Key Points
Much as we would like to believe in NCERTs institutional integrity, successive statements by several commentators made no mention of the Covid-19-burden-induced deletions, and instead defended the deletions on the grounds that the textbooks were written by so-called Leftist historians who love the Mughals (read Muslims) and are not proud of everything Hindu..
But how do the deletions a chapter on the Mughals from part-II of the history textbook for Class 12, and topics such as the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Emergency, some Dalit writers and the Naxalite movement from textbooks of classes 6 to 12 remedy that?.
Scholar Ganesh Devy pointed out in a recent interview that efforts were on to depict six golden eras of the Indian past, drawn from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkars book, Six Golden Pages in the History of Bharat; in that text, the medieval period, which was dominated by Islamic art, Islamic empires and Islamic advancement, is seen as a dark era..
It is also a well-known fact that NCERT history books were the subject of controversy in the past as well, first in 1977-79 during the Janata Dal government, and then in 1999-2004, when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was in power..
During the NDA regime, the first generation of history textbooks written by famous (now reviled by some) historians, such as Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, RS Sharma, Satish Chandra, and Arjun Dev were first subjected to deletions and then successfully removed..
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