India: Govt Under Fire For Editing School Textbooks

Facts

• Teachers, education experts, and opposition politicians have criticized India's ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for revising and rewriting school textbooks, claiming the move is intended to push its Hindu nationalist political agenda.¹
• This comes as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — a state-run body under the education ministry — eliminated several portions from the latest edition of the class 11 political science textbook, including mentions of India's first education minister and freedom fighter Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, to reportedly simplify the syllabus.²
• The references to the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir and its conditional accession under Article 370 of the Constitution were also dropped, with the revised textbook claiming Pakistan sent tribal infiltrators to capture Kashmir in 1947, following which the state acceded to India.³
• The NCERT has also erased topics related to the Mughal empire and the Cold War from class 12 textbooks as well as chapters on 'Democracy and Diversity,' 'Popular Struggles and Movements,' and 'Challenges of Democracy' from class 10 books.⁴
• The Council consulted 25 external experts, including five for history and two for political science, and 16 Central Board of Secondary Education teachers to rationalize the curriculum. Still, it allegedly fell short of notifying some controversial deletions.⁵
• The BJP is often accused of cementing the narrative that Hindus are under threat from Muslims — which account for about 14% of the country's population — to win the next general elections in 2024. Meanwhile, leaders of the BJP have defended the revisions, with PM Narendra Modi having said they're needed to rectify 'concocted narratives.'⁶

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²The financial express, ³Tribuneindia news service, ⁴Republic world, ⁵The siasat daily and ⁶Time.

Narratives

• Left narrative, as provided by The wire. While there's nothing wrong with rationalizing the syllabus, the NCERT has carried out an unjustified political intervention in textbooks. These changes, which failed to meet even the vague criteria established by the Council itself, aren't streamlining content but undermining students' ability to deal with sensitive topics.
• Right narrative, as provided by Opindia. Rumors and fabrications have fueled this debate to try to smear Modi's government. Unlike the left, which in the past changed textbooks to glorify Muslim rulers and conceal their atrocities against Hindus, the NCERT has only removed overlapping chapters to alleviate unnecessary pressure on students, which has been high since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Predictions