It is time to leave the discipline of history to historians and not be guided by narrow minded politicians to see the world
New Delhi,date of issue: April 24, 2023 , Updates: April 15, 2023 03:18 IST
(Illustration: Nilanjan Das)
TeaThe recent deletions from NCERT textbooks have more to do with Hindu communal politics than, as claimed by NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani, removing some to ease the load on students returning after Covid”UselessChapter and Vol. Violating the principles of history, its scientific procedures and the ‘discourse of evidence’, the majoritarian political forces in power in India today have resorted to complete falsification of facts or substituting it with faith, beliefs and mythology. A particular version of history is the core of communal ideology, which communalists have been trying to spread for a very long time. In fact, Hindu communalists propagated the British colonial notion of Indian society being deeply divided on the basis of religious identity, which allegedly subsumed all other identities or interests, economic, political, social or cultural. Thus was born the religious communal ideology and the communal interpretation of history. Hindu communalists accepted a colonial understanding of Indian history inspired by James Mill that divided it from the ancient past along religious lines; After the ‘Hindu rule’ comes the ‘oppressive Muslim rule’ and then the ‘British rule’ as the ‘saviour’. Their politics in the colonial period was also to forge an alliance with the British to fight the Indian nationalists fighting for Hindu-Muslim unity alongside the Muslims.