The Indian Council for Historical Research(ICHR) has disbanded the advisory committee of its journal comprising 21 eminent historians from around the world, including Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib.
The council’s member-secretary Gopinath Ravindran opposed the decision taken during a meeting of the journal’s editorial board held this week, people familiar with the matter told ET.
The decision to disband the committee is among the first taken by the country’s top historical research body after it was reconstituted by the NDA government in January.
The Indian Historical Review is the refereed journal of the ICHR that has been publishing research work in history since 1974. It is one of the few Indian journals found on the prestigious Thomson Reuters list. The panel was disbanded in a meeting of the journal’s editorial board, headed by ICHR Chairman Y Sudershan Rao, on Tuesday.
The membership of the new advisory committee is now limited to the 18 historians on ICHR’s governing body.
The advisory committee included Satish Chandra, Muzaffar Alam from the University of Chicago, Richard M Eaton of the University of Arizona, BR Tomlinson from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and JS Grewal, former vice chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar. Although the advisory members are not actively involved in producing the biannual journal, they help in reviewing articles that appear in it. “A panel of eminent historians lends lustre to the journal. It adds to its credibility,” said Professor BP Sahu of Delhi University, a former ICHR member.
Ravindran, who also serves as the managing editor of IHR, opposed the decision on the grounds that it wasn’t backed by any “academic logic”, one of the persons cited earlier said. Ravindran, a professor of history at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, who was appointed as ICHR’s membersecretary under the previous UPA II government, declined to comment on the matter. Rao, however, defended the decision saying appointment of the advisory panel forIHR is purely the prerogative of the journal’s editorial board. “There is nothing unusual or wrong about this,” he said.
Thapar told ET that she had received no official communication about her removal from IHR’s advisory panel. Asked if she was surprised by the news of her removal, she said, “Not really. One can see from the membership of the new council which direction they are heading into.”
Reacting to the decision to limit the panel’s membership to just ICHR members, she said, “The whole point of the advisory board is that you can search far and wide for people who have expertise in various subjects. If you limit the membership of the advisory board to just members of the ICHR, you are, in a sense, annulling the purpose of the advisory board, which is to get as wide an opinion as possible on what to put into the journal.”
This development comes close on the heels of historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s resignation from the post of chief editor of the journal last month. Although Bhattacharya gave no official reason for quitting, media reports suggested he was unhappy with the “direction” the ICHR is taking. Professor Dilip Chakrabarti ofCambridge University is the new chief editor of the journal.
