Deleting content from school textbooks is problematic
Rewriting history as it sees it has always been part of the BJP’s national agenda. If during Vajpayee’s rule at the Centre it was done in a hurry, with Murli Manohar Joshi becoming the mascot of saffronisation, the party’s approach was subtler ever since it captured power in 2014.
While nothing much happened in the first five years, the framing of the new National Education Policy (NEP) set the tone for restructuring education in a big way in 2020. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the widespread fretting over the curriculum volume and exam stress of students who lost school time due to the pandemic created the ideal platform for trimming textbooks.
The government set up expert committees recommending rationalising content—from deleting sentences to purging paragraphs and even dropping chapters to reduce overlapping and/or irrelevant content in all textbooks for classes VI to XII. The NCERT released a comprehensive list of approved rationalisations last year. The current controversy concerns a few fresh deletions in the latest textbooks that did not figure on that list, which the board claimed was due to oversight.
To be fair, some of the editing does make sense, like taking the caste reference out on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse in the Class XII political science textbook. But snipping sentences on, say, Bapu’s attempt at Hindu-Muslim unity being frowned upon by radicals gives room to the interpretation of varnishing history. Messing with the Mahatma invariably goes politically south.
The deletion of a sentence on the RSS being banned for some time after the assassination was only to be expected, given how conscious the Sangh is about image management. The axing of one of three chapters on Mughal history was explained as rationalisation. And a paragraph from the Class XI Sociology textbook on the 2002 Godhra riots that talks about the ghettoisation of Muslims was purged for obvious reasons.
The logic that history is written by the victor and the exercise is not entirely done objectively is well understood. But being frugal with facts to suit a narrative is also not done. Facts don’t change, the spin does. The controversy now concerns editing, not spinning, as the NCERT is transitioning.
Completely new books are being lined up from next year in line with the NEP if the opposition fails to get its act together and lets the BJP enjoy its third successive shot at power. That will be a totally different ball game.