NCERT Paints Textbooks Saffron Yet Again

AISA condemns all attempts to re-write history by the Sangh Parivar

In another fresh attempt to saffronise the history pedagogy, the RSS has removed chapters on Mughals, Gandhi, secularism and that the RSS was banned! In November 2022, in a meeting in Assam, Home Minister Amit Shah gave a clarion call: “Who can stop us now from rewriting our history with pride? We will have to amend this and put our history in front of the world with pride.” It is in furtherance of this, that textbooks are being painted saffron with impunity.

What are the changes in the updated curriculum?

1. References to Mahatma Gandhi has been removed from a sub-topic called ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s sacrifice’, and the deleted paragraphs included, “His (Gandhi’s) steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate Gandhiji.”
2. References to RSS being banned after the assassination of Gandhi has been removed.
3. Nathuram Godse’s role in Gandhi’s assassination has been toned down in Class 12 history textbook titled ‘Themes in Indian History – 3’, as also the revision of a paragraph in the chapter ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement’, where the revised paragraph reads – “At his daily prayer meeting on the evening of 30th January, Gandhiji was shot dead by a young man. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was Nathuram Godse”. The earlier paragraph reas as follows: “Gandhiji was shot dead by a young man. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was a Brahmin from Pune named Nathuram Godse, the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper who had denounced Gandhiji as “an appeaser of Muslims.””
4. The NCERT has removed the chapter on ‘Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts (16th and 17th Centuries) from the history textbook’s ‘Themes of Indian History – Part II’.
5. The 11th Grade Textbook – ‘Themes in World History’ – has removed chapters like ‘Central Islamic Lands’, ‘Confrontation of Cultures’, and ‘Industrial Revolution’.
6. Firaq Gorakhpuri’s ghazal, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s song ‘Geet Gaane Do Mujhe, and Vishnu Khare’s Satya, have been removed from the Hindi textbooks of the UP Board and CBSE Class 12.
7. References to Dalit writer Om Prakash Valmiki from the social science textbook for Classes 7 and 8. In the Class 7 textbook titled “Our Pasts, 2,”, pages 48 and 49 were excluded. These pages mention “Mughal Emperors: Major Campaigns and Events.”.

It is evident that mainly three kinds of things have been deleted or diluted in this latest attention to safronisation. First, the mention of Muslims as an integral part of Indian history, second, the mention of popular socio-political mass movements in this country, and third, the atrocities committed by the RSS and their ideologues.

This is not the first time the BJP government has edited school textbooks to turn into Hindutva propaganda pamphlets. It has been working on brainwashing young minds ever since it came to power in 2014 where, references to the 2002 Gujarat riots was deleted; passages that dealt with Emergency’s draconian impact on people and institutions was dropped; chapters on protests and social movements, including those spearheaded by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Dalit Panthers, and Bharatiya Kisan Union were dropped from social science textbooks.

These changes are part of the BJP and RSS’s Hindutva plan to turn schools into factories where students won’t learn about the great legacies of social and political movements in India. This is a well-thought-out effort to snatch critical ability from the students. They wish to create a society that is communally divided, in which protests by citizens would be looked upon as social aberrations that need to be stopped.

The pattern of BJP erasing history was seen even during the Nazi Germany. In recent times, we have seen the BJP ban the BBC documentary on the Gujarat riots, and the rapists of Bilkis Banu was released from imprisonment. By trying to really hard to hide the role of Gujarat riots, is the BJP trying to hide its communal past or that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi?

It is important for us to know and understand what the BJP is hiding, erasing and why they have left certain portions untouched. The BJP is denying students their ‘right to know’ the real history of India, by deliberately deleting sequence of history and placing them as bits and pieces. This apparent disjuncture that they present as their version of history, exposes their hypocrisy.

Let us remain alert and resist the attempts to saffronize our diverse and secular Indian history!