Marxist ‘historian’ DN Jha, known for alternative history and distortion of India’s ancient past, died on Thursday evening due to prolonged illness.
The 81-year-old ‘historian’, who was also a professor and chair at the Department of History at Delhi University, was infamously known for ‘secularising’ Indian history through falsifying facts to defame indigenous cultures of the land. Jha, who belonged to the school of Marxist history in Delhi, claimed to have specialised in ancient and medieval history.
Jha lied about the presence of a temple beneath Babri Masjid
DN Jha was one of the first far-left ‘intellectuals’ who peddled the lies about the non-existence of a Hindu temple underneath the Babri Masjid at Ram Janmabhoomi, Ayodhya. The likes of Jha had gone to the extent of nullifying the historical claim over Ayodhya and its past by distorting facts about the presence of a temple beneath the illegal structure called Babri Masjid.
In May 1991, Jha and along with three other ‘historians’ had come up with a document, ‘Babri Mosque or Rama’s Birthplace? Historians’ Report to the Indian Nation’. In this document, Jha had come up with theories, as usual without any substantial proofs to claim that there was no Hindu temple under the illegal structure of Babri Masjid. However, the lies of ‘historians’ such as DN Jha were exposed by the ASI who unearthed temple remains during their excavation, which was later vindicated by the Supreme Court in its Ram Mandir judgement in 2019.
DN Jha peddled Hindu ate beef myth, lied about Hindus destroying Nalanda
Not just it, DN Jha, who was known for anti-Hindu propaganda, had also tried his luck with ‘fiction’ when he published The Myth of the Holy Cow. In this book, Jha had claimed that Hindu were the first to consume beef during the Vedic and post-Vedic period.
In the introduction of the book, Jha wrote, “The veneration of the cow has been converted into a symbol of the communal identity of the Hindus, and obscurantist and fundamentalist forces obdurately refuse to appreciate that the cow was not always all that sacred in the Vedic and subsequent Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical traditions—or that its flesh”.
This was the extent of anti-Hindu hatred the likes of DN Jha possessed which motivated them to go to any extent to defame and discredit Hindu civilizational values.
A known supporter of the Congress party and its politics, the Marxist ‘historian’ was also known for inventing facts to lie about Nalanda when he had claimed that the ancient University was destroyed by followers of Brahmanical religion, to save Muslims who had ravaged the ancient university in the 12th century. Arun Shourie, a minister of the Vajpayee government and also a Hindu scholar, had accused DN Jha of distorting history.
