Times: Modi erases India's Islamic past from textbooks
A group of 250 Indian historians have protested against the rewriting of history textbooks in India to conform to what they describe as the ruling party's ideological bias, the Times reported.
The newspaper said in Report The deletion of sections on topics including India's Muslim rulers was part of the Narendra Modi government's partisan agenda to remove chapters that did not fit the larger ideological thrust of the current ruling regime.
History is at the center of India's culture wars, with politicians still arguing over figures from the past. For the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the period that deserves to be glorified the most is the period of ancient Hindu India, while the Mughal Muslim rule from the 16th to 19th centuries is condemned by the BJP.
Erasing the history of the Mongols
The report confirmed that the erasure of previous chapters on the Mongols from new editions of the National Council for Educational Research and Training's high school history and political science textbooks has already taken place.
Gone are references to the deadly 2002 Gujarat riots, which occurred when Modi was chief minister of the state. The textbooks included mention that about 1,000 Muslims were killed, and references to Mahatma Gandhi's hatred of Hindu nationalists and the desire for Hindu-Muslim unity also disappeared.
The report noted that the historians' protest may have no effect given that these changes have already been made, adding that BJP leaders have already spoken publicly about their desire to rewrite history as they see it, rather than how it is portrayed by historians who belong to what they see as the liberal and secular elite.
Source: Times
