How and why BJP is Saffronizing and politicizing the education system?
Educational bodies across India are making a conscious effort to ensure that future generations of the country don’t get to learn the significant part of its history: The 300-year presence of Mughals in the Indian subcontinent. An effort to play down Muslim achievements who dominated the region for centuries, replacing them with stories that lack truth.
In the past, BJP and other pro-Hindutva parties had complained that historians have given undue importance to Mughal rule at the expense of the ancient Hindu civilizations. So, shortly after Narendra Modi takes up the PM office in 2014, Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, an organization affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), formed an advisory committee Bharatiya Shiksha Niti Aayog to suggest corrective steps to make education system “Bharat-centric”.
In July 2017 Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, sent a list of recommendations to the National Council for Education and Research Training (NCERT), to cleanse the Hindi textbooks. The recommendation entails the removal of Arabic, English, and Urdu words, from textbooks and all unnecessary Mughals history along with references to caste-based discrimination, riots; material that is intolerable to RSS and BJP. Talking to Indian Express regarding the recommendations, Atul Kothari, Secretary of the Nyas stated that:
“Several things (in these books) are baseless, biased. There is an attempt to insult members of a community. There is also appeasement… how can you inspire children by teaching them about riots? The history of valor, of great personalities like Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, Vivekananda, and Subhas Chandra Bose finds no place.”
In August 2017, the Maharashtra education board revised history textbooks for classes 7 and 9, removing almost all traces of the Mughal era and replacing them with the Maratha empire founded by Shivaji. The revision of the syllabus was discussed at a meeting held by the Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini (a research organization linked to BJP and RSS ) with Vinod Tawde, the education minister of Maharashtra.
Kishore Darak, a Pune-based independent researcher in curriculum and textbooks, called the cover “problematic” as it:
“Displays saffron flags all over the map of the country. Creating an image that the “Hindu samrajya existed in India during that period. This is factually incorrect and reeks of a political agenda.”
Not just the cover but the content in the book itself seems peculiar as the 69-page book is revolving only around the Maratha Empire reducing the Mughal rule to a few lines and that too is because of the Mughal-Maratha wars. Furthermore, to iconize Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education (RBSE) released textbooks for Class 10, describing him as a great revolutionary and a great patriot leaving little space for Gandhi, the founder of India.
Reuters in early 2018 while investigating the matter of course revision, interviewed the members of a newly appointed committee of scholars including a geologist, archaeologist, scholars of the ancient Sanskrit language, and two bureaucrats. All were assigned a single task to rewrite Indian history by using evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA of human remains establishing that Indian civilization is much older than is widely known. Trying to Prove that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact, not a myth, and today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants thousands of years ago.
“I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.”
The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, told Reuters
Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.
Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Human Resource Development also proudly gave credit to the BJP government to address this matter on an alarming basis he stated:
“Our government is the first government to have the courage to even question the existing version of history that is being taught in schools and colleges.”
This revision of education is not limited to classrooms but is openly and proudly carried out in public. After the 2019 Supreme Court verdict on the Ayodhya land dispute, Sri Rama Vidyakendra High School in Dakshina Kannada district’s Kalladkaa in its annual festival re-enacted the event of the demolition of Babri Masjid using schoolchildren.
The video shows schoolchildren gathered on the ground, all dressed in white and saffron standing alongside a huge poster of the Babri Masjid as ‘Sri Ram, Jai Ram’ plays in the background. On the narrator’s cue, children rush toward the poster and started tearing it with their bare hands after which they were seen jumping in excitement.
Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat, president of the trust that operates the school and RSS’s one of the most powerful leaders in the south, said that he is “proud of them (students)”. He further stated:
“It was a historic event that has been recorded in history. What is wrong is re-enacting it? Children and our future generations should know what happened on that day.We all know there was a temple there and so we thought we should put this up for all to see and understand what happened.How can you say that showing what happened on 6 December (1992) is wrong?”
Continuing on the Hindutva's agenda in midyear 2022 an updated table of content was uploaded on the NCERT website which was removed later for unknown reasons, upon matching this updated content with the old version, The Indian Express found that most of the changes in this version were related to Muslim rulers and their achievements along with rising and expansion of Islam in the region. Whole chapters have been removed and the content related to Muslims that is left is minimized to the level of no use.
Speaking about these changes NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani stated:
“Firstly, this is not a selective exercise. We have tried to reduce the curriculum load for students across all subjects and not just social science. We have also done the same for maths and science. Apart, this exercise was done very professionally with the help of external experts. NCERT doesn’t interfere with what the experts have to say. They felt some of the content could be deleted because it is covered elsewhere in other textbooks.”
However, the so-called experts that have been given the task of restructuring the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for schools are mostly people with strong links with RRS.
“Since learning lessons from history is a key component of Hindu nationalism, influencing how it’s taught is a key component of their ideology.”
Vinay Sitapati, a political scientist at Ashoka University
Early this year the Indian state of Karnataka too decided to modify textbook contents, intended to end the glorification of Muslim rulers. Space given to kings like Tippu, Babar, and Tughlaq will be reduced during textbook revision. Only a concise chapter on the Mughals will be part of the textbook and elaborated paragraphs on the Mughal Empire will also be deleted.
“Textbooks are seen sometimes as a political weapon rather than as a pedagogical tool. Jeopardizes children’s right to discover knowledge for themselves.”
Pankaj Pushkar (Opposition-aligned member of the Delhi legislature)
The Congress lashed out at the BJP calling it the “saffronisation” of history books (The color saffron is often associated with Hindutva).
“Current history books do not support their narrative. They have never been part of any historical struggle or independence struggle. They are trying to retrofit their icons into our history books.”
In response to a question in parliament on the “rationalization” exercise in NCERT textbooks, India’s junior Minister for Education Annapurna Devi justifies the deletion of topics from the textbooks, said:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic situation, students across the stages of school education have struggled a lot to continue their learning through online and other modes. Also, concerns related to curriculum load including the content load spread over syllabi and textbooks have been raised from different corners.”
History taught in the schools is serving the dual function of transmitting historical knowledge and creating a shared desired national identity, nurturing a toxic mindset. Educational institutes are becoming the ideal medium for advancing Hindutva’s political agenda and influencing the minds of the next generation of learners and voters by injecting racial hatred directly into educational foundations.
