“History is written by the victors,” said Winston Churchill once. The statement stands true in the current Indian politically coloured climate. Back in 2017, the Maharashtra State Education Board had removed chapters about Muslim rulers in India and the Mughals from its history textbooks for Class VII and IX. In the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ruled state, the textbooks turned their focus on the Maratha warrior Shivaji, Bofors scam and the Emergency of 1975-1977 that are associated with Congress-led administrations.
The syllabus that was reportedly revised after a meeting at Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, an RSS-endorsed think-tank led by Maharashtra education minister Vinod Tawde, also removed mentions of Razia Sultana (the first woman to rule Delhi), Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, Sher Shah Suri, among others. The move had caused the Devendra Fadnavis-led government to draw flak back then.
Six years on, history-deletion has repeated itself. The National Council of Educational Research (NCERT) has edited several chapters from class 12 textbooks as a part of the ‘syllabus rationalisation’ exercise. The new and revised versions of the textbooks will be adopted by the UP-state board and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in Uttar Pradesh from this academic year. NCERT has cited “overlap, irrelevance, and ease of topic” as the reasons behind the revision.
From the textbook ‘Themes of Indian History: Part II’, the erased portions are related to ‘Kings and Chronicles; the Mughal Courts (C. 16th and 17th centuries)’. In the political science textbook, parts of Gujarat Riots and the National Human Rights Commission report on it have been deleted from the 'Recent Developments in Indian Politics' chapter. Similarly, chapters like ‘US hegemony in world politics’ and ‘The Cold War Era’ have also been completely dropped from the Class 12 civics textbook. The other removals from the Class 12 textbook ‘Politics in India Since Independence’ include ‘Rise of popular movements’ and ‘Era of one-party dominance.’
Of the deleted lines, some prominent ones include, “Gandhiji’s actions were however not liked by all. Extremists in both the communities blamed him for their conditions. Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists…RSS was banned for some time.”
Listing the changes, the NCERT in a note had said, "The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class, similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.”
BJP leader Kapil Mishra called the move a “great decision”. He wrote on Twitter, “It is a great decision to remove the false history of the Mughals from NCERT textbooks.” He further said, “Thieves, pickpockets and two-penny road raiders were called the Mughal Sultanate and the emperor of India. Akbar, Babar, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb do not deserve a place in history textbooks but in the dustbin.”
The NCERT move drew criticism as academicians and the opposition believed this would deprive students of critical portions of Indian history.
Calling the debate unnecessary, NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said, “We are working as per National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and it speaks of reducing content load. We are implementing it. National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for school education is being formed; it will be finalised soon. Textbooks will be printed in 2024 as per NEP. We have not dropped anything right now.” However, the UP state board government schools will adopt the curriculum starting this academic year.
Other exclusions include the cold war era, the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the reproduction of organisms. There have also been major changes in the textbooks of Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Biology.
The changes for classes 6-12 were announced last year by the CBSE in order to align the ‘rationalisation’ with the recommendations of the NCERT according to the NEP 2020 that ought to outline the vision of new education system of India. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi had criticised the move in 2022 and called CBSE ‘Central Board of Suppressing Education’ on Twitter.
The history of errors
This is not the first time that political parties have been accused of altering history for their own agendas. In 2019, Rajasthan board of secondary education (RBSE) textbooks were altered once again to undo the changes introduced by the Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government in 2017 that allegedly glorified the government and asserted its Hindu ideology. Under the Congress government in 2019, the textbooks were revised again as parts on demonetisation, Vinayak Savarkar, the battle of Haldighati, Article 370, religious conversions and so on, were removed.
