Editorial: History redacted, repeated

India seems to be in the throes of a historical revisionism of sorts, on the educational front. Two weeks back, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) set into motion an overhauling or rather alteration in the history syllabi and textbooks.

For instance, any mention pertaining to Maulana Azad, India’s first Education Minister has been deleted from a revised Class 11 political science textbook, that is published by the NCERT.

The fact that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India on the assurance that the State would remain autonomous has also been snipped off. The aforementioned excision is among the latest in a series of controversial erasures from new NCERT textbooks as part of a major rationalising drive for the syllabus.

Basically, anything inconsistent with the communalist ideology of the current regime is part of this disposal exercise, including Mahatma Gandhi’s unfavourable standing among Hindu extremists, a ban on the RSS after his assassination, references to the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, the Emergency, and the Naxalite movement. In fact, when the central official agency published a list of deletions that are being incorporated in the rationalised new material, it had even declared that no alterations were made in the aforementioned textbook.

However, it’s not just school students who are being shielded from such ‘facts’ by the respective authors of these texts. The University Grants Commission (UGC) in the draft syllabus framed for the Bachelor’s course for History, has claimed that India has the honour of being the Aryan homeland, has accorded the status of possible historical chronicles to the epics, and has done away with all references to India’s caste system in the syllabus’s ancient India segment.

As per the new syllabus, the caste system is being regarded as an institution born from the rise of Islam, which carries its own strange sense of irony, as the syllabus also excludes references to Mughal emperor Akbar, and his policy of religious tolerance among various communities.

The move has invited criticism from across the board, including from the Indian History Congress, which said it was greatly alarmed by these changes, and had sought historians to oppose such distortions of history.

Their argument is that peddling such narratives will lead to a prejudiced and irrational perception of our past. The long-standing apprehension is that students will be kept in the dark regarding the cultural and intellectual developments of the Mughal era.

These arbitrary excisions are being viewed by key stakeholders in the education space as the introduction of misrepresentation in History textbooks, which are being carried out by omitting entire sections, individual passages, and sentences.

Even more stringent measures are being put in place that resemble a change of guard, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2022, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, opted to discontinue the Maulana Azad fellowship which provided a five-year-long financial assistance to students from six notified minorities including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, among others.

As per observers in the higher education and the policy space, a revision of syllabus is an expected and essential process of a robust education ecosystem. The pedagogy is also reflective of the collective ethics and values prevalent in society at that point in time.

However, when political partisanship becomes the raison d’etre for such textual trimming, it turns out to be a problematic exercise. Ignoring the plurality and cultural diversity of India, while educating the youth is a sure-shot way to breed a generation susceptible to bigotry and prejudice.

Establishing an ideology through education engenders the risk of radicalising India’s youngsters in divisive silos – certainly not the road to be taken, if they must avoid the missteps of the past.