Column

It is often said about us Indians that we do not have a sense of history. This does not mean that we don't know our history and its significant dates and dramatis personae. That is crammed into our brains early on and at a drop of a hat any child will recite all the key events of our past. That is just general knowledge, important to know for passing exams but of little value otherwise. By sense of history we mean a broader context to understanding where we are and how we got here and drawing lessons from it.

Academic history in India is still in a straitjacket and our schools do a fine job of putting off little children from history for the rest of their lives. There are schools which have simply dropped the subject from their curriculum on the grounds that "it has no utility value." History is not needed to pass an all India competitive exam and nor does it crop up in group discussions at management institutes. If you can't monetize it, why bother to learn it. History is for nerds and losers and whatever little one has to know can be picked up from the guidebooks.

If this is the case with ancient history or even that of medieval or recent times, knowledge of recent contemporary events is abysmal. We are proud of our young population which is apparently going to give us a big economic boost in the coming decades, but the distaff side is the unfortunate fact that they have little idea of some of the most significant events of recent times. But why blame them alone? Even our academia, our intellectual classes, our thinkers and our policy makers remain either oblivious or uninterested in probing our contemporary history in any in-depth way. Debate and discussion now mean a television panel show where the most sarcastic or most loud sound bite prevails; where is the room for the considered thought or the well-reasoned argument?

An example of how we are apathetic to the history of our times is right before us. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Operation Bluestar, which was conducted between June 3 and 6. During those days, in 1984, soldiers of the Indian army fought a group of highly motivated and armed Sikhs who were holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The Sikhs had been slowly fortifying the gurudwara for months; during a couple of visits there in 1983 and 1984 I saw and met several gun-toting radicals who walked around the complex freely. They were part of the group around Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale, the militant Sikh preacher who had set up base within the temple complex and who was demanding a separate Sikh homeland, called Khalistan.

Finally, after the local police failed to do the job Indira Gandhi ordered the army to do flush out the militants, which it did, with clinical efficiency. But in the process nearly 600 people died, according to official figures. Gandhi called the army action a "last resort" option and the government ensured that there was no triumphalistic celebrations; the mood after Bluestar was decidedly sullen. The Sikhs felt hurt and aggrieved by this assault on their most sacred shrine. There was an even more brutal aftermath to come and in October of the same year, Indira Gandhi was shot and killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards. She had refused to get them shifted out of her security detail.

It was annus horribilis for the country and a seminal moment in independent India's history. This nation had known insurgency, but rarely had we used the army in this way against our own citizens. In time the demand for Khalistan disappeared and today it is just a memory for most. The country has moved on and so have the Sikhs-most of them did not support the homeland idea in the first place and are comfortable to be part of India.

One would have thought that the 25th year of that terrible occasion would be marked in some way. Sikh organisations may obviously not want to commemorate it, but surely the media and academia would have noted it by way of a seminar, a conference or even one of those loud TV debates. After all there are many experts, eye witnesses, journalists still around with personal knowledge and experience of the whole thing, right from the beginnings of the Punjab crisis to its ghastly aftermath. Indeed, there is even room to link Punjab terrorism with what is happening in Kashmir or the denouement of the civil war in Sri Lanka. But no. The anniversary has passed by without anyone even bothering to take note of it. It made no waves, not even a ripple.

This is not a solitary example-there are other instances too. What does one make of it? Is it because there is hardly any collective memory left any more, or is it because it was not seen as a TRP driver? Are we in denial about that sensitive moment? Do we think we should not re-open old wounds? Or simply, we don't care about the past; we want to live in the here and now? I have no answer But it does tell us something about ourselves as a people, a society and a nation when we do not want to come to grips with our history and take full stock of what happened and why it happened. History is bunk, said Henry Ford; we think it is junk.