[progchat_action] Hindu group to sue California over textbook
 
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:48:41 -0600 (CST)

Calif. Textbook Dispute Headed Towards Court Battle Says Hindu Group

Ashfaque Swapan,
India West , Mar 20, 2006

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Despite a public hearing for over two hours Mar. 8 here
where the 12-member California State Board of Education heard over several
groups and well over 50 individuals representing a wide spectrum of
viewpoints, a hot debate over California's history textbooks is almost
certainly headed toward the courts, attorneys for the Hindu American
Foundation confirmed to India-West. At press time HAF attorneys Deborah
Caplan and Suhag Shukla told India-West that a lawsuit would almost
certainly be filed by the weekend, probably at the Sacramento Superior
Court, seeking an injunction on the textbooks until HAF's complaint was
reviewed.

At the Mar. 8 meeting, an overflow audience was accommodated in adjacent
rooms as hundreds of Indian Americans filled the auditorium, representing a
diverse array of viewpoints, ranging from support for the Hindu Education
Fund, the Austin, Texas-based Vedic Foundation and its allies who have been
clamoring for changes in the proposed textbooks to rectify what they see as
incorrect and derogatory representations of Hinduism and India, to critics
who included a slew of academics, women's activists, dalits and other
individuals who made passionate requests to the state board to give priority
to historical accuracy over what in their view was a sectarian Hindu
nationalist bias.

The debate continues although there is common agreement on a substantial
number of edits which corrected blatant errors (for example, one book said
Hindi was written in Arabic script). Critics charge that the remaining
contentious edits sought by the Hindu Education Fund and the Vedic
Foundation promote a sectarian ideological agenda. HEF and VF say their
critics are biased, and that their main issue is Hindu pride and the welfare
of the child.

The state board Mar. 8 essentially accepted the earlier recommendation of a
five-member panel on the edits made Feb. 27. The recommendations were based
on a compromise meeting between Harvard Prof. Michael Witzel and Cal State
Northridge emeritus Prof. Shiva Bajpai in which both agreed on the bulk of
the edits. However, where Witzel disagreed, the edits reverted to the
original. HEF supporters say they are particularly unhappy about this
closed-door procedure, since Witzel was one of the first critics of the HEF
edits whose letter triggered an outpouring of criticism of the edits from a
variety of groups, including academics from U.S. universities and abroad,
left-leaning secular and dalit groups.

Witzel, however, told India-West that he tried to be as flexible as
possible, and rejected only those edits that he found grossly inaccurate. An
India-West survey of the Feb. 27 edits shows that of the 84 HEF edits
previously accepted, 40 were accepted verbatim, 11 were rejected outright,
and the remaining 33 were accepted with changes varying from minor to
substantive. Of the 70 Vedic Foundation edits, 21 were accepted verbatim, 20
were rejected, and the remaining 29 were accepted with varying modification.
(See Box 1.)

HEF is crying foul and backs HAF as it goes to court. "We welcome their
decision," HEF spokesman Khanderao Kand told India-West when asked about
HAF's planned lawsuit. "All along we have been saying that there is
discrimination against Hindus irrespective of the outcome."

He lamented that the main issue had gotten buried under a bitter debate.

"The key issue for HEF is Hindu pride and the impact on children," he said.
"Unfortunately, all these academicians, and further, their network with
different groups (with) anti-Hindu bias, connected to Marxists, other
things, with that the process got derailed, the atmosphere got hostile and
the key issue got lost.

"We are basically working on parity of treatment or equal treatment of
religions, capturing the basic tenets and values of Hinduism so basically
reflecting Hinduism appropriately in schoolbooks. That is getting totally
out of the picture."

The Vedic Foundation said many of its edits have been suppressed. "There was
more than 300 edits submitted by the Vedic Foundation," said Janeshwari Devi
of the VF. "Because of the procedural problems, and violations by the state
board, they were never looked at. They addressed some very serious errors in
the book."

In addition, Devi had a list of 12 inconsistent edits of different books
which contradicted each other. (See Box 2.)

"The books in our opinion are in violation of California education code,
which says that religious teachings should be imparted in such a way that
they instill pride in the student or the follower of that religion," Devi
told India-West. "If the books do end up in the schools the way they are
now, they are very derogatory, they are full of inaccurate information, it's
going to present a very confused picture of what Hinduism actually is to
California students."

Critics of the contentious HEF edits, meanwhile, rejoiced at the state board
decision. "I was very happy with the decision of the board, and feel that
this is a victory for scholarship and secular historiography," said Anu
Mandivilli, spokesperson for the Friends of South Asia. "We are very proud
that the board actually stood up to these threats of lawsuits and strong-arm
tactics."

Nalini Shekar, a women's rights activist, said she was glad the contentious
HEF edits were not accepted. "It just undermines the struggles women had and
I think it's important for everybody to know where we are now, and how we
came here," she told India-West. "Learning about history as it is, will help
to analyze and understand how much we have come forward and where we have to
go."

In a press release, FOSA also expressed its satisfaction. "The California
State Board of Education finally rejected a majority of contentious changes
proposed by the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation," its
press release said. "The board voted 9-0 to endorse the February 27, 2006,
recommendations of a special subcommittee, which had rejected a majority of
the controversial edits proposed by the VF and HEF. The board also took the
unprecedented step of ruling that the Curriculum Commission, an advisory
body to the board, had overstepped its mandate of maintaining factual
accuracy when it forwarded to the board many of the HEF and VF proposals in
the December 2nd 2005 meeting."

A group of 17 California legislators wrote to the Board of Education to
voice their concerns over the HEF and VF edits. In a letter to SBE president
Glee Johnson, the legislators belonging to the Women's Caucus and Asian
Pacific Islander Caucus, including Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero and
co-chairs of the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, Judy Chu and Leland Yee, as
well as the vice-chair of the Women's Caucus, Patty Berg, wrote:
"California's educational system should foster a supportive environment for
the development of ideologies, opinions, and intellectual questioning and
growth around the facts - even if they are unpleasant. Sanitation of history
silences a large number of people's struggles against injustice and
oppression.

"We...ask you to reject curriculum modifications that are not based on
historically accurate and objective scholarship, and that are not
religiously neutral."

Gautam Premnath, who teaches English at the University of California at
Berkeley, is part of a group of South Asian faculty at U.S. universities who
have joined together to ensure history is portrayed accurately. While they
are against the contentious HEF edits, their effort is not driven by any
animus towards those organizations, he told India-West.

"We are trying not to set ourselves as the antagonists of HEF and VF. Our
point is not to denigrate them, but to uphold certain principles," he said.

The edits aim towards a narrow, simplistic notion of the origin of Hinduism
which the group opposes, he said. "That runs counter to the ways in which
most scholars see the logic of Hinduism's development," he said. "Hinduism
is not like the so-called Abrahamic religions, it's something that evolves
and changes and syncretizes in all sorts of ways, and that in some ways in
the name of treating Hinduism on a par with other religions, they are also
overlooking some of what makes Hinduism distinctive as a belief system that
incorporates within it many often contradictory strands."

Premnath said the dispute over Aryan migration was another issue the faculty
group had a serious problem with. "We keep hearing references to Maxmuller
being referred to as a racist, and yes, that's probably true, but the
colonial inquiry into Aryan migration has progressed a lot since Maxmuller's
day; we are not merely reinventing the wheel. The conversation has moved
past talking about invasion to talking about migration.

"The world of scholarship is very large and very diffuse. You can always
find people who support your point of view, especially something which is as
ideologically fraught as this issue. But for the overwhelming majority of
reputable scholars, it's not a controversy, it's grounds for further
research, but there are certain historical facts that are largely accepted."

Meanwhile, HAF has set up a $200,000 legal action fund and is soliciting
public donations as it files a lawsuit. The process has been derailed, its
attorney Suhag Shukla said. "The whole process is meant to be a public
process," she said. "On Nov. 8, things started going downhill (after
Witzel's letter)." Instead of simply accepting the recommendations of the
Curriculum Commission, which had approved the recommendations of the ad hoc
committee, the state board decided to do something else, she said. "They
allowed an ex parte post process letter of Prof. Witzel to unduly influence
them," she added. "The original letter was an ad hominem attack of the
groups that didn't have anything of substance on it. Because of that letter,
the state board has adjusted all of their action to kind of comply with his
demands. That goes against any democratic process."

HAF attorney Deborah Caplan added: "We've been trying to work with them to
find some middle ground, but the last action taken was pretty much, I think,
on their part a decision not to seek a middle ground."

The HAF lawsuit could challenge "whether the textbooks actually meet the
requirements and whether the board has met all the open meeting act
requirements in terms of how they were conducted," Caplan said. "I think
there would be some kind of a request for an injunction to keep the
publishers from going forward until the court has a chance to review it."

Paul Seave, chief counsel for the State Board of Education, declined comment
when reached by India-West, citing "the sensitivity of the issue."

While HEF and its allies go to court, critics of its contentious edits plan
to go to the community. "This whole language of lawsuits and smear campaigns
against Michael Witzel, for example, and (historians) Vinay Lal and Romila
Thapar, this has been the tone of the whole campaign," FOSA spokesperson
Mandivilli said. "We are really concerned about the health of the community.
We feel that they have really divided the community by the kind of tone they
have taken.

"So we are thinking of conducting town hall meetings. We want to talk to the
community, we want to talk to the parents and we want to be able to discuss
the issue and explain the stakes involved, and why FOSA took the position it
took and how we can work together to correct stereotypes without necessarily
supporting sectarian content."

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