Bankim Dutta
“The irony is that in order to critique history, one needs to know it first. What is happening here is not a scholarly debate over the interpretation of historical facts related to key aspects of India’s recent and more distant history, but the manufacture of ignorance about those facts,” says Political scientist Gilles Verniers. This comment comes after the recent deletion of some specific topics from the school textbooks of history and political science published by NCERT, a Government of India Enterprise.
Paragraphs such as: 1. Attempts by Hindu extremists to assassinate Gandhi and 2. The ban imposed on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after the killing of Mahatma Gandhi, have been dropped from the existing syllabus.
Likewise, all references to the ‘2002 Gujarat riots’ have also been dropped from NCERT social science textbooks altogether. In addition, contents from the Mughal era and previous Muslim rulers of India have suffered a reduction. Moreover, three chapters detailing protests that turned into social movements in contemporary India have been dropped from political science textbooks across Classes 6 to 12. The section on varnas ( the four Hindu castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and the Shudras) in the Class 6 history textbook is also downsized.
Some of the omissions were not even publicized by the NCERT on its website until a recent report in the Indian Express revealed that the updated textbooks that hit the markets had their content significantly reduced, especially about Gandhi and the ban on the RSS, which was not mentioned in the list of rationalized material released by the NCERT.
Over 250 historians, including Romila Thapar and Jayati Ghosh, issued a public statement, condemning the move and demanding that the deletions be withdrawn. They also alleged that the changes were against India’s constitutional ethos.
“We are appalled by the decision of the NCERT to remove chapters and statements from the history textbooks and demand that the deletions be withdrawn. The decision of the NCERT is guided by divisive motives. It is a decision that goes against the constitutional ethos and composite culture of the Indian subcontinent. As such, it must be rescinded at the earliest.” Besides Romila Thapar and Jayati Gosh, this statement was signed by Mridula Mukherjee, Apoorvanada, Irfan Habib, and Upinder Singh, along with many others.
The statement said, “The new editions of these NCERT books have simply made the deletions the norm even when we are in a post-pandemic context in which school education has limped back to normalcy and is no longer in the online mode”. As a part of its syllabus rationalization process, to reduce students’ “burden” amid covid-19 pandemic, last year, the NCERT also removed chapters on Mughal Courts, the 2002 Gujarat Riots, the cold war, references to Mughal emperors, and Emergency, among other topics.
What is the opinion of NCERT officials regarding these omissions? NCERT chairperson Dinesh Prasad Saklani has said –”NCERT doesn’t take decisions on its own. These topics were rationalized last year on recommendations of the subject expert panel. One should not see that through the political prism.” This sort of exclusion, as said by the historians who have signed the statement, exposes the wider communal undertones, based on an inaccurate assumption about India’s past. The statement condemns the conception that the religion of the rulers was the dominant religion of the times, it is highly erroneous and leads to the deeply problematic idea of a ‘Hindu’ era, ‘Muslim’ era, etc. According to them, ”These categories are uncritically imposed on what has historically been a very diverse social fabric”.
In this context, Binoy Viswam (CPI, MP) remarks, “Our young minds deserve the truth, and offering them half-truths, omissions, and biases is a grave injustice which is sure to imperil our future. Thus, I urge you to take account of the changes made and take necessary action to rectify the biases from NCERT textbooks to preserve the spirit of critical inquiry and scientific temper in future generations,” he also mentioned that “the alterations made to NCERT textbooks are a deliberate effort to ‘distort and communalize’ the study of India’s history, politics, and society.”
The Congress had earlier accused the ruling party of “whitewashing with vengeance” over the removal of texts about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the ban on RSS and termed it an act of distorting history. The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued a statement in which it is said, “that the current efforts to revise the textbooks are 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.”
On the other side of the coin lies the advocate and mentor – BJP and RSS.
Organiser, a periodical of RSS, argues “Of course, it is the responsibility of the Government, its people, and historians to put together their history, enhance it, and to rewrite it with an objective to redeem Indian history from Eurocentric interpretations”. In another portion of the article that appeared in the Organiser, we find, the following defense – “The textbooks that the Congress government produced did not pay adequate attention to nationalist leaders like VD Savarkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, Subhash Chandra Bose, and Bhagat Singh. These textbooks continue to depict invaders and communalists as heroes. Those kings, who were responsible for the mass genocide and atrocities on their Hindu subjects were portrayed as great rulers.”
The intention to change Indian history from Eurocentrism to ‘Hindu Hard Line’ (which is opposed in the statement made by more than 250 renowned historians) is crystal clear. The first major attack on the history syllabus 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 globally recognized scholars such as Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Satish Chandra, R.S. Sharma, and Arjun Dev, were sought to be banned. The institutions in India, at that time, were still functioning with considerable independence. The effort was resisted strongly, from within the NCERT itself, in the media, and in universities across the country. The books survived at least but did not last long. When the NDA came to power(1999-2004), the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had replaced the Jana Sangh as the political arm of the RSS, was in the driving seat.
In a RSS publication, ‘The Enemies of Indianisation: The Children of Marx, Macaulay and Madarsa’, the then newly appointed NCERT director J.S. Rajput himself contributed an article. Those who defended and stood beside the secular historians, namely, the Indian History Congress (the largest association of professional historians in South Asia) Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, former 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”.
In their article “Weaponising History: The Hindutva Communal Project”, published recently in the online magazine Wire, Aditya Mukherjee, and Mridula Mukherjee wrote –”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!”
According to Mukherjee et al, “Those who want a Hindu Rashtra as a mirror image of Muslim Pakistan are now imitating how history is taught in Pakistan.”
Instead of coming to a conclusion, we can insist that the struggle to save the Indian Constitution can never be concluded especially when it is taking a U-turn in the direction of the ‘Hindu hard line’, defeating the national, united spirit of struggle.
On top of that, such crucial omissions are throwing the students at the mercy of the coaching institutions to help them fill in the gap and assist them cover the entire syllabus comprehensively since the limited and discarded topics are necessary for competitive exams later on.
Under tremendous mental strain, parents are demanding immediate clarity on how much the NCERT syllabus for Class 11 and 12 will be used for testing in competitive exams. The NCERT study material is usually considered among the best resource for cracking competitive entrance exams — like NEET, Engineering, and Law — or even regular college admissions (CUET) after school. While regular schools have made it clear that they will be teaching only the syllabus outlined by the Board, parents are now having to pay several lakhs to the ever-growing sector of dummy schools (Dummy schools are those that have tie-ups with coaching institutes), coaching institutions, and private tuitions to bridge the gap.
In the end, we would like to include two following quotes which speak for themselves:
1. Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader Kapil Mishra wrote, “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, Shahjahan, Aurangzeb are not in the history books, they are in the dustbin.”
2. Our prime minister on December 26, 2022 (while speaking at the first ‘Veer Bal Diwas’ event) spoke 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 cat is out of the bag now. The modification and rationalization of the syllabus were done as part of the measures under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which from our analysis, hereafter can be interpreted as the NEEP (National Education Eradication Policy).
Acknowledgment: Various news websites
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