For decades, school curricula, especially textbooks produced by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, have been a poli...
For decades, school curricula, especially textbooks produced by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, have been a political battleground for conflicting ideas of India. But in the latest round of revisions, parts of the political science curriculum for Class 12 students under the Central Board of Secondary Education have been burnished into an ode to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In the new NCERT textbooks, the decision to strip Jammu and Kashmir of special status on August 5, 2019, is cast as an achievement of the current government. It followed years of unstable coalition governments, “major acts of terrorism” as well as “mounting internal and external tensions”, students will read. It was made possible after the Bharatiya Janata Party walked out of the coalition government presided over by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti – the text spells her name wrong. The partition of Jammu and Kashmir into two separate Union Territories, the textbook says, fulfilled the “divergent political and developmental aspirations” of the region. Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are described as “living examples of society in India”. A section on different kinds of separatist politics in Jammu and Kashmir has been excised from the new edition of the NCERT textbooks.
The Central Board of Secondary...
