Behind Closed Doors, Hindutva Groups Press for Rewriting School Textbooks

New Delhi:  On a Saturday afternoon last week, a steady stream of visitors made their way into the residence of Smriti Irani in Delhi’s Lutyens area.

These included members of RSS-linked educational bodies like the Shiksha Bachao Andolan, the Bhartiya Shikhsan Mandal, the ABVP, and Vidya Bharati. Accompanying them was the RSS joint general secretary, Krishna Gopal.

Other invitees included the minister of state for human resource development, Ramshankar Katheria and the higher education secretary, VS Oberoi.

Several bundles of teacher training books were carried in.

This at a time when the blueprint for the New Education Policy has been opened up for public discussion, one that will culminate in new syllabi and new textbooks by the NCERT, which designs curricula for all CBSE and many state board schools across the country.

If indeed this gathering, which went on close to four hours, was part of that consultation, then it should have been an open, transparent excercise, the discussions made public on the Ministry’s site.

But none of those attending the meeting – or officials in the HRD Ministry – wanted to speak. One attendee told us on condition of anonymity that this is “ghar ki baat” (an in-house matter).

What Hindutva groups have on other occasions publicly outlined is that they want to rewrite the text books. “We are requesting to the present government that these books should be re-written,” Dinanath Batra, an activist with the RSS-affiliated Shikhan Sanskriti Uthan Nyas, told NDTV a few days before the meeting . And what are the broad brushstrokes of the changes they would like to see? “Pride in India, healthcare, social consciousness and spiritualism, Vedic Mathematics and Sanskrit- all should be included in the curriculum,” he said .

They also said they would, as in past, ‘damaging elements’ in the existing textbooks to be removed, but it’s unclear what those are.

In the NCERT textbooks in current use, the damaging aspects, at least as defined by Batra  – and which he had gone to court against in 2004 – are no longer there. Those references (which included the beef-eating habits of Aryans) were part of an earlier set of NCERT textbooks phased out from 2006 onwards, when the NCERT ushered in a new set of books.

Then NCERT director Professor Krishna Kumar who supervised the new books told us the current texts cannot be accused of any ideological distortions. They have been adopted by several state governments, including those run by the BJP. “States like Chhattisgarh, Goa, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand were all under BJP,” said Professor Kumar. “And those states are still using these textbooks. In Chhattisgarh, Mr Raman Singh’s government has continued; the textbooks have also continued. These are NCERT’s textbooks without any change. These textbooks transcended the old controversies because we were trying to focus on the way children learn.”

Instead of giving a simple narrative, Professor Kumar said, the books introduced modern ideas of learning and teaching, based on historical and archaeological evidence, to get a sense of how historians arrive at conclusions.

The Sangh lobby is silent on what changes it is negotiating behind closed doors. But Dinanath Batra is confident that their changes will be implemented.

“We have got an assurance from the government,” he said.