India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has removed contents on the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the Mughal rule in India and the emergency imposed in 1975 among other texts from its textbooks. The NCERT, in a note said that the revision was part of “rationalization of contents in textbooks”. Changes have been made to textbooks for sixth standard to twelfth standard, English daily The Indian Express reported. A reference to the Gujarat pogrom from the chapter “Recent Developments in Indian Politics” has been removed from twelfth standard’s Political Science curriculum, quoting the NCERT note, The Indian Express reported. “Gujarat riots show that the government machinery also becomes susceptible to sectarian passions,” a paragraph from the removed chapter stated, according to the newspaper.

An entire chapter titled “Kings and Chronicles: the Mughal Courts (C. Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)” has also been dropped from the twelfth standard’s History syllabus, the report said. From the Political Science textbook, one page on the history of the Naxal movement, and four pages on “Controversies regarding Emergency” have also been dropped. Other content removed from the twelfth standard’s syllabus include excerpts on the Cold War and “US Hegemony in World Politics”. From the eleventh standard’s History textbook, a chapter titled “Central Islamic lands” and another named “The Industrial Revolution” have been dropped. The revision came two months after excerpts of two of Faiz’s poems were removed from tenth standard’s Social Science textbook in the 2022-23 curriculum of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

Credit:
Independent News Pakistan-INP