is located in Saraswati Bal Mandir, a school affiliated to Bharatiya Vidyapeeth. The lift plays music, but it’s not the usual muzzak or distortions of Mozart, but the Gayatri Mantra. His own room is dominated by portraits of Maharana Pratap, Swami Vivekananda, Chanakya — who are the real heroes of India he says, yet haven’t got their due. He sees it as his mission to correct this. Actually, it’s only part of his mission. He wants to completely overhaul our system of education, which is “distorted by Marx and Macaulay.” This is almost a Modism. (A real Modism would be “mauled by Marx and Macaulay”.) The proposed overhaul of the curriculum embraces every possible subject.
Mr Batra’s erudition covers every possible subject:

• Aeronautics: “Pushpak Viman, a flying chariot used by Lord Rama, was the first aeroplane in the world”.
• Mathematics: “Vedic maths is the real mathematics and must be taught in schools”.
• Medicine: “When the royal couple couldn’t produce an heir, they were asked to do gai puja, and their cow devotion helped them beget a son”.

All this stems from his belief that “we must reject English education and revert to our ancient languages.” We should reject Western education because it has not given our ancient wisdom its due. “Our rishis were scientists,” Mr Batra says, “Whose inventions in the fields of technology, medicine, science have been appropriated by the West.” So he doesn’t want children to celebrate birthdays by blowing candles on cakes, an imported idea, but by wearing swadeshi, taking part in a havan, reciting the Gayatri Mantra and feeding cows.

The Books of Batra have many such pearls of wisdom. There are nine books, all made supplementary reading for schools in Gujarat, and to encourage the reading of which free copies are being distributed to 35,000 government schools. Mr Batra has his ideas on creating an ideal society, too: “Keeping a good friend circle is not enough. To keep it faultless, a good company is also required. This means a company of saints and learned people. The student that goes to a RSS shakha daily, he finds miraculous change in his life.”

Mr Batra is not the first man to claim that planes were invented in ancient India because our epics refer to them. Only the literalists are capable of believing that what is written is proof of having been witnessed.

Sadly for the student going to Gujarat government schools, Mr Batra is not alone in his looniness. A 125-page book called Tejomay Bharat, not written by him has also been mandated along with Mr Batra’s, as supplementary reading for all government primary and secondary schools. Here are some passages from it: “What we know today as the motorcar existed during the Vedic period. It was called anashva rath. Usually a rath (chariot) is pulled by horse, but an anashva rath means the one that runs without horses or yantra rath, what is today motorcar. The Rig Veda refers to this…”

“America wants to take the credit for invention of stem cell research but the truth is that India’s Dr Balkrishna Ganpat Matapurkar has already got a patent for regenerating body parts… You would be surprised to know that this research is not new and that Dr Matapurkar was inspired by the Mahabharata. Kunti had a bright son like Sun itself. When Gandhari, who was not conceiving for two years, learnt of this, she underwent hysterectomy. From her womb a huge mass of flesh came out. (Rishi) Dwaipayan Vyas was called. He observed this hard mass of flesh and then he preserved it in a cold tank with specific medicines.

“He then divided the mass of flesh into 100 parts and kept them separately in 100 tanks full of ghee for two years. After two years, 100 Kauravas were born of it. On reading this he (Matapurkar) realised that stem cell was not his invention. This was found in India thousands of years ago.”

This book’s content adviser is Harshad Shah, vice-chancellor of Children’s University in Gandhinagar and former Gujarat chairman of Vidya Bharati. Mr Shah at least is from Gujarat. How does Mr Batra from Delhi exert such a strong influence on that state’s education system? And what are Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s views on this?

Could they be any different from the views expressed in the following two passages?

“It is congratulatory that Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks is publishing writer Dinanath Batraji’s literature. It is hoped that this inspirational literature will inspire students and teachers... Seeds of values which are sown in the childhood emerge with time like a large banyan tree of idealism....”

We should be surprised if the Prime Minister’s views are too different. After all, the two passages above are from the forewords of two books by Mr Batra. The forewords are by Mr Modi when he was the chief minister of Gujarat.

The writer is a senior journalist