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India: Purge in NCERT School Textbooks under the Modi Regime - Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, RSS ban etc - Select Newsreports and responses (April 2023)

6 April 2023

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Purged from NCERT Textbooks: Hindu extremists’ dislike for Gandhi, RSS ban after assassination

Key deletions on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in NCERT class 12 texts

Written by Ritika Chopra

* He (Gandhi) was particularly disliked by those who wanted Hindus to take revenge or who wanted India to become a country for the Hindus, just as Pakistan was for Muslims…

* His steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate Gandhiji…

* Gandhiji’s death had an almost magical effect on the communal situation in the country… The Government of India cracked down on organisations that were spreading communal hatred. Organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh were banned for some time…

These sentences that have been taught to Class 12 students for more than 15 years as part of their Political Science curriculum now stand deleted from NCERT textbooks.

So does the reference to Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse as “a Brahmin from Pune” and “the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper who had denounced Gandhiji as ‘an appeaser of Muslims’” from a Class 12 History textbook.

References to Gujarat riots purged from social science books for Classes 6-12 Among key deletions on Gandhi’s assassination in NCERT class 12 texts are these lines.

Significantly, the above deletions did not figure in the “list of rationalised content” officially released by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in June last year. [ . . . ]

https://indianexpress.com/article/education/references-to-gujarat-riots-purged-from-social-science-books-for-ncert-classes-6-12-8538768/

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The Wire

Weaponising History: The Hindutva Communal Project

Those who want a Hindu Rashtra as a mirror image of Muslim Pakistan are now imitating how history is taught in Pakistan.

by Aditya Mukherjee and Mridula Mukherjee *

The recent deletions made from the NCERT textbooks have been explained by the NCERT director as a process of ‘rationalisation’ necessitated by the need to reduce the academic load on children who lost out due to the COVID-19 related disruption of their academic programme. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An analysis of the deletions from the history, sociology and political science texts, the political statements made by members of the ruling party in that context and the long history of the Hindu communalists trying to distort history will make this amply clear. It is in the same vein as the duplicity the communalists have exhibited historically. They never take responsibility for their actions. Unlike Bhagat Singh, Gandhi, Tilak and countless others who bravely took responsibility for their actions and faced the consequences, including exile, jail and the death penalty, we are told no organisation was responsible for Gandhi’s assassination (paras fixing the responsibility were removed from the NCERT texts), nobody committed what the Supreme Court called the “criminal act” of destroying the Babri Masjid, nobody was responsible for the Gujarat massacre (all sections removed from NCERT text).

Historical overview of distorting history

The RSS recognised very early that communal ideology constitutes the core of the communal project. A particular version of history in turn forms the core of communal ideology. Therefore, once the ban imposed on the RSS in the wake of the murder of Mahatma Gandhi was lifted after they pledged to work only as a cultural organisation, which would stay away from politics, they set themselves assiduously to the task of spreading communal ideology. Since the 1950s, the RSS, through their schools (the first Saraswati Shishu Mandir being inaugurated by RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar) and their textbooks, tried to promote a distorted, often totally imagined version of history. A version which demonised members of other religious communities.

RSS school texts, for example, would teach nine-year-old tender minds in class IV about Islam:

“Wherever they went, they had a sword in their hand…. Any country that came their way was destroyed. Houses of prayers and universities were destroyed. Libraries were burnt. Religious books were destroyed. Mothers and sisters were humiliated. Mercy and justice were unknown to them”

“Delhi’s Qutb Minar…. was actually built by emperor Samudragupta. Its real name was Vishnu Stambha…. This Sultan (Qutbuddin Aibak) actually got some parts of it demolished and its name was changed.”

Similar invective was reserved for the Christians, Parsees etc., who like the Muslims were defined as “foreigners” not deserving full citizenship rights, using Savarkar’s definition that only those whose “fatherland” (pitribhumi) and “holy land” (punya bhumi) were in India could claim to be Indians. (An absurd definition – if applied to all the Christians of Europe, America and Korea or to the Buddhists of Japan, it would make them foreigners in their own country as their holy lands were not in the country they inhabited!)

Use of state power to distort history

1977-79

While promoting this kind of history in RSS schools which had multiplied by the thousands over the years was bad enough, what was even more dangerous was that the RSS tried to use state power, whenever they had access to it, to introduce similar history in state-run schools and into the national curriculum and launched an attack on secular scientific history.

The first major attack came when the Janata party was in power from 1977-79, as the Jana Sangh, the political/electoral wing of the RSS, had merged with the Janata Party. The existing NCERT textbooks written by the tallest of our scholars, who were globally recognised, such as Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Satish Chandra, R.S. Sharma and Arjun Dev, were sought to be banned. But at that time, the institutions in India were still functioning with considerable independence and the effort was resisted strongly, from within the NCERT itself, in the media and universities across the country. The books survived.

1999-2004

Next time round, when the NDA came to power at the Centre in 1999, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had replaced the Jana Sangh as the political arm of the RSS, was in the driving seat. Learning from past experience, they removed key people from the syllabus committees and appointed pliant people to top administrative positions in the NCERT, UGC (University Grants Commission), ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) and ICHR (Indian Council of Historical Research), before launching a frontal attack on secular scientific historians.

On grounds of religious and community feelings being hurt, passages were sought to be deleted from NCERT textbooks written by R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Satish Chandra, etc. Notably, 41 passages which were sought to be removed had already been identified in a RSS publication, The Enemies of Indianisation: The Children of Marx, Macaulay and Madarsa, in which the newly appointed NCERT director J.S. Rajput himself had contributed an article. The secular scholars and those who defended them (which included the Indian History Congress, the most representative body of professional historians in the country, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, President of India, K.R. Narayanan, editors of major newspapers, etc.)
were described as “anti-national”. The RSS chief, K.S. Sudarshan, branded them as “anti-Hindu Euro-Indians”.

The alarming tendency of intimidating those who did not agree with the Hindutva (Hindu communal) version of history was evident when a group of self-appointed protectors of Indian nationalism collected at the house of education minister Murli Manohar Joshi and demanded the arrest of historians like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Arjun Dev. The minister added fuel to this fascist tendency, branding the history written by these scholars as “intellectual terrorism”, which was “more dangerous than cross border terrorism” that needed to be countered effectively!

Eventually, the existing NCERT books written by ostensible “intellectual terrorists” were removed and a new set of books were brought in. Such was the poor quality of the books and the communal bias that was being dished out to our children that the Indian History Congress was constrained to bring out a book in 2003 called History in the New NCERT Textbooks: A Report and an Index of Errors.

The report concluded: “Often the errors are apparently mere products of ignorance; but as often they stem from an anxiety to present History with a very strong chauvinistic and communal bias. The textbooks draw heavily on the kind of propaganda that the so called Sangh Parivar publications have been projecting for quite some time.”

The decade beginning 2004, when the Hindu communal forces lost state power at the Centre, provided some reprieve from the communal onslaught. These books were withdrawn and a new set of books was prepared involving a team of scholars from all over the country. They were chosen for their scholarship, not political sycophancy. While this was a welcome move, the secular forces unfortunately failed to utilise the opportunity fully to challenge on a war footing the rapid communalisation of society done through the spread of a virulent, communal interpretation of history through texts taught in RSS schools or in schools run by religious minorities.

2021-23

The return to power at the Centre of the BJP-led NDA in 2014 and again in 2019 provided the RSS/BJP combine a new opportunity to return to their favourite pastime of rewriting India’s past in their own image.

Reports of major deletions being made from the NCERT textbooks in print began to emerge. As in 2001, the deletions in the NCERT texts was preceded by an RSS publication demanding the same. In June 2021, the Public Policy Research Center headed by the National Convener of the e-training cell of the BJP produced a report demanding changes in the existing history curriculum. In tandem, the parliamentary committee headed by Vinay Sahsrabuddhe, a BJP/RSS ideologue, produced a similar report. The NCERT produced a revised syllabus, details of which were printed in the Indian Express in April 2022. In this syllabus major deletions were made from the history of the Moghul period as well as the Delhi Sultanate including the Tughlaqs, Khaljis and Lodis.

Lest one thinks it was a purely an academic exercise, the home minister declared on November 24, 2022 that no one could stop India from rewriting its history with pride to remove past distortions. The prime minister on December 26, 2022 talked of the “concocted narratives” taught till now that needed to be corrected. He went on to declare “On the one hand, there was terrorism, and on the other, spiritualism… On the one hand there was the mighty Mughal Sultanate blinded by religious fanaticism, while on the other hand, there were our Gurus gleaming in the knowledge and living by the ancient principles of India…”

The new textbooks with all the deletions incorporated hit the market in early April 2023. Again, immediately on release of the books, BJP leader Kapil Mishra, as reported on April 4, 2023, declared: “It is a great decision to remove false history of Mughals from NCERT. Thieves, pickpockets and two-penny road raiders were called the Mughal Sultanate and the emperor of India. Akbar, Babar, Shahjehan, Aurangzeb are not in the history books, they are in the dustbin.”

Given this context, the repeated statements by the NCERT director that the deletions were a part of a rationalistion done to reduce the academic load on students who got a setback due to COVID-19 cuts no ice. Nor does his claim that a few “faltu” (useless) sections have been removed.

A quick look at the so called “faltu” deletions makes clear the primary motivation. Some deletions defy any reasoning except total ignorance or incompetence. A lot of the deletions as noted above relate to the Mughal period and the Delhi Sultanate. This is in tune with the constant vilification of the Muslim community and the efforts to remove their names from roads, cities and now textbooks and also to push them into ghettoes. Significantly, references to the 2002 Gujarat riots, the National Human Right Commission’s observations on the Gujarat government’s (headed by Narendra Modi) handling of the riots and on how such riots lead to ghettoisation, converting mixed neighbourhoods into single community ones have also been deleted.

Research in many parts of the world has shown that genocide of a community is often preceded by the community being demonised, their names changed, their history being erased and they being pushed into ghettoes so that people do not interact with them in their daily lives. These processes have begun in India and open calls for genocide of Muslims are being given in various parts of the country with amazing impunity. These early signs must be noted and resisted by the democratic forces in the country.

The erasure of the Mughal and the Sultanate period is also extremely detrimental to the understanding of our own history. Do remember that if all was evil in this period, India at the beginning of the 18th century would not be producing nearly a quarter of the world’s GDP, more than that of entire West Europe put together and eight times the GDP of the United Kingdom. India was then the largest exporter of textiles to the world and the British were indulging in industrial espionage to try and steal techniques and design prevalent here. This was also the period when a syncretic culture evolved and amazing advances were made in music, art, architecture and literature.

The people of India did not see this period as one of Muslim atrocities over Hindus. British colonial ideologues were the first to view this period in this manner, a view lapped up and propagated by the Hindu communalists. It is worth reminding ourselves that during the 1857 revolt, soldiers and people belonging to all communities attempted to overthrow the British and install in their place none other than the Moghul Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar! To deny our children a peep into this period is to cut one’s own feet.

Those who want a Hindu rashtra as a mirror image of Muslim Pakistan are now imitating how history is taught in Pakistan where they teach about Harappa and Mohenjodaro as it is in Pakistan and pre-Hindu, then gloss over several centuries of pre-Islamic period and the period of the Indian national movement. This, when the existing historiography in India had advanced to among the best in the world.

Another set of deletions relate to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. These deletions were made surreptitiously and were not even mentioned in the list circulated to schools in April 2022 , as highlighted yet again by The Indian Express. Passages which spoke of Gandhi’s conviction “that any attempt to make India into a country only for the Hindus would destroy India” and how his “steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate Gandhiji” were deleted. So were the lines that said: “Government of India cracked down on orgnisations that were spreading communal hatred. Organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh were banned for some time”.

In the revised paragraph in the class XII history text all details regarding Gandhi’s assassin’s political views are removed. It now just says, “At his daily prayer meeting on the evening of 30 January, Gandhiji was shot dead by a young man. The assassin who surrendered afterwards, was Nathuram Godse.” A clear attempt at a whitewash where typically the responsibility of the forces of Hindu communalism in the murder of the Father of the Nation was sought to be denied. At the same time in the prevalent political eco system, Nathu Ram Godse is allowed to be worshipped and BJP Member of Parliament Pragya Thakur can retain her office after calling Godse a “Deshbhakt”! Clearly, no lessons are to be learnt by the next generation from circumstances that led to the ghastly murder of one of the greatest Indians.

We do not have space here to discuss the inexplicable deletion of other ‘faltu’ subjects like the Industrial Revolution, caste oppression, Rise of Popular Movements, ‘Confrontation of Cultures’, Democracy and Diversity, Challenges of Democracy, The Emergency, Central Islamic Lands, Environment and Society, Urban Environment (with a section dealing with urban inequities with the police backing the privileged against the poor), etc.

With such deletions we will succeed in creating a generation of unthinking bhakts who do not ask questions. We do not wish our children to be bigoted morons.

Fortunately, large number of academics and several state governments have registered strong protests and demanded the immediate withdrawal of the changes which are seen to be guided by divisive motives going against the constitutional ethos and the democratic and composite culture of the Indian subcontinent. Many newspapers too have published editorials critical of the NCERT decision. It is to be hoped that saner voices will prevail and persuade those entrusted with the education of our children to act in their best interests.

* (Authors: Aditya Mukherjee and Mridula Mukherjee taught at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU)

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Gujarat riots out of syllabus, references to Jawaharlal Nehru cut short
NCERT has ‘rationalised’ content in its textbooks to ‘reduce the load’ on students in view of the pandemic

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/gujarat-riots-out-of-syllabus-references-to-jawaharlal-nehru-cut-short/cid/1927564#

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Newsclick

Case Studies on Police Killings, Vidarbha Water Crisis Deleted From Class 11 NCERT Sociology Textbook

Newsclick Report | 10 Apr 2023

The Vidarbha case study was written by veteran journalist P. Sainath. It first appeared on June 22, 2005, in The Hindu, describing how a water park was established in Bazargaon village of Nagpur district on a 40-acre land.
MP: On ABVP Complaint, FIR Against Muslim Principal, Profs for Buying ‘Controversial’ Book

New Delhi: The updated syllabus of the newly printed National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks does not include references to agrarian distress, pollution-related death, and class-based killing by the police.

As per The Hindu, NCERT dropped these topics from the Class 11 Sociology textbook, Understanding Society.

In Chapter 3 - Environment and Society, there is a section titled, ’Why environmental problems are also social problems.’ NCERT dropped three pages from this section, including two case studies. The first case study concerns the increase in the number of amusement centres and water parks in water-starved Vidarbha region in Maharashtra. The second study talks about the killing of five people in Wazirpur, Delhi, by the police.

The Vidarbha case study was written by veteran journalist P. Sainath. It first appeared on June 22, 2005, in The Hindu, describing how a water park was established in Bazargaon village of Nagpur district on 40-acre land.

The deleted portion contains the lines: "Bazargaon falls in a region declared as scarcity-hit in 2004. It had never faced that fate before. The village also had its share of six-hour — and worse — power cuts till about May. These hit every aspect of daily life, including health, and devastated children appearing for exams. The summer heat, touching 47, made things worse. All these iron laws of rural life do not apply within Fun and Food Village. This private oasis has more water than Bazargaon can dream of. And never a moment’s break in power supply."

The second case study was from an article by sociologist Amita Baviskar. It first appeared in the International Social Science Journal, titled ’Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi.’ It described the class conflict in the Ashok Vihar area of North Delhi.

In one particular incident, an 18-year-old boy was beaten to death ’by a group of enraged house owners and two police constables’ while strolling in a park.

The omission of case studies has changed the narrative structure of the whole chapter, turning it into a generic piece about sustainable development without any examples or stories.

Moreover, NCERT has omitted key statistics concerning indoor air pollution-related deaths in India.

The omitted lines included: "But we often don’t realise that indoor pollution from cooking fires is also a serious source. The World Health Organisation has estimated that almost 600,000 people died due to (cumulative) indoor pollution-related causes in India in 1998, almost 500,000 of them in rural areas."

These deletions have yet to be declared by the NCERT’ says the report.

Read Also:250 Historians Express Appallment at NCERT’s Decision to Remove Topics from History Textbook

Recent reports on NCERT making changes in textbooks of various subjects, including history, have created quite a furore in the country, with academics and the Opposition parties saying that the government was pushing its “saffron agenda”.

In fact, the Left Democratic Front Kerala government has even declined to accept the changes in NCERT textbooks.

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Mystery of the Missing Mughals

by Suchintan Das | 06 Apr 2023

https://www.newsclick.in/mystery-missing-mughals

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From Syllabus to Street, Hindutva Hate Politics Targets Muslims in Hindi — Siddharth Varadarajan in conversation with Apoorvanand

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Indian Textbooks Purged of Material Modi’s Party Finds Inconvenient

https://t.co/NzI2QCKZwM

New Indian textbooks purged of nation’s Muslim history https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/india-textbooks-muslim-history-changes/

India’s Taj Mahal Has Disappeared. Thanks to Modi’s anti-Muslim Mania

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2023-04-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/indias-taj-mahal-has-disappeared-thanks-to-modis-anti-muslim-mania/

Narendra Modi is rewriting Indian history
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/13/narendra-modi-is-rewriting-indian-history

Politics Behind the Removal of Mughal History From Textbooks Say Academics by Ranjit Devraj https://www.ipsnews.net/2023/04/politics-behind-the-removal-of-mughal-history-from-textbooks-say-academics/

India history debate after chapter on Mughals dropped https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65229515

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Deccan Herald, April 07 2023

Editorial

Falsifying history to suit the ruling party

The new history and political science textbooks prescribed by the NCERT for senior and senior secondary classes will present a new history, and in some cases even no history. The changes have been made to suit politics rather than pedagogical needs and amount to rewriting and distorting history. Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to foster Hindu-Muslim unity during the months before and after Partition, his assassination and the subsequent ban on the RSS have all been presented in a new narrative after deletion of sentences about the activities of Hindu extremists.

Also Read | Textbooks not revised to please or offend anyone: NCERT chief
References to the 2002 Gujarat riots and paragraphs about how class, religion and ethnicities lead to segregation of people and to riots have been removed. The Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period of our history have been removed and students will grow up with no idea of what happened in the country during many centuries of its existence.

NCERT made the changes in the name of rationalisation of study material. Rationalisation should not mean changing history in accordance with the political ideology of the ruling party. The Hindu right wing has always complained that India’s history-writing has been dominated by left wing writers and it is now its mission to right the wrongs and present the “true” history of the country. But all that “true” history amounts to is the whitewashing of events in history that are inconvenient to the ruling party and deleting portions of it that it does not like.

It is a comprehensive project that involves changing names, exiling personalities, inventing new ones and events, deleting entire periods and rewriting and reinterpreting the entire past. The result is false history, a history that is more what the ruling powers want it to have been than what it actually was. Indians have long been considered to lack a sense of history. The impression is being ‘corrected’ now with the invention of a false history.
The contentious changes were made in a surreptitious manner and that has made their motivated nature clear. Some of these alterations did not figure in the list of proposed changes published last June. NCERT Director D P Saklani has said that it was an oversight. Along with rationalisation, other explanations like “reducing the burden on students” have also been advanced. He has also said that the changes were made on the basis of the views of experts, but it is not known who the experts are. Contents of syllabi need to be periodically updated on the basis of new research and to correct biases and prejudices. New perspectives and methodologies are also needed. But the changes made by NCERT make history slave to politics and are meant to ideologically indoctrinate students.

The Tribune, Editorial, April 7, 2023

Curricula changes
New NCERT books reek of selective deletions
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/editorials/curricula-changes-494841

The Indian Express, April 6, 2023

Express View on textbook deletions: They go against the spirit and promise of NEP https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/express-view-on-textbook-deletions-they-go-against-the-spirit-and-promise-of-nep-8540940/

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Rajmohan Gandhi writes on textbook deletions: You can’t delete Gandhi’s truth https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/rajmohan-gandhi-textbook-deletions-mahatma-gandhi-8542909/

Interview: The plan is to depict a heroic regime: GN Devy on attempts to rewrite history
09 April 2023 | https://caravanmagazine.in/interview/g-n-devy-history-mughals-bjp-rss-hindi-nationalism

‘Rationalization’ of Text books or Communalization of Polity? by Ram Puniyani https://rampuniyani.com/rationalization-of-text-books-or-communalization-of-polity/

Maiming India The regime’s mimicry of Pakistan in rewriting India’s history
by Mukul Kesavan https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/maiming-india-the-regimes-mimicry-of-pakistan-in-rewriting-indias-history/cid/1929997

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India: Text of Public statement of historians on changes in school History textbooks of the NCERT
http://www.sacw.net/article15166.html

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Indian History Congress denounces changes in NCERT syllabi
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/indian-history-congress-denounces-changes-in-ncert-syllabi/article66720803.ece

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Statement from the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Reverse Deletions in NCERT Text Books

Date: April 6, 2023

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) strongly condemns the efforts by the government to change the syllabus of history through the NCERT text books.

The NCERT chief’s specious argument that this has been done to rationalize the syllabus and reduce the burden on the students is totally misleading and is part of a project to rewrite history along communal lines. The government is obviously overlooking that different periods of our past cannot be just deleted based on communal prejudice. This underlines the majoritarian mindset which is distorting history itself by dropping entire chapters about the Mughal empire.

That the current efforts to revise the text books are actually intended to whitewash the divisive and violent role of the RSS is evident in the manner in which the crucial sentences regarding the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi which led to the ban of the organization is sought to be struck off.

We urge the government to immediately take the necessary steps to reverse these obnoxious steps and restore the old text books. We also urge upon all Indian patriots interested in defending the objective study of our past to raise their voice of protest.

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Democratic Teachers Front

Press Release: Rationalisation of history as neoliberalisation

7 April 2023

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has recently dropped some portions of its Class XII history textbook dealing with Indian Mughals and portions of the Class XI history textbook dealing with colonialism and related topics. This move was ostensibly undertaken to “rationalise” the syllabus due to “Covid pressure on students everywhere”. Additionally it has been claimed that dropping these portions on Indian Mughals and colonialism “won’t affect the knowledge of children and are an unnecessary burden can be removed”. These claims are however far removed from the scientific practice of history education. Let us see why.

Most subjects in Classes XI and XII in the CBSE format are electives. If a student has opted for history as one of its papers then that is reflective of that student’s quest to learn that subject in depth including its debates and nuances. Further “Covid pressure” is no longer pertinent (unless the union government does a repeat of its ignominious past record of public health intervention). Therefore the claims about “rationalisation” of the syllabus hold no water.

Further, what these moves about “rationalisation” of the syllabus amount to is the denuding of the discipline of history and its pedagogy. This will have deleterious consequences on scientific temper (a constitutional imperative) and the ability of Indian citizens to develop India as an inclusive, plural and diverse society. It will also put paid to any hopes of India emerging as a centre of world science and technology (which requires critical thinking). Indian democracy will find itself irretrievably undermined if the “WhatsApp University” of the ruling dispensation is allowed to cannibalise Indian schools, colleges and universities.

The source of this “rationalisation” is no doubt the bigotry of the ruling dispensation which ostensibly wants to re-enact their (distorted) picture of past history while diverting attention from actual contemporary concerns about poverty and inequality. But underlying this bigotry is the ruling dispensation’s attempt to accelerate the imposition of neoliberal policies to whittle away the democratic promise of India’s anti-colonial freedom movement and its (partial) realisation after 1947. Dropping the portions dealing with colonialism is also part of the attempt to create a “conducive investment climate” for international finance and thereby further the neoliberal agenda in India. Thereby, they hope that the quest for democratic alternatives to neoliberalism is also muted. This “rationalisation” also enables drawing attention away from the collusion with the British colonial regime in India of the forerunners of the current ruling dispensation. This is why the ruling dispensation considers the teaching and learning of Indian Mughal history and colonialism “an unnecessary burden” on their quest to subvert India’s constitutional order.

Resisting and reversing these unscientific and anti-people measures is not only necessary to restore India towards its constitutional trajectory but also necessary to ensure that India has a viable future.

Nandita Narain, President
Abha Dev Habib, Secretary

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image received in response to the Syllabus deletions, no credits provided: