"The facts concerning the persecution of Hindus in the pre-modern age were a matter of consensus until recently. For contemporary political reasons, the Congress movement under Mahatma Gandhi and especially under Jawaharlal Nehru thought it opportune to minimize or deny this painful history. They invented a history of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai totally at variance with the information given in the primary sources. The job of rewriting history in this sense was subsequently taken up in right earnest by the post-independence generation of vocal Marxist scholars, who gained firm control of the guiding history institutions under Indira Gandhi. For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists' hold on the cultural sector intact. ...After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. They ordered the writing of new history textbooks for the schools. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called "saffronization" (hinduization) of history... Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as "McCarthyist" anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that "eminent historians" like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as "saffronization" was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a "coup d'état". And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin "at least as ruthless as Hitler". Such are the true concerns of the "secularists" warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum. History falsification comes in different forms and has concentric lines of defence and attack. At the time of unlimited "secularist" self-confidence and belligerence, this went as far as to deny that any Islamic persecution or oppression of Hindus had taken place. When that proved untenable, it was claimed that intolerance had admittedly existed but that it had been unrelated to Islam, that it was a general phenomenon typical of the medieval period."