Outcry in India over deletions in history textbooks, raises worries over ‘whitewashing’

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Textbooks printed with the fresh content became available recently, ahead of the 2023-24 academic year. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PEXELS

 

 

NEW DELHI - The assassination of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi is a dark chapter in the country’s history, one that students have read about for years in their political science and history textbooks.

 

From the textbooks, 17- to 18-year-old students in Grade 12 learnt that the assassin, Nathuram Godse, was “a Brahmin from Pune” and “the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper who had denounced Gandhiji as an appeaser of Muslims”.

 

Students also read that Gandhi was “particularly disliked by those who wanted India to become a country for the Hindus, just as Pakistan was for Muslims”. And that his “steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate Gandhiji”.

 

But, as students returned to school for the new academic year that began in April, these passages, which students had studied for more than 15 years, were missing from their textbooks.

 

The Indian Express newspaper reported these deletions on Wednesday, prompting an outcry from academics as well as opposition politicians, who accused the government of “whitewashing” the curriculum.

 

The revision was carried out by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organisation that develops textbooks used widely in India.

 

Among the deleted sections is one that mentions how organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were “banned for some time” following the assassination as part of a government crackdown on organisations “that were spreading communal hatred”.

 

RSS is a right-wing Hindu socio-political organisation that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member, shares umbilical links with.

 

These changes covering up the controversial track record of Hindu right-wing forces in India are raising troubling questions for the BJP-led government, which has seen some of its leaders even praise Godse.

 

Another deletion is a reference in Grade 11 NCERT textbooks to the 2002 Gujarat riots, talking about how class, religion and ethnicities often lead to segregation of residential areas and cites. The riots, in which over 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed, occurred when Mr Modi was chief minister of the state.

 

In June 2022, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling clearing him of complicity in the riots.

 

These surreptitious changes are on top of those announced in June 2022 as part of a textbook “rationalisation” exercise for grades six to 12 to reduce the academic load and help students catch up following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Textbooks printed with the fresh content became available recently, ahead of the 2023-24 academic year.

 

These changes also inflict cuts to references involving Hinduism’s caste system, protests that coalesced into social movements, and even India’s Muslim rulers, with the removal of a chapter dedicated to the Mughal Empire that controlled much of the subcontinent between the 16th and 19th centuries.

 

The Mughal emperors are reviled by the Hindu right wing, for reasons that include the destruction of temples during their reign.

 

The deleted chapter, however, also detailed the Mughals’ “conscious policy” to accommodate different traditions they encountered in the subcontinent, including how grants were issued for the repair of temples destroyed during wars.

 

BJP leader Kapil Mishra described the changes as “a great decision to remove false history of Mughals”. “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,” he added.

 

These changes – the third since the BJP was elected to power in 2014 – are part of a wider BJP campaign that has targeted the Mughals. In January, the iconic Mughal Gardens at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi was rechristened Amrit Udyan (The Garden of the Holy Nectar). The busy Mughalsarai railway station in Uttar Pradesh was also renamed Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction in June 2018, after the leader of political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which was also the BJP’s forerunner.

 

NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani told The Telegraph newspaper that the content had been deleted “professionally” by subject experts and “uniformly without any selective approach”.

 

The BJP’s national spokesman Gopal Krishna Agarwal also told Reuters that this was not an attempt to erase history, but to counter biases.

 

Dr Aditya Mukherjee, a retired professor of contemporary Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the Hindu right wing’s persistent attempts to rewrite textbooks began as early as in 1977 with the election of the Janata Party, which was formed through the merger of a number of entities, including the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the RSS’ political arm.

 

“This is, therefore, clearly an agenda of the RSS and BJP, and not historians getting together and saying we need to make a change,” he said, referring to the latest changes.

 

“This kind of rubbish being passed off as history is really a shame. I mean, it may look good in North Korea, but I cannot even believe we will promote this kind of history in our country.

 

“Weaponising history in this manner to erase and demonise a particular community is also politically a very dangerous thing to do in a multi-religious country like ours. You’re playing with fire when you do things like these.”

 

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