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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 8:56:24 pm

Congress backs Bollywood, slams Mahayuti government

Mumbai: Throwing its weight behind Bollywood amid a spate of alleged threats and attacks targeting film personalities, the Maharashtra Congress on Saturday slammed the BJP-led Mahayuti government for failing to protect Mumbai’s glamour industry, and warned that the state could could lose out culturally and economically if there was an exodus by filmmakers and actors from Mumbai. State Congress President Harshwardhan Sapkal launched a sharp attack on Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, a...

Congress backs Bollywood, slams Mahayuti government

Mumbai: Throwing its weight behind Bollywood amid a spate of alleged threats and attacks targeting film personalities, the Maharashtra Congress on Saturday slammed the BJP-led Mahayuti government for failing to protect Mumbai’s glamour industry, and warned that the state could could lose out culturally and economically if there was an exodus by filmmakers and actors from Mumbai. State Congress President Harshwardhan Sapkal launched a sharp attack on Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, a lleging that the deteriorating law-and-order situation had emboldened criminal gangs to train guns at Bollywood personalities – considered a ‘soft target’. “Bollywood actors, producers and directors are being openly targeted in Mumbai, and threats are being issued against them. They all live in constant fear,” Sapkal said at a media interaction at Tilak Bhavan, referring to the recent appeal by All Indian Cine Workers Association (AICWA) to the Centre, as a multi-state police dragnet has been thrown in the past week. Dwelling on the past attacks or threats involving actors Salman Khan, Rohit Shetty and most recently Tiger Shroff, Sapkal questioned “how gangsters could allegedly intimidate the film fraternity while operating from behind bars”. “If gangsters can control the film industry while sitting inside Gujarat’s Sabarmati Central Jail, then what exactly are the police and the BJP governments doing? The appeal by the AICWA reflects the grave situation confronting the entertainment industry,” he said, alleging political patronage had emboldened criminal elements. Warning of the possibility of Bollywood shifting out of Mumbai, Sapkal claimed that already efforts to woo actors and film-makers to other states like Uttar Pradesh have gained momentum. He recalled UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s publicly declaration how he was keen to attract the film industry to his state. The Congress leader wondered “whether the prevailing climate of fear could accelerate the shift”, and said it could deal a big blow to Maharashtra’s cultural identity, employment, economy and its overall image. “If the government cannot control crime and protect people, it should resign,” he reiterated, demanding accountability from the BJP-led Mahayuti government.

Selective Amnesia

Correspondent
Apr 28, 2025
2 min read

History is often an inconvenient companion. It tells stories of grandeur but also tales of horror, conquest and cruelty. Today’s India, it seems, would prefer to forget the less savoury parts. This week, the new Class 7 NCERT Social Science textbook, reworked in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) and the 2023 National Curriculum Framework, has excised all references to the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. In their place stand glowing chapters on ‘Indian ethos,’ sacred geographies and triumphant Central government schemes like ‘Make in India’ and ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao.’


This is not the first time India’s rulers have tried to fashion the past to suit the present. In the early decades after Independence, the Nehruvian establishment, suspicious of nationalism and keen to forge a syncretic identity, instructed historians to tread carefully. A 1982 NCERT guideline explicitly cautioned against glorifying either Aurangzeb - the Mughal emperor synonymous with bigotry and destruction - or the Gupta Empire, often regarded as the zenith of India’s ancient past. As a result, generations of Indians grew up with an airbrushed version of history, where brutal invasions were reimagined as cultural exchanges and civilizational conflict was glossed over in the name of harmony.


But if Nehruvian history erred by whitewashing invasions, today’s policymakers commit the opposite sin by erasing them entirely. To remove the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals from textbooks is not an act of correction but of amnesia. It does not heal wounds; it denies that they ever existed.


The Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate were not minor episodes that can be edited out with a swipe of nationalist fervour. For better or worse, they reshaped the subcontinent. Their story is one of brutal conquest, religious intolerance (at least until Akbar) and cultural suppression. Precisely for these reasons, they must remain in the textbooks, not to be celebrated, but to be understood in full.


While India’s civilizational past, from the Mauryas to the Shungas to the Sātavāhanas, deserves fuller treatment than it was long given, pride must not come at the cost of truth. Sacred rivers and pilgrimage sites are no substitute for understanding how kingdoms rose and fell, how empires ruled, and how the scars of history continue to shape the present.


The instinct to sanitize history reveals an astonishing insecurity. A confident civilization does not fear its past but studies it. A confident democracy does not shield its citizens from unpleasant truths but equips them to grapple with them.


If the earlier government’s mistake was to minimize the atrocities of Islamic invaders, today’s error is to pretend that the invaders themselves were inconsequential. Both impulses are equally dangerous. History should neither be embalmed in sentimentality nor butchered for ideology.


Removing the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals from India’s classrooms will not change what happened. It will merely ensure that another generation grows up either ignorant of its past or vulnerable to distorted versions of it.

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