To an extent, a book, in whatever the language in which it is crafted, can be a matter of subjective reflection; it is up to the reader or critic to draw conclusions.

The Indian Human Resource Development Ministry’s latest move is testament to what Amartya Sen has famously described as the spread of “unfreedom.” While facts are meant to be garnered, interpretation is free.

As much was the underlying theme of the pedagogy of the late Ashin Das Gupta, one of the finest teachers of history at Presidency College. If the HRD Ministry under Smriti Irani has its way, the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language is on course to initiate yet another step toward detoxification of history.

To that end, writers will have to declare in a form that their books contain “nothing against government policy or national interest.” The initiative goes beyond bowdlerized publications; the government’s terms of engagement are set to come into force at the conceptual stage.

A more brazen attempt to dictate content will be difficult to imagine; the plan affords little or no freedom to the author, let alone the publisher.

The right-wing “fatwa,” clothed as a government notification, betrays a remarkable insensitivity toward criticism and a near-total aversion to a different point of view, an area of disagreement which ought never to be confused with dissent.

It would be useful to underline that such muddled thinking on the part of the national government was very recently at the root of the Jawaharlal Nehru University kerfuffle. While critical writing must always be promoted and welcomed in academia, the fine print of Saturday’s official statement is that the author must stop short of making a critical assessment.

The HRD Ministry’s diktat will blur the distinction between a historian and/or political scientist and a chronicler. While proceeding from conclusion to premise, the ministry has taken recourse to an alibi that is as presumptuous as it is breathless, specifically that the government’s objective is to minimize the scope for what it calls “factual errors” in Urdu publications.

The contrived reasoning is no more than an attempt to play to a certain gallery -- “government-sponsored books should only create harmony and goodwill among various sections.” The immediate provocation was a book authored by a professor of Harisingh Gaur Central University in Madhya Pradesh.

It is said to have contained an innocuous error, mentioning Punjab as the birthplace of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Far greater damage has been wrought by the detoxification of history and the restructuring of quasi-academic entities such as the Indian Council of Historical Research. Let literary critics and not the ministry’s babus take a call on the facts, which in the case of the social sciences are open to subjective reflection.

(Asia News Network/The Statesman)