New Delhi: Two leading English-language Indian newspapers – The Indian Express and The Times of India – have released editorials on Thursday (April 6) against the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s decision to drop key chapters on the Mughal empire, 2002 Gujarat riots and popular movements from Class 12 history textbooks.Other newspapers have so far not commented on the matter.The Indian Express focused its criticism around the idea that these deletions violate the spirit of the National Education Policy 2020 brought about by this very government. While history textbooks could do with some revisions, the editorial argues, to include “new thinking in the disciplines and also remove past blind spots and blinkers”, this is not what is being done. “Instead, they excise content related to chapters in history that have acquired political overtones under the current regime,” the newspaper notes.The fact that the changes were made without any real consultation with experts “is in marked contrast to the wide-ranging conversations undertaken by the same government before framing the National Education Policy 2020”, the editorial states. Instead of actively “making knowledge more attractive and accessible”, the “recent revisions…invite the charge that not only does the government wish to escape unpalatable facts, but it also wants to ensure that the students do not engage with social and political realities with a critical attitude”.The sections that have been deleted, The Indian Express says, point to the present regime’s anxieties:“The Gujarat riots-related erasures betray an anxiety to paper over the faultlines and institutional failures that continue to inflict pain and injustice on minorities. The removal of sentences on communalism and the RSS in the passage on Gandhi’s assassination indicates discomfiture with a turning point that continues to resonate in the India story. The deletion of the section on protest movements curtails in crucial ways the student’s view and imagination of citizenship in an argumentative democracy. The NEP had taken an ideologically-agnostic route to educational reform. The revisions in the social science textbooks do a disservice to the process it initiated, and threaten to undo one of the most progressive aspects of its approach.”In a scathing opening paragraph, The Times of India editorial notes that changes like this are no different from fake news percolating through ‘WhatsApp University’:“A grounding in objective facts, and before that the idea of shared objective facts, is the minimum bedrock for India’s progress. When textbook revisions take place in a way that suggests the facts of our dense history can be replaced by ‘new facts’ with every ‘new mood of the nation’, it entrenches the dangerous disease that goes by the name of ‘WhatsApp University’ instead of remedying it.”While it is normal for readings and interpretations of history to change with time, the editorial says, this is not the same as changing textbooks to reflect political leanings and differences. “Writing fresh narratives advances discourse. Simply deleting facts creates epistemic fractures that wound and ultimately disable conversation,” the newspaper states.
