What India’s right-wing gov’t is erasing from school textbooks
New Delhi, India – In 2018, a year before the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for a second term, a federal education minister said he believed Indians were descendants of Hindu “rishis” (sages) and not monkeys .
Satya Pal Singh, who was Minister of State for Human Resource Development, said Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong”.
“It has to change in the curriculum of schools and universities. Since man has been seen on earth, he has always been a human being. No one has seen an ape turn into a man,’ he said said.
By the 2021-2022 academic year, Darwin’s theory was quietly removed from the exam syllabus for Grade 9 and Grade 10 students. By 2022-2023, the topic of evolution had been completely removed from textbooks, teachers and education experts told Al Jazeera.
Now millions of students won’t know who Darwin was or what his theory says – unless they choose biology in grades 11 and 12.
The current government is attacking India’s ethos by poisoning the school curriculum.
The textbook changes were mandated by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a state-run body under the federal Department of Education.
NCERT textbooks are prescribed by more than 24,000 schools affiliated to India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), with tens of millions of students. CBSE also has about 240 member schools in 26 countries around the world.
Apart from that, at least 19 school boards in 14 Indian states are also using NCERT books in classrooms.
Muslim rulers erased from textbooks
Evolution is not the only glaring omission in the textbooks introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government that has ruled India since 2014.
Modi’s BJP and her ideological mentor, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have long campaigned for a revision of India’s textbooks that aligns with their political objective of replacing a constitutionally secular India with an ethnically Hindu state .
In pursuit of that goal, the BJP and other RSS-affiliated Hindu groups are campaigning to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims, who make up 14 percent of India’s population. Denying the historical fact that Muslims have ruled the Indian subcontinent for centuries — and demonizing those rulers by creating an alternate history of alleged Hindu persecution — are key elements of that campaign.
As part of the same campaign, references to the Mughals, who ruled the subcontinent between the 16th and 19th centuries, have also been removed from history books.
In a move that the NCERT claimed would “rationalize” textbooks and ease the workload for students affected by the pandemic, it removed several pages from the Class 7 history textbook that referenced the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate , such as the Mamluks, Tughlaqs, Khiljis and Lodis. It also removed a two-page table explaining in detail the milestones and achievements of the Mughal emperors.
Similarly, three pages were also removed that talked about the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate and a section explaining a “masjid” (mosque) in detail. A chapter called Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts which dealt with Mughal era manuscripts including Akbar Nama and Badshah Nama was removed from class 12 history textbooks.
Gandhi’s assassination, Gujarat riot details edited
The NCERT political science textbooks for grades 11 and 12 also removed a reference to a brief ban on the RSS after India’s iconic freedom fighter Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly called “Mahatma” (noble soul) and revered as the father of the nation, was assassinated in 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu hardliner with links to the RSS.
A sentence in the 2020-21 edition of the textbook – that Gandhi was “convinced that any attempt to make India a Hindu-only country would destroy India” – has also been removed. Another sentence deleted stated that Gandhi’s “steadfast pursuit of unity between Hindus and Muslims provoked the Hindu extremists to the point of making several attempts to assassinate Gandhi ‘ji’. [ji is an honorific in Hindi]”.
NCERT has also removed references to Muslim freedom fighter Maulana Abul Kalam Azad from its new class 11 textbook on political science entitled ‘Constitution – Why and How?’. Azad was India’s first education minister and a member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the country’s constitution after independence from British rule in 1947.
The earlier editions of the textbook contained the sentence: “The Constituent Assembly had eight major committees on various subjects. Usually Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first Prime Minister), Rajendra Prasad (India’s first President), Sardar Patel (Vallabhbhai Patel, First Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister), Maulana Azad or Ambedkar (Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Chairman of the Editorial Committee ) chair these committees.”
According to The Hindu newspaper, the second sentence in the revised textbook reads: “Usually Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel or BR Ambedkar chaired these committees.”
What BJP is doing is in line with other fascist rulers. We have seen in other countries how fascists have played with history to suit their ideology.
An investigation by The Indian Express newspaper, which first published the story, also found references to the 2002 riots in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, which killed nearly 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, including removed from all social media. Scientific Textbooks. India recently banned a BBC film that claimed Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, was directly responsible for the massacre.
The rewriting of history is in line with the BJP’s efforts to push through its Hindu nationalist propaganda, historian S. Irfan Habib told Al Jazeera. Habib called the textbook cuts a “major attack” and said, “It will affect the younger generation more than we can imagine.”
“This politicization of student textbooks is polarizing the country by presenting a skewed past that leaves students in the dark. It is a conscious act of the current government to pursue agendas to widen the religious divide in India by brainwashing young children. The current government is attacking India’s ethos by poisoning the school curriculum,” he added.
Darwin’s ‘purely imaginative’ theory
Until 2020-2021, textbooks for grade 9 and grade 10 contain chapters on evolution. The Class 9 chapter entitled Diversity of Organisms has been removed. In grade 10, the topic was taught as part of a chapter titled Heredity and Evolution. The revised textbook just says “heredity.”
Similarly, if the class 11 students chose history or biology as their major, they were taught about evolution. That is no longer an option.
“Evolution is a fundamental scientific concept. It helps students put concepts like reproduction, adaptation and survivability in a larger context to understand how life appeared on Earth and how it can change,” a teacher who was part of the new textbook committee told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
“It is also the chapter where students find a place to debate and challenge religious beliefs about the origin of life and scientific ideas. This chapter was a good way for a teacher to get students to distinguish between ‘faith as a way of knowing’ and ‘science as a way of knowing’.”
Can you imagine a student passing the 10th standard without knowing who Darwin was?
The teacher said cutting the chapter on evolution deprives students of the opportunity to dispel the misconceptions they learn from social media, mostly propagated by proponents of creation theory.
The removal of the chapter comes as Hindu groups push the mythological theory of Dashavatar who claims that humans evolved through incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu.
In 2019, when Nageswara Rao Gollapalli, Vice Chancellor of Andhra Pradesh University, addressed the 106th Indian Science Congress, claimed the Dashavatar gave a better theory of evolution than Darwin.
“The theory of Dashavatara is in the bloodstream of Hindus, so it should be taught in schools.” Surendra Jain, a retired university principal and senior official with the far-right Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, or VHP), told Al Jazeera.
“Darwin’s theory has narrowed the scope of religion. It’s pure fantasy. We found evidence of Dashavatara. It should be taught not only to Hindu students but to all students of India. The whole world will benefit from Dashavatar’s message. It’s not just mythology, it’s history,” he said.
Krishna Kumar, who once headed the NCERT, told Al Jazeera that the government’s erasure of scientific and historical facts was “appalling.”
“No one knows the full extent of textbook deletions. Can you imagine a student passing the 10th standard without knowing who Darwin was?” he asked.
“The school curriculum has been badly abused. It is such a shame that a whole class of students turns out to be completely ignorant of important concepts of science and history.”
“Long-Term Agenda of RSS”
Al Jazeera independently reviewed other changes made to the curriculum and found that some sections of the Diversity and Discrimination chapter that talked about discrimination against India’s Muslim minority had been removed from grade 6 textbooks.
The review also found that two chapters in the class 7 social science textbook had been removed. One of them, titled Understanding Advertising, talked about the role of big companies in the media. The other, Struggles for Equality, explained the various factors why people in India were treated unequally. It also included details of famous struggles for equality, such as the women’s empowerment movement.
“The attempts to politicize textbooks are nothing new, but a long-standing agenda of the RSS and the Hindu far right. However, the scale is alarming,” historian Habib told Al Jazeera.
“The BJP hides those facts from students showing age-old secularism in India and harmony between Hindus and Muslims to present a distorted Hindu nationalist perspective that [believes] India is only for Hindus.”
In a statement, NCERT Director DP Saklani said the council will not reinstate the deletions because they were made based on the recommendations of a committee of experts.
When asked for comment by Al Jazeera, he said: “As a director, I did my work on this case for three months last year and three days again this year, giving all information and clarification to everyone through electronic and print media. media.”
Prominent Muslim parliamentarian Asaduddin Owaisi accused the ruling BJP of “pushing its political agenda” by reviewing and rewriting textbooks.
“I’m afraid they’ll soon be teaching schools and justifying why Godse killed Gandhi. What BJP is doing is in line with other fascist rulers. We have seen in other countries how fascists have played with history to suit their ideology. The same is happening now in India, but the scale is extraordinary,” he told Al Jazeera.