On 19 December 2001, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, the Human Resources Development (or Education) Minister in the BJP-led Government of India, speaking to the BJP youth wing, less than a week after the Lashkar-e-Toiba's attack on the parliament buildings in New Delhi, identified two types of terrorism: ‘cross-border terrorism’ perpetrated over two decades by Pakistan and by Kashmiri militant groups sponsored by its military intelligence, and the ‘intellectual terrorism unleashed by the left’, more specifically by ‘leftist historians’. Their falsification of history had ‘spread like a poison’. This ‘intellectual terrorism’ was, he asserted, ‘more dangerous than cross-border terrorism’. In exhorting the party's youth wing to counter both types of terrorism, the Human Resources Minister appeared to salute the influence of the historians with the demeanour of someone confident of his ability to destroy them.

The minister's statement followed several attempts to contain their supposed influence. Three months earlier, the Human Resources Minister had ordered about ten ‘objectionable’ passages to be deleted from four textbooks written for classes VI, VII and XI (that is for students aged 11, 12 and 16 respectively). These textbooks had originally been commissioned by the National Council for Education Research and Training in the 1970s and they had been written by leading historians – in the case of Romila Thapar, a scholar of the greatest distinction.