It was reported on July 17 that the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s newly published text books for class 8 portray various Mughal emperors as brutal and intolerant. It describes that the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals followed the policies of religious intolerance. It also adds questionable notes at the end. According to NCERT such new descriptions of Mughal are based on the New Education Policy 2000 and NCF-SE 2023.While Babur is depicted as “brutal and ruthless conqueror, slaughtering entire populations of cities”, Akbar’s rule is characterised as “blend of brutality and tolerance”, and Aurangzeb as one who destroyed temples and gurdwaras. Very preposterously the NCERT justifies the description of Mughal brutality and other distorted versions by explaining it in a “Note on Some Darker Periods in History”.Gandhi’s apprehensions Such rewriting of history and the rationale given for it is a gross distortion that reflects the accentuation of communal tensions during the Narendra Modi regime. Earlier, the NCERT had removed Mughal era from history books and now it presents the Mughal era and other periods of Indian history ruled by some Muslim rulers as brutal and heinous.Earlier, in April 2023, I had written on how Gandhi’s prediction that communal polarisation would erase Mughal rule from history had come true. In fact in his article ‘Of New Universities,’ authored on October 25, 1947, and published in Harijan on November 2 of that year, Gandhi with rare farsightedness wrote that accentuation of Hindu-Muslim discord would poison our education and history and would lead to erasure of the Mughal period from the history texts. The entire text of Gandhi’s article is available on pages 402-405 of volume 89 of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.Those apprehensions of Gandhi are being fructified by NCERT because of the kind of narratives spun by the Modi regime, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindutva leaders. Their purpose is to deepen discord among people on the basis of faith.Of Syama Prasad MookerjeeApart from making Gandhi’s fears a reality, the NCERT, by making a sweeping projection of Mughal rulers as barbaric and intolerant are negating the vision of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Jan Sangh (the current BJP) and a revered figure for BJP and Hindutva forces. He was certainly a Hindutva ideologue. But on December 17, 1946 in the Constituent Assembly, while talking about the brutal suppression of the 1942 Quit India movement, Mookerjee described Mughals as great and not barbaric. On that day, while participating in the discussion on the Objectives Resolution moved by Jawaharlal Nehru on December 13, 1946, Mookerjee mentioned that several British leaders made utterly false statements about India and its Constituent Assembly and specially referred to the charge of Lord Simon that the Constituent Assembly of India consisted of only caste Hindus. Expressing his outrage Mookerjee urged that the Assembly should, in no uncertain terms, tell the Britishers: “You started your career in this country as traders. You came here as supplicants before the Great Mughal. You wanted to exploit the wealth of this country. Luck was in your favour. By forgery, fraud and force, you succeeded in establishing-these are all matters of history-your Government in this country, but not with the willing co-operation of the people of this land. You introduced separate electorates, you introduced religion into Indian politics. That was not done by Indians. You did it, only to perpetuate your rule in this country”.Mookerjee in the Constituent Assembly thus said that Britishers came “as supplicants before the Great Mughal” and it was not Indians who introduced religion to politics but Britishers. This contrasts to the depiction of Mughals in the NCERT textbooks as barbaric and intolerant.Of Swami Vivekananda The distorted contents in those books of the NCERT are also completely contrary to the understanding and vision of Swami Vivekananda, a celebrated and cerebral Hindu monk, who mesmerised the Americans and the western world in 1893 and in subsequent periods till his passing away in 1902. Vivekananda’s brilliant exposition of Vedanta and spirituality are well known. In his book Lectures from Colombo to America, he referred to the varieties and complexities of India and how it has been shaped by contributions of several nationalities. He said:“Here have been the Aryan, the Dravidian, the Tartar, the Turk, the Mogul, the European all the nations of the world, as it were, pouring their blood into this land”. If Mughals were pouring their blood to this nation, as stated by Swami Vivekananda, how is it that the NCERT book now projects them as brutal? While he flagged some shortcomings of several rulers including that of Aurangzeb, nowhere did he say that Mughals were barbaric.In volume five of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda is his article ‘East and West’. In page 459 he referred to the firmly based and tremendously strong Mughal empire and explained that they left the religion of Hindus largely untouched. “In fact,” he asserted, “…Hindus were the real prop of the Mogul Empire.” But he remarked like many historians that “…as soon as the ill-fated Aurangzeb again touched that point (Hindu religion), the vast Mogul Empire vanished in an instant like a dream”. Jawaharlal Nehru has made similar remarks on Aurangzeb in his book Discovery of India.Why can’t the NCERT books capture the nuanced vision of Swami Vivekananda, who is an icon for Hindutva forces including Prime Minister Modi?Refusal to impose ShariaR. Prasanna, in an illuminating article, ‘A Chartered Flight to Liberty,’ in June 2015, on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta wrote that while Europe was ridden with conflict of laws at a key time, India was spared of it. He then wrote with documentary evidence that India had visionary sultans like Iltutmish who “severed his connections with the caliphate and refused to impose Sharia on his Hindu subjects.”Prasanna also wrote in his article that even Mohammad Ghori introduced a coin one side of which was the image of the Hindu deity, Lakshmi.These examples show how the NCERT books have been rash in describing Mughals. Such distortions must be removed to teach children a history free from bias.S.N. Sahu served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India K.R. Narayanan.