The Hindu : Kerala News : ICHR review panel slams M.G.S. Narayanan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 04, 2005

Kerala

Kerala

ICHR review panel slams M.G.S. Narayanan

By C. Gouridasan Nair

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, FEB. 3. The one-man Review Committee, appointed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to look into the stoppage of publication of two volumes of the `Towards Freedom Project,' has come down heavily on the former Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) Chairman, M.G.S. Narayanan.

It has accused him and ICHR Chairmen and Member Secretaries who held office during the period of the controversy of having displayed "total lack of intellectual and academic integrity" by becoming party "to the disgraceful act of withdrawal" of the two volumes written by historians Sumit Sarkar and K. N. Panikkar.

In its interim report submitted to the Government, the Committee member, D. Bandyopadhyay, quotes Dr. Narayanan as having written on November 19, 2000 to the then Indian History Congress secretary, Ramakrishna Chatterjee, that the decision to suspend printing of the two volumes was meant "to enable the members of the Council to peruse the manuscripts," that "they had been sent to the press without clearance from the Research Project Committee of the Council' and further that the Council members suspected some "foul play" in this.

According to the interim report, the committee had written to Dr. Narayanan on November 18, 2004, asking him to clarify what he meant by `foul play,' but received no response till the submission of the report. "... in the absence of any explanation the Committee is at liberty to come to a reasonable inference about this episode.

Either Dr. Narayanan wrote these words "foul play" to curry favours with the power that be for advancement of his personal career or he was so directed by some authority above him," the report says.

Falsification

The committee has also accused Dr. Narayanan of having deliberately falsified the whole issue.

"He cast aspersions on the integrity of such an eminent historian as S. Gopal, the General Editor, who clearly stated that "these volumes were submitted to him by the editors after incorporating the changes he had suggested... ."

"All the records the Council made available to the Committee clearly showed that the manuscripts were duly processed before they were sent to press," the report says.

The Committee has also found the two main charges against the series, that they underplayed the role of Mahatma Gandhi in the freedom struggle and hid the "traitorous role" played by the Communist Party in the freedom movement baseless. "... the then authorities of the ICHR were either totally ignorant of the contents of the volume or trying to prevaricate the facts for some extraneous reasons."

The committee has cited hundreds of documents mentioned in the volumes forming part of the project and comments by Dr. Gopal to prove that the charges had no basis in facts.

The committee has concluded that "on the basis of evidence made available to the Review Committee, it clearly emerges that a plan was hatched to scuttle the project outside the ICHR."

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