On March 22, 2026, a committee in the Department of Political Science at the University of Jammu recommended removing topics related to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal from the MA Political Science curriculum. The proposal concerns the module on “Minorities and the Nation” in both the one-year and two-year postgraduate programmes. It came after student protests and has been sent to the Board of Studies for final consideration. While presented as an internal academic exercise, the move raises broader questions about how universities shape intellectual engagement in a plural society. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) was a pioneering reformer who responded creatively to the challenges of colonial modernity. After the upheaval of 1857, he founded the Aligarh Movement and established the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, which later evolved into Aligarh Muslim University. Through his Scientific Society, he promoted the translation of Western scientific texts into Urdu and advocated rational inquiry and modern education. His vision was integrative rather than separatist. He encouraged Muslims to engage with contemporary knowledge while preserving cultural and religious identity, thereby building institutional foundations for community empowerment and wider dialogue.Also read: How Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s Contributions Shaped 19th-Century LegislationAllama Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) added rich philosophical and poetic dimensions. His early work, including the widely remembered Tarana-e-Hind, celebrated India’s composite cultural heritage. In later writings such as Asrar-e-Khudi (Secrets of the Self), he developed the concept of Khudi – self-realisation and inner strengthening – drawing on Islamic mystical traditions while addressing universal ethical concerns. Iqbal’s thought encouraged reflection on personal awakening, identity, and the tensions between cultural specificity and broader humanism.Two leading historians offer particularly relevant perspectives on this development: Romila Thapar on the politics of historical memory and the continuity of the past, and Irfan Habib on the risks of distorting historical understanding through curricular changes. Their insights highlight a shared concern. When key thinkers are removed from postgraduate reading lists, the long-term cost is not merely lighter syllabi but a reduced capacity for nuanced, evidence-based critical thinking among future citizens and scholars.Romila Thapar: History as a continuous processThapar, one of India’s most respected historians and a global authority on ancient Indian history and historiography, has long emphasised that societies construct historical narratives by selecting from multiple available pasts. As she has observed, “A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority.”In recent public interventions, Thapar has sharply critiqued large-scale deletions from school textbooks. She has described the removal of entire periods or dynasties as “nonsense,” arguing that “history is a continuous process and cannot be taught in fragments.” Breaking this continuity, she warns, renders the subject meaningless and leaves students ignorant of significant parts of their own past. Such exercises, she suggests, amount not to rationalisation of academic load but to a form of “rationing of knowledge” that serves narrower purposes.This framework applies directly to the Jammu University recommendation. The module on “Minorities and the Nation” was designed to help postgraduate students examine how diverse intellectual currents contributed to modern ideas of nationhood, identity, and reform under colonial rule. Removing specific thinkers disrupts that examination.For Thapar, serious engagement with such figures allows students to understand how concepts of nationhood were debated, contested, and adapted over time, rather than presented as fixed or inevitable. Excising them from a module focused on minority perspectives risks replacing rigorous, evidence-based analysis with a more streamlined narrative. This narrowing limits students’ ability to interrogate causal connections, appreciate intellectual nuance, and develop independent judgment – capacities that lie at the heart of university education.Irfan Habib: The dangers of false historyHabib, a distinguished historian of medieval India, agrarian systems, and economic history, has consistently warned against attempts to distort historical understanding through education. He has described certain curricular revisions as amounting to “fictionalisation” rather than mere ideological adjustment. “Rewriting history is not saffronisation but fictionalisation,” he has said, explaining that building “false history and false claims for the nation” does not strengthen the country but ridicules it.Habib has further characterised the effect of such distortions in stark terms: “False history for a nation is like a false memory for an individual – it is a disease for the country.” He has called defective or heavily edited syllabi “very defective and dangerous” because they promote “a totally false history of ours,” urging instead that education defend accurate, evidence-based accounts against efforts that obscure real historical processes.In the context of the Jammu recommendation, Habib’s perspective underscores the scholarly value of studying Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal when examining minority reform movements within the broader freedom struggle. Sir Syed’s initiatives went beyond rhetoric. The All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference he helped establish in 1886 created platforms for discussing practical self-empowerment through science, rationality, and constructive engagement across communities. His efforts countered colonial marginalisation while fostering tools for modernisation and dialogue.Iqbal complemented this with deeper philosophical reflection. His poetry and prose often wove personal awakening with humanistic ideals, encouraging a synthesis that looked beyond rigid boundaries. Removing these voices from a dedicated module on minorities and the nation, Habib would likely view as intellectual impoverishment. Students would have fewer opportunities to examine the actual historical processes of identity formation, reform, negotiation, and intellectual exchange that shaped modern South Asia.When education tilts toward selective omission or conformity, Habib has implied through his work and statements, it risks leaving learners with incomplete or polarised maps of the past. Universities, in his estimation, have a responsibility to preserve complexity so that scholarship can inform public understanding rather than distort it. Defending proper history, he has argued, must remain part of our broader educational effort.Shared academic costs and democratic implicationsTaken together, the perspectives of Thapar and Irfan Habib point to consistent long-term consequences. Postgraduate students in political science who encounter a narrower set of thinkers may develop a less comprehensive understanding of how minority reform movements and modernist philosophies influenced debates on nationhood, secularism, identity, and pluralism in South Asia. Sir Syed’s institutional legacy and Iqbal’s humanistic contributions once provided valuable windows into themes of resilience, adaptation, synthesis, and awakening – resources that remain relevant for informed citizenship in a diverse democracy.This episode is not without precedent. Earlier controversies over NCERT textbooks in the 1970s and 1980s, along with subsequent revisions that adjusted content on medieval or social history, followed similar patterns. Changes were often justified on administrative or practical grounds. Historians have repeatedly noted, however, that their cumulative effect can be a diminished capacity for nuance, independent analysis, and engagement with historical complexity.In India’s democracy, universities play a vital role in preparing citizens to navigate difference, evaluate evidence, and confront complexity with intellectual rigour. While syllabus adjustments may bring short-term administrative convenience, sustained narrowing of intellectual exposure can undermine the deeper purpose of higher education: cultivating minds capable of reflective and critical thought.The recommendation at the University of Jammu remains under deliberation by the Board of Studies. Whatever the final decision, the discussion itself highlights an important principle. A confident academic culture does not shy away from its multifaceted intellectual heritage. It equips students to examine that heritage honestly, with evidence and openness. Doing so not only strengthens scholarship but also supports the democratic resilience that depends on an informed and thoughtful citizenry.For universities to fulfill their role effectively, they must prioritise depth and breadth in political thought. Removing influential voices from modules designed to explore minority perspectives does little to lighten genuine academic burden. Instead, it risks producing graduates with thinner analytical tools – a quiet but significant cost for both academia and the larger society it serves. Harjeet Singh is an assistant professor (History), Akal University, Punjab. He writes on Sikh Empire, Historiography, Social, Philosophical and Cultural Issues. He can be reached at aishxing@gmail.com. Singh hails from J&K.