News
The curriculum of hate.
Under the BJP government, the education ministry has always followed a Hindutva agenda of saffronising education by inventing a martial India where new textbooks revolve around combats and masculinity. Such content is then used for ‘national resurrection’ purposes by RSS affiliates.
“If they don’t read Shivaji they end up reading Genghis Khan,” the former Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Ram Shankar Katheria said at Lucknow University. Katheria also made it clear that “there will be saffronisation of education and the country… if that is good for the nation”.
This remark cannot be taken as another incident of a minister displaying a loose tongue. It can be convincingly said that the remark comes from a larger Hindutva design to create extreme impressions – the staple diet of any extreme political ideology that feeds on adversarial social relations.
What may completely escape the reader is the minister’s total ignorance of Genghis Khan’s story, the ruthless conqueror who went on a ruthless campaign in Central Asia and China in the 13th century. The minister apparently was under the impression that the Mongolian warlord was a Muslim and set him up against Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha ruler who, for all purposes has been appropriated by the Hindutva forces.
The fact is that Genghis Khan was not only a ruthless ruler but also a destroyer of various Muslim powers and Islamic institutions across Transoxiana in the early 13th century. The political rhetoric completely overlooked the fact that Muslim communities across Transoxiana suffered the worst at the hands of Khan.
Coming to the real reason behind the minister’s unbridled jingoism, it is actually a part of the Hindutva agenda of saffronising education by inventing a martial India where new textbooks revolve around combats and masculinity.
Such valourised/romanticised histories are already a part of the school curricula in BJP-ruled states: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. What is worrying is that these textbooks have now become serious instruments for the proliferation of communal tensions in north India. Researches on recent cases of violence in north India show that the new history textbooks contributed to the communal violence in many micro-regions in north Indian states.
Once these invented histories make their way to the textbooks, Groups like Akhil Bharatiya Ithihas Sankalan Yojana and Institute for Rewriting Indian History take it upon themselves to popularise them and use them for ‘national resurrection’. It is important to know that these organisations are affiliated to RSS.
Under the ex-HRD minister, Smriti Irani, the Hindutva brigade’s institute of choice for carrying out the agenda was Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR). In fact, the appointment of P. Sudarshana Rao as the chairman of ICHR was ridiculed by the international community of historians as — his only contribution to history remains the discovery of the “exact year of the Kurukshetra War”.
If hate histories such as the one the current administration is trying to peddle are perpetrated then the generation that grows up reading such history will seek “revenge” for the wrongs of the past.
It is difficult to say if the elevation of Prakash Javadekar as the new HRD minister would change the situation. We may see more saffronisation — perhaps in a more sophisticated and less boisterous manner.
Image used for representational purposes only