The BJP alliance is now back in power, but this time with a much larger alliance than in its previous avatar. Some political commentators argue that the BJP's ideological gurus within the RSS and the VHP appear hemmed in by the unwieldy coalition, not to speak of what some consider the unimpeachable goodness of Mr. Vajpayee.

For those less sanguine, Vajpayee II is not any less ideologically driven than Vajpayee I. Indeed, both Vajpayees constructed careful strategies for governance that did not put them in frontal combat with the institutions of the Indian state. Rather, Mr. Vajpayee's regime uses the language of pragmatism and modernism to herald changes that appear at odds with the general cultural consensus within India on topics such as education and religion. The State's education system is to be "modernised," we are told, which means, in sum, that it is to be turned over, ironically, to the pundits to be Hinduised.

As Mr. Vajpayee celebrated the nuclear tests, sadhus gathered the radioactive sands with the intent, thereafter stopped, to distribute the atomic dust across the four corners of the land. Ganesh, the original pachyderm, was the scribe of Vyasa who offered us the long verse story of Arjuna and the Pandavas. The BJP and its sadhus do no honour to that elephantine God: their current disrespect for learning and reason is far from the dedication of Ganesh of the distant past.

Elephants, naturalists say, have long memories. So does the Hindu Right. George Orwell, among other students of authoritarianism, shows us that the Right's dominance in the present is often secured through its (sometimes fabricated) control of the past. Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Union Human Resource Development Minister for the second time, was nonplussed by the rebuff he received last year for his plan to "Indianise, nationalize and spirtualize" the school curriculum. Within weeks of the Vajpayee's government assumption to office last year, Dr. Joshi installed Hindu Right supporters to head the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the Indian Council of Social Scientists (ICSSR) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

To control the past, one must write history textbooks in one's image. The test case for much that is now on the national scene transpired in Uttar Pradesh almost a decade ago. The scholar of education Krishna Kumar argues that textbooks in north India have routinely betrayed sectarian (mainly anti-Muslim biases), since they resemble the bigotry of Amar Chitra Katha comics, which stray far from the evidentiary requirements of history. In 1993, the NCERT reported that the BJP government's textbooks in Uttar Pradesh contained "historical falsehoods" and had a "blatantly communal orientation." Furthermore, these textbooks exaggerated the role of the Hindu Right, whose own place in the freedom movement was negligible. "The inclusion of references to the RSS and its founder in chapters dealing with the freedom movement," the report noted, "is meant to provide respectability to and legitimise the role of Hindu communal organisations and their leaders"'

Ganesh's choice vehicle was a rat, and it might be a rat that does metaphorical duty for us here to explain the Hindu Right's rodent-like gnawing at the national consciousness. People, frustrated by the failures of capitalism, organise themselves under the banner of populist leaders (whose close relations with capital notwithstanding). This theocratic populism is represented in India by the Hindu Right and in the USA by the Christian Right - so that the bigotry of the VHP and of the Southern Baptist Convention is nothing if not identical. People are frustrated, this is clear. They are angry at the plateau of their economic and social destiny, something that could perhaps have been explained by a digression on the overwhelming power of finance (or fictitious) capital over the productive energies of people. Dr. Joshi's decision to drop the explanatory framework of Marxism from the Class 12 political science curriculum will make the task of a complex explanation for popular frustration all the more of a challenge. How does one share a theory of growth amidst inequality without the profound framework of Marxism? For those who sneer at talk of Marx, keep in mind that in 1989, Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen called Marx the "great critic of capitalism" who "did more than any author to emphasize the importance of analysing economic movements through disaggregation according to classes."

Ganesh, the beloved son of Parvathi and Shiva, is known by many as Vighananda, the remover of obstacles. The BJP is set in its ways to distort the complex heritage of India, just as the playful figure of Ganesh was distorted by the hideously stern Ganapati festival authored by Tilak and now presided over by Mumbai's King Rat (BT, to those not in the know). In 1992, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh organised a workshop on Vedic Mathematics. The state education minister inaugurated the function, saying, "I feel happy and proud to say that what is very ancient for Bharat is precisely what is very modern for the world." Study the Vedas, he noted, and you will understand all of mathematics.

While science and mathematics entrance students elsewhere, the children of Uttar Pradesh (and now India) will have to eat a bitter humble pie. Is this what we (and Ganesh) want to see befall India?

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