A textbook case of ideological brainwashing

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has taken its syllabus censorship further and introduced more falsehoods, misrepresentations and evasions in textbooks. It had started the process of rewriting history, reinventing historical personages, and reinterpreting society ever since the BJP came to power.

The latest erasures and revisions are as striking as they are lopsided. All mention of the Gujarat riots and the violence after the Babri Masjid demolition have been omitted from the Class 12 political science textbook on the ground that an “expert committee felt that mentioning a few riots selectively is not good”. NCERT Chairman Dinesh Saklani thinks that students should not be taught about riots because “we want to create positive citizens, not violent and depressed individuals”. Shall we forget the Partition riots, too, then, and shall we keep all strife and unrest in history out of textbooks in the interest of creating ‘positive’ citizens out of students? 

The idea is to whitewash history and to present a picture of India and the world, past and present, as the BJP wishes to look at them, and not as they actually happened. The book does not mention the Babri Masjid by name, but calls it a “three-domed structure”. The section on the rath yatra, the role of kar sevaks in demolishing the Babri Masjid, and the communal violence that followed are not mentioned. References to the dismissal of BJP governments after the demolition and the party’s “regret over the happenings in Ayodhya” have been removed.

Textbooks have been revised in the past in various other ways, too. Ideas like the Aryan migration and historical events like the Islamic rule, including the centuries-long Mughal period, and Gandhi’s assassination have been presented to suit the BJP’s narrative. All the Mughals were oppressors and all Hindu kings were benign. Ancient India was golden and led the world in all fields. It is a distorted and unreal picture of India that is presented to the children.

This happens when history is made to serve today’s politics and education is used as a tool to indoctrinate young minds. The New Education Policy 2020 aims to “enhance critical thinking among students” and the NCERT is expected to be an autonomous body, not an ideological affiliate of the BJP. A nation is its history, including past and contemporary history, and the values that guided it in the past and will guide it in the future. If a false idea of the nation is instilled in the minds of students, they will construct their own self-images accordingly and develop a false and unreal worldview around it. Education should promote them to question and to argue. It should not hide, distort and falsify history and it should not impose answers and conclusions on them.