Indian academics warn edits to high school textbooks are attempt to rewrite history

When Manish Jain first heard about the changes made to the textbooks he helped create for Indian high school students, he was unsure how to react.

But he knew exactly how he felt about it.

"You feel pained, and it is not just because one is associated with [the textbooks]," said Jain, a professor in the school of education studies at New Delhi's Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University. 

"What should be given to our youth and young is being denied. So that's the pain. It is not about our names. It is about what could be possible." 

The textbooks were used in history and political science courses. The changes, introduced by NCERT, an independent body that works under India's federal education ministry and is responsible for syllabus revisions and textbook content, include dropping chapters on Mughal history, federalism and diversity and a section on the deadly communal riots in India's Gujarat state more than 20 years ago. 

Jain, 52, is one of more than 30 academics who wrote an open letter in June asking for their names to be removed from the textbooks' credits page, after what they called "unilateral" and "substantive" revisions. 

The controversy first broke out when two of the books' chief advisors, political scientists Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Phalsikar, wrote to NCERT, accusing it of changes that left the text "mutilated beyond recognition." 

The textbooks, once "a source of pride for us, are now a source of embarrassment," the chief advisors wrote.

The topics dropped include a chapter on Mughal history, when the Muslim dynasty ruled over India, and paragraphs on attempts by extreme Hindu nationalists to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi, who was killed in 1948.

NCERT also moved information on Darwin's theory of evolution to a later grade. 

Critics see the changes as purely political, and a means for the Indian government to realign the curriculum and rewrite history to fit its Hindu nationalist agenda. 

"An entire section on the Gujarat riots has been deleted" from the grade 12 textbook, Jain told CBC. "We know in the context of the present regime what the Gujarat riots mean."

The 2002 riots, which killed more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims, broke out after Muslims were suspected of setting a train carriage of Hindu pilgrims alight, triggering revenge attacks by Hindu groups, and unleashing three days of intense communal violence.

The riots are a sensitive subject for India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was Gujarat's top leader at the time of the riots, was accused of being complicit in the violence, a charge he denies.