"Attention focussed too-and critically so-on the incremental and ad hoc processes by which India had acquired a cultural policy. The casual nature of Shankar's note to Chunder captures the amorphous, even protean,quality of cultural policy formation.It is more a loose aggregate of spontaneous decisions than a body of coherent doctrine expressing intent and subject to policy choice and guidance. Although the procedures used to commission, examine, and license the textbooks in question were exemplary by comparison to the procedure used to challenge them, cultural policy formation was, and remains, ad hoc. Policies are essentially outputs of particular bureaus or outcomes of bargains among officials,rather than the results of deliberate choices based on coherent formulations that provide policy guidance and are subject to public accountability.... For a time, Nehru's The Discovery of India and Letters from Prison constituted a tacit statement of Congress's cultural policy, in part because those who might have objected were reluctant to challenge a prime minister who commanded wide political support. But Indira Gandhi's accession to power in the mid-1960s marked the beginning of a more articulate and aggressive left secularism in institutional arrangements, ideological formulations,and scholarship. Congress governments founded, funded, and favored the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Its nationally-recruited faculty and student body soon acquired a reputation for progressive perspectives.A progressive tone was imparted to many other national cultural institutions.Nurul Hasan, a leading Mughal historian of Marxist persuasion and former professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University,became education minister after Mrs. Gandhi's impressive electoral victory in 1971. When, after 1977, Janata intervened in textbook certification and appointments to cultural bodies, it did so in the name of rectifying a decade of partisan cultural patronage by Congress governments to secularist and soi-disant left academia. The anonymous memorandum to Prime Minister Desai alleged that progressive secularists had colonized independent government-funded research organizations-such as the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the University Grants Commission, and the Indian Council of Historical Research"