There has been a furore after news broke that NCERT had removed portions relating to the Mughals and much more from high school text books. The banning of the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination is gone, along with every trace of Maulana Azad in the political science books.
“NCERT has been making changes from time to time at various levels, and historians have been protesting. This time the opposition is much more” says veteran historian Mridula Mukherjee in this podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.
Mukherjee, who taught in JNU for four decades, had written a book RSS, School Textbooks and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project. She says that the Hindutva-oriented government has appointed people who toe the line in various educational institutions to ensure that it exercise complete control in pushing its ideological agenda. “They have a vision of the kind of India, one that goes back to the past.”
But, she points out, the changes are very shoddily done – even the Industrial Revolution too has been removed. “How will that help?” She asks.
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