An entire generation of students across India studying in high schools and junior colleges is learning history with certain incidents, battles, kingdoms, even personalities erased from their textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). In its latest set of deletions and purges, the body has removed references to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in a textbook for Class 11, according to news reports. In the chapter titled ‘Constitution – Why and How’ a line has been tweaked so that Azad’s name stands deleted from the sentences about the Constituent Assembly committee meetings; other names such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel, BR Ambedkar have been left intact.
As in previous instances of selective deletions in recent months, the NCERT may well pretend that it was an omission or an error, in which case there appears to be less than scholarly mettle in India’s premier educational advisory body. This hardly bodes well for the well-rounded education of the nation’s young. However, it is difficult now to accept that the NCERT is merely committing errors with what has been deleted from textbooks because there is a clear pattern to them: the erasure of Muslims and Mughals. The autonomous body, set up in 1961 to advise and assist the central and state government on school education and its improvement, is clearly carrying out the present central government’s political agenda.
Education is usually a casualty when governments strongly driven by ideology take charge, be they right-wing or left-wing. Of all subjects taught in schools and junior colleges, History is often their first target because, as the saying goes, to control the present it is necessary to control the past. History has always been a contested subject in educational institutions and India’s right-wing — mainly Hindutva organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — has long protested that the post-independence history curriculum carried a left-wing bias or lens.
Accordingly, it should not come as a surprise that history books and curriculums have systematically sought to erase and purge all that does not fit into the Hindutva worldview. The idea is to propagate the myth of ‘benevolent Hindus’ and ‘barbaric Muslims’ when it comes to kings and battles, but the erasure cannot stop there. For an organisation that did not fully participate in or commit to India’s freedom movement, and has been long identified with Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, tweaking this part of the history is important too. How can it allow Maulana Azad, who in the face of bitter and undeniable Hindu-Muslim fissures, stood out as a symbol of unity and tolerance, walked in step with Gandhi and gave his all to the freedom movement frequently forming the bridge for communal amity?
A scholar, poet, and committed Congressman, he was the president of the party when the Quit India movement was launched. He frequently sparred with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and vowed his allegiance to India with words such as “I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure is incomplete”. Azad’s life and work does not neatly fit into the ‘barbaric Muslim’ or ‘bad Muslim’ myth that the RSS-BJP propagates and exploits; so he had to be erased. However, erasing Azad out of the Constituent Assembly committee meetings cannot wipe out his sterling contribution to shaping the nation’s most significant document. Nor can it diminish his leadership to establish independent India’s education template; it is a bitter irony that his name is quietly removed from textbooks today.
The first attempt to change history textbooks and curriculum goes back to the Vajpayee era when Murli Manohar Joshi, as India’s Human Resources Development minister, engineered selective changes in textbooks in ways that he was accused of saffronising the subject for school students. The Narendra Modi government has gone full throttle on this. The purpose is clear: to target the most impressionable young Indian with the RSS-BJP agenda at the school level itself. Combined with relentless propaganda and half-truths that abound in the public domain and ecosystems now, the young cannot be faulted for imbibing the simplistic idea – actually, a myth – that all Hindus were good and all Muslims bad. Skewed history makes for easier politics, evidently. But in selectively erasing what does not fit into its worldview, the Modi government is doing irreparable harm to education and to India’s future generations.
