NO SELECTIVE NARRATIVES PLEASE

The recent deletions from the NCERT textbooks have more to do with Hindu communal politics than with, as claimed by NCERT director Dinesh Saklani, reducing the load on students returning post-Covid by removing some "faltu" chapters and sections.

- MRIDULA MUKHERJEE & ADITYA MUKHERJEE

Violating the principles of history, it's scientific procedures and 'discourse of proof", the majoritarian political forces in power in India today have resorted to total falsification of facts or the substituting of it with faith, beliefs and mythology. A particular version of history forms the core of communal ideology, which the communalists have been trying to spread for a very long time. In fact, the Hindu communalist propagated the British colonial notion of Indian society being deeply divided on the basis of religious identities, which supposedly subsumed all other identities or interests, economic, political, social or cultural. The religious communal ideology and a communal interpretation of history were thus born. The Hindu communalists accepted the James Mill-inspired colonial understanding of Indian history which divided it from the ancient past onwards on religious lines; 'Hindu rule' followed by the 'oppressive Muslim rule' and then 'British rule' arrives as the 'saviour. Their politics too in the colonial period was one of allying with the British to fight the Muslims as well as the Indian nationalists who fought for Hindu-Muslim unity.