Historical revisionism in contemporary India: an analysis of the Mann Ki Baat broadcasts

When Land is God

As revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams and Lloyd C. Gardner had demonstrated, the dominant US goal after 1933 was to restore the Open Door economic order which had promoted American trade expansion in the previous decade. It was the 'passionate concern' with the impact of British trade and tariff policy which helped shape the US response to appeasement under Chamberlain. As Berle noted, once the Prime Minister had 'sold' the Czechs, the United States must sponsor a conference on economic appeasement to set the seal on any bilateral agreements worked out between London and Berlin. The goal of the Open Door would be thus achieved and a narrow Anglo-German economic deal, which might be expanded into a four-power bloc including France and Italy, prevented. In January 1940 investigations began into the possibility of a US-mediated settlement, which would contain the threat of Nazi expansion and reintegrate London and Berlin into an Open Door world economy.

The outline of Anglo-American strategy against Germany in 1944–45 was sketched as early as December 1941 at the first Washington conference, held in the aftermath of the naval disaster at Pearl Harbor, which kicked the United States into the war. The conference took place during the fleeting moment when Britain's naval and military power, now nearing its apogee of expansion, broadly matched that of the United States, which had as yet hardly begun to muster its overwhelmingly greater human and industrial resources, and when the British could speak with the authority of hard-won expertise to Americans new to the game. Moreover, the British Chiefs of Staff [COS] and the Prime Minister came to the conference comprehensively prepared for debate; the American Chiefs of Staff and the President, their minds busy with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, were not so. Thus the statement of global strategy finally agreed by the conference, 'WW1', was an amended version of a draft tabled by the British COS. In turn this professional staff paper owed much to the three papers on grand strategy written by Winston Churchill as minutes to the COS while crossing the Atlantic in HMS Duke of York. Since Churchill has come in for criticism by revisionist historians who have failed to think through the political and strategic realities of the predicament with which he, as British Prime Minister, had to cope,1 it is worth noting that these three state papers still stand as a masterly overview of the war in all its complexities, coupled with a far-sighted vision of how the allies would eventually win it.2

An individual’s memories of the events of historical significance, often narrated as memoirs, have the potential to expand human perception from personal history and trauma to collective historical consciousness and collective trauma. Studies on autobiographical narratives involve various approaches in investigating self, narrative identity, emotional valence, and construction of meaning. This study attempts to elucidate the role of autobiographical memory and narration in connecting subjective level history and trauma with national history and collective trauma through textual interpretation of Farah Bashir’s memoir, Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir. The memoir narrates the author’s disturbing memories of the insurgency in the 1990s and her experiences of psychological trauma that followed it. The insurgency of the 1990s holds greater importance in Kashmir’s history as many significant events like the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, the Gawkadal Massacre, and the Kunan Poshpora incident happened during this period. This article employs the theoretical framework of Roger Brown and James Kulik’s Flashbulb Memories to construe the role of narrative technique in exhibiting the perceptual transformation from personal level to collective level by discussing the aspects of history and trauma. Through the study, the article attempts to signify the importance of self-narration in historical revisionism and in tracing collective trauma. 

This study aimed to examine the experiences of the second year undergraduate students of Elementary Mathematics Teaching (EMT) within the scope of the Mathematicians Who Left a Mark in History (MWLMH) Project carried out within the scope of the Community Service Practices (THU) course. The case study method, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the study. The participants of the research consist of 14 undergraduate students studying in the second year of the EMT program of a state university in the Western Black Sea region in the spring semester of the 2021-2022 academic year. The data of the research were obtained from the reflective diaries that the students kept regularly every week from the beginning to the end of the project process, and from the focus group interviews held with the students after the process was over. The obtained data were subjected to content analysis. As a result of the research; it has been determined that the MWLMH project contributes to PEMT undergraduate students in different aspects such as gaining teaching experience, experiencing designing materials and how to integrate MH into lessons and strengthening their communication skills. In addition, EMT undergraduate students were determined mostly pre-service teacher-related challenges as designing materials, also administrator-related challenges as being unwilling/indifferent. Lastly, EMT students emphasized that the activities/materials they developed were useful, interesting and entertaining for students and contributed to their awareness towards MH. Based on the results of the research, various recommendations were provided.

Author Response

On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zealand) into lockdown to shelter citizens from the catastrophic impacts of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Entire households were placed in isolation, permitted only to travel locally to access food or medical supplies. The media messaging was resoundingly clear: stay at home. This contemporary context contributes to an analysis of sculptor Michael Parekowhai’s The Lighthouse: Tū Whenua-a-Kura (2017), a full-scale model of a State House building typology. State Houses have been lauded as symbols of Aotearoa’s ongoing commitment to the principles of egalitarianism. First produced in the 1930s under the leadership of Michael Joseph Savage’s Labour government, they were intended to house those unable to afford their own homes. However, in recent years this form of social housing and, in particular, those who have access to it have been the subject of vociferous political debate. A current housing shortage has exacerbated matters as exponential increases in accommodation costs have coincided with increases in homeless numbers in the city. These developments make Parekowhai's public sculpture particularly timely. Sited at the terminus of Queens Wharf on the Waitematā Harbour in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), the sculpture contains a single room and a single man: the eighteenth-century English explorer Captain James Cook. He is larger than life-size and adopts a penitent deportment. Cook's heroic legacy has been questioned by revisionist historians and Māori scholars who have identified a plethora of negative impacts colonization had and continues to have on indigenous communities. Cook is now under house arrest, quarantined in a prototypical State House, appearing to reflect on his actions. This paper examines how the artist assiduously reinvents this housing typology as a beacon on a prime piece of real estate. The familiarity of the exterior form is belied by the sculpture's provocative interior contents, where the artist manipulates an elaborate suite of figurative and abstract forms rendered in an array of dazzling surface treatments to shed light, both literally and metaphorically on troubling aspects of our colonial history and access to the provision of land and housing in Aotearoa. Here, at the end of the wharf, we lose our footing; we have to consider where we stand in relation to our colonial past and our contemporary relationship to whenua (land). As calamitous events unfold on the global stage that make us all turn toward our domestic interiors, the conceptual ideas that underpin The Lighthouse: Tū Whenua-a-Kura make one consider what it means to stay at home now in Aotearoa.

Even as it passed its seventieth anniversary, the 1953 coup in Iran has remained a hotly debated political topic. This is true in the public spheres of Iran, which saw its last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, overthrown in the coup, and in those of the United States and the United Kingdom, which helped stage the ouster. There also has been an attempt at historical revisionism about the coup, usually by overemphasizing the domestic factors that led to the coup and placing less importance on the role of the CIA or questioning Mossadeq's democratic credentials. This revisionism has been robustly rebutted by the scholarly community, which has held to a general consensus on the basic narrative of the coup: that it overthrew a popular leader and that it took place with significant interventions from London and Washington. The release of the final batch of US documents related to the coup in 2017 (following many years of undue delay) also bolstered evidence for this consensus. But, although most public debates about the coup center on questions such as the constitutional process of Mosaddeq's dismissal or the relative weight given to domestic and international actors behind the coup, there is another historiographical question that has been subject to widely divergent perspectives in the field: the relationship of the coup to the Cold War. In other words, can the 1953 coup be considered a Cold War confrontation, or is this a misleading frame of reference? Both sides of this argument have often focused on the motivations of coup plotters (mostly those in Washington, DC, and London) and whether they are more readily explained by a genuine fear of the communist movement in Iran or whether this was a rhetorical smokescreen, masking the neocolonial drive for the control of Iran's resources. This tension is not limited to scholarship on Iran. Even as new global histories of the Cold War have grown in recent years, some have cautioned against the use of this framework for understanding politics in the Global South. Jeremi Suri, for instance, speaks of a “group of scholars” who have “questioned the very utility of the Cold War as an analytical concept” by pointing to “the ways in which this geopolitical term privileges state actors in the United States and Europe and neglects local forces of change, many of which had little apparent connection to the basic issues and personalities of the Cold War.” In his analysis of the global place of Algeria's drive for independence, Matthew Connelly suggests “taking off the Cold War lens,” arguing that such a lens did less to shape the views of historical actors (such as the Eisenhower administration) than “those of the historians who have studied them.”

Prime Minister Shinzo's decision to enter talks on the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been a game changer in the competition over Asia Pacific free trade agreements (FTAs). His move helped to create a space for multilateral, mega-FTA competition before South Korea could fully prepare and implement its FTA predicated on bilateral deals. In this article, I provide an overview of South Korea's evolving strategies toward FTAs and explore how it has responded to the Abe effect. My focus is on two challenges for South Korea in participating in the TPP: US geopolitical pressure once Japan entered negotiations, and the de facto FTA negotiations with Japan under the TPP. Dealing with Japan is an especially tall order given the troubled history of South Korea-Japan economic and political relations. KEYWORDS: Korea-Japan relations, TPP, Shinzo, strategy, security-economy nexus.WHEN ABE SHINZO RETURNED TO POWER IN DECEMBER 2012, FEW people expected that Japan-South Korea relations would hit their lowest mark since diplomatic relations between them were restored in 1965. Instead of celebrating joint accomplishments of the past five decades, the two sides attempted to improve their severely strained relations, which included failure to hold a oneon- one summit meeting since took office. History conflicts emanating from Abe's historical revisionism in regard to imperialism and colonialism have been the primary source of political strains. While South Korea's president Park Geun-hye has demanded a more explicit apology from Japan on the history issues, such as the Imperial Army's enslavement of so-called comfort women, in Japan a view is gaining strength that it has apologized enough. Increasing enmity is reflected in public opinion surveys, such as one by the East Asia Institute and Genron NPO in spring 2014. It found that nearly 70 percent of South Koreans have a negative image of Japan, while 66 percent of Japanese have an unfavorable image of Korea (East Asia Institute 2014). This trend will most likely continue throughout 2015 because, as John Delury's article in this volume argues, the odds of genuine reconciliation between and Park are very low.Abe's return to power has also made an economic impact. The best example is his decision to enter TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) negotiations on March 15, 2013, significantly affecting South Korea's trade strategy that sought middle-power leadership as a of regional and transregional free trade agreement (FTA) networks. Abe's decision means that Japan supports the TPP, the US initiative in regional trade architecture, and helps to enhance the TPP's credibility and viability as a mega-regional trade agreement within the US coalition-building strategy (Terada 2013). Abe's move prompted China's response to accelerate the pace of devising alternative FTA networks. And it created strategic dilemmas for South Korea. Because the United States, together with Japan, has taken the initiative in forging regional trade networks through the TPP while China is counterbalancing it, the FTA game is now about creating (or multilateralizing) a regional or megaregional FTA. This is a blow to South Korea's FTA hub strategy predicated on bilateral FTAs with the major economies.My article explores how South Korea has responded to the challenges caused by the major economic powers. After providing an overview of South Korea's evolving strategies toward FTAs as an FTA latecomer, I examine the country's policy toward the TPP. I then analyze the Abe effect on South Korea's global strategy. The new dilemmas facing South Korea on TPP participation are twofold. It felt strong US geopolitical pressure once Japan entered the negotiations. But should South Korea enter the FTA negotiations, it would have to deal with a difficult Japan.The Rise of South Korea in the FTA GameFTAs and the Hub Strategy in East AsiaEast Asian countries embarked on FTA initiatives in response to economic globalization, the Asian financial crisis, and competitive regionalism. …

Under ultraconservative Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the process of Japan's remilitarization has recently gained momentum. Japan's rightward shift is embodied in a military buildup, Abe's pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine, and historical revisionism. The buildup includes a new warship and more funding for the Self Defense Forces, greater surveillance over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, ignoring local opposition to a new military base in Okinawa, the State Secrets Law, establishment of an American-style national security council, and plans to reinterpret Article 9 of the Constitution to allow for collective self-defense.

Rising terrorism against religions and ethnic minorities has been an issue for Pakistan in the recent years. This rise in hate crimes and targeted terrorism can be linked with the revisionist history which is being preached through the textbooks of the country. This paper aims to study through a detailed qualitative content analysis how this revisionist history is being created, how facts and language are being manipulated to latently influence the thinking of young school going students to create a feeling if homogeneity within the country in which people that do not become part of the permitted social narrative are looked at upon as outsiders. It was concluded that through distortion, omission of necessary facts and the manipulation of language a systematic narrative is being shaped in the country which creates resentment against religious and ethnic minorities as well as India and the West.

This book is an account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India. It examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. The book traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, the book broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the book offers new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a “bloodscape of difference:” different sovereignties, different proportionalities, and different temporalities. These entryways allow exploration of the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.

1. 'The Visual Turn: Approaching South Asia Across the Disciplines', 2. 'Jaipur, City of Tolerance and Progress', 3. 'A Visual History of Three Lucknows', 4. 'The Urdu Khushtar Ramayan: Verbal- and Visual-Narrative Repertoires and Sense of Place ' 5. 'Visual Strategies for Literary Authority in Modern Hindi', 6. 'Imaging Caste: Photography, the Housing Question, and the Making of Sociology in Colonial Bombay, 1900-1939', 7. 'The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediation of Political Practice in Contemporary India',

The main objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of naming a geographical space. Naming privileges a certain understanding of space at the expense of erasing others, both epistemologically and politically. Historically, defining the Middle East has been Western/Eurocentric. It serves (neo)colonial interests to geographically reify the Middle East and marginalise its peoples and politics. The Middle East as a geopolitical "truth" is a discursive regime, which essentialises and instrumentalises a certain Middle East for Euro/Western geopolitical interests. This chapter argues in favour of articulating the Middle East conceptually along the lines of "everyday politics" in order to challenge the latter's political and epistemological practice. The discussion will set an agenda for a critical engagement with the geographical space referred to as the Middle East. This, it is argued, can be done through a sustained commitment to unravelling the workings of power in multiple discourses on the Middle East(s). Such critical engagement will enable scholars to examine how political practices at the "elite" level are lived and challenged by allegedly "apolitical" common people.

Chetan Bhagat, a contemporary Indian English author, has emerged as a significant voice in modern Indian literature by blending popular fiction with socio-cultural commentary. His novels, characterized by accessible language, relatable characters, and contemporary themes, have resonated strongly with urban middle-class youth, capturing their aspirations, dilemmas, and everyday struggles. Bhagat’s works address critical issues such as the pressures of competitive education, career ambitions, interpersonal relationships, class mobility, and the challenges of modern Indian society, making his narratives both entertaining and socially reflective. This research article aims to critically examine Bhagat as the voice of modern Indian youth, focusing on the thematic concerns, narrative strategies, and the broader social and cultural implications of his writing. Employing textual analysis, content analysis, and socio-cultural interpretation, the study explores how Bhagat’s novels reflect and influence contemporary youth discourse while bridging the gap between mass readership and literary critique. The research highlights his contribution to making literature accessible, engaging, and socially relevant, demonstrating his role in shaping youth perspectives and cultural consciousness. Ultimately, this study underscores Chetan Bhagat’s significance in modern Indian literature, his impact on youth identity formation, and his educational and socio-cultural relevance in the evolving landscape of Indian popular fiction.