Whenever a government begins talking about saving the national culture from invaders, it has something more important and imminent to cover up. As the discourse gets intensely emotional and collectively nostalgic, real issues get subverted or pushed off the agenda of the Establishment.

Take the great economic debate, for instance. While there is a consensus on the fact that the economy is in a bad shape, the ongoing argument deals with something else, something bizarrely unreal. The swadeshi versus the pro-liberalisation lobby.

The Sangh Parivar, by any stretch of imagination, is not known for its liberalised vision of economy. If it has a vision, it is ruled by its core of upper middleclass comprising traders and small businessmen who relish protectionism. But the projected, hyped-up fight that dominates news columns is between the swadeshi lobby and the knights of liberalisation within the Parivar. The result: no one is talking about the economy.

Another great crisis that bothers our rulers is the contribution of MTV and other invaders. The Parivar thinks they are polluting our generations, violating the sanctity of the tricolour. Our children are made to watch women in strange clothes or little clothes, they are shown bodies intertwined, people hugging and kissing, something which is not part of our culture.

So the debate is on how to clean our skies, how to drive away the peddlers of promiscuity and degenerated western notions on sexuality. The debate is not on how mediocre the programmes we produce are, not how primitive our national channel's concepts and approaches are. The result: no one is talking about our unprofessionalism.

Then comes history. The Parivar thinks thatLeft-leaning history mongers have hijacked the Great Indian History. And that they have been doing it for the past 50 years, beginning under the caring umbrella of Nehruvian socialism. They have invaded textbooks, infiltrated the minds of several generations, introduced Marxian terminology in history when we did not need it, diverted the taxpayer's money to vilify our heroes and create their own.

The Parivar has a diagnosis for the near absence of right-wing historians in the country: They have remained hidden and off mainstream because they never got official patronage. Simple. So the question now is not whether the so-called Indian right have seen a D.D. Kosambi or not. Or whether there have been a stream of historians or enough volume of work to counter the leftist onslaught.

Art and literature follow. Art academies and the market, the Parivar says, are dominated by leftist artists. This happened because the left-of-centre rulers patronised them. The result is that rightist painters and writers nevergot exposure. What else could explain the domination of the so-called progressive painters?

Forget the fact that art and literature thrived across the world despite the oppression of governments. If anything, official opposition helped them flourish. When the Parivar wants to cleanse the museums, galleries and institutions, a small question should bother them. What will they fill the galleries with when existing works are thrown out? Shivakasi calendars?Answers may be difficult to find but the Parivar's immediate task is cleaning up India's culture.

There should be a lot of cleaning to do. The more they clean the more difficult it is to stop. Where does it end?

The Great Indian Culture, if brought back to the core, will be without most of the things that we find around us. Evolved through generations of rulers, civilizations and invaders, our lives are irreconcilably different from what the Parivar's view of them is. A cleansing has to take care of the way we eat and what we eat, the way we all dressand the way we speak, read and write.

While the inane argument about regaining the national culture goes on, another question is conveniently forgotten. Whose culture is it and who wants it anyway?

Most of India does not find a place in the Parivar's idea of Indian culture. In its glorified past of wisdom and wealth, there are no dalits. Its world-view -- decided and driven by false notion of the past -- does not include the backward castes too. A casteist past and Manu's views on women form the Indian culture that the Parivar talks about.

But national culture is a great catch phrase. When problems of the present get too difficult to handle, the best way out is to talk about the past. It is so distant that the concrete images have irrevocably disappeared from the collective consciousness. Culture could be a great idea for some but people do not live by it.