The new history and political science textbooks prescribed by the NCERT for senior and senior secondary classes will present a new history, and in some cases even no history. The changes have been made to suit politics rather than pedagogical needs and amount to rewriting and distorting history. Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to foster Hindu-Muslim unity during the months before and after Partition, his assassination and the subsequent ban on the RSS have all been presented in a new narrative after deletion of sentences about the activities of Hindu extremists.
References to the 2002 Gujarat riots and paragraphs about how class, religion and ethnicities lead to segregation of people and to riots have been removed. The Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period of our history have been removed and students will grow up with no idea of what happened in the country during many centuries of its existence.
NCERT made the changes in the name of rationalisation of study material. Rationalisation should not mean changing history in accordance with the political ideology of the ruling party. The Hindu right wing has always complained that India’s history-writing has been dominated by left wing writers and it is now its mission to right the wrongs and present the “true” history of the country. But all that “true” history amounts to is the whitewashing of events in history that are inconvenient to the ruling party and deleting portions of it that it does not like.
It is a comprehensive project that involves changing names, exiling personalities, inventing new ones and events, deleting entire periods and rewriting and reinterpreting the entire past. The result is false history, a history that is more what the ruling powers want it to have been than what it actually was. Indians have long been considered to lack a sense of history. The impression is being ‘corrected’ now with the invention of a false history.
The contentious changes were made in a surreptitious manner and that has made their motivated nature clear. Some of these alterations did not figure in the list of proposed changes published last June. NCERT Director D P Saklani has said that it was an oversight. Along with rationalisation, other explanations like “reducing the burden on students” have also been advanced. He has also said that the changes were made on the basis of the views of experts, but it is not known who the experts are. Contents of syllabi need to be periodically updated on the basis of new research and to correct biases and prejudices. New perspectives and methodologies are also needed. But the changes made by NCERT make history slave to politics and are meant to ideologically indoctrinate students.