Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: June 17, 2004
Goaded by his communist friends,
Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh has formed a committee
of distinguished scholars to "review" the textbooks on history and the
social sciences published by NCERT. One wonders why redoubtable scholars
like Professors S Settar and Barun De accepted this assignment in the first
place because to any lay observer the intention of the Government was transparent.
Decency and intellectual honesty
demanded that they politely refuse the Minister saying it was a job more
befitting a backroom hack from AK Gopalan Bhavan. For, the Government's
fixation with the "communal" content in the books had resounded unequivocally
in the Common Minimum Programme. Its original objective was to recall the
books already in circulation and replace them with the old ones which NCERT
had discontinued. But when enlightened of the logistical nightmare that
involved printing and distributing enough books in time so as to cause
the least inconvenience to millions of students, the next best option was
availed: Sanitise the existing books of their allegedly offensive passages.
There are no prizes for predicting the eventual product of this sham exercise.
At the end of it all, the biggest
loser would be the credibility of a government which dances to the tune
of communists and executes, with wanton ease, a despicable tradition imported
from the lost, "evil empire" which was the USSR. Wittingly or otherwise,
Mr Singh would end up ushering in a precedent which would see the "official"
history of India being changed every five years to suit the agenda of the
new party in power. Nobody who tolerates the ongoing charade should grudge
the BJP of cloning Mr Singh in its day. The tragedy of this nation at this
point in its history is that it lacks a voice of sanity.
Beyond the future of a humble school
textbook, a larger question hangs: Why should the Government be in the
business of school textbook writing? This is the job of independent scholars
and producing didactic literature is acknowledged worldwide as a highly
specialised skill. The damage was done by Indira Gandhi- era NCERT administrators
who roped in some politically powerful historians to do the job. Instead
of producing books which made history an inspiring experience for young
learners, they produced junior versions of the tomes they wrote for students
of higher levels. Also tucked in were subtle doses of the Congress-communist
perspective-"catch 'em young" being the undefined credo.
Dr JS Rajput, the outgoing NCERT
Director, did away with this practice and recruited a team of younger scholars
who may not have inspired awe for their accomplishments in Oxford and Cambridge,
but managed to churn out a digestible range of books which were commendable
from the standpoint of accuracy and pedagogy. After all, it is for an educationist,
not activist-historian, to decide how much and in what doses an 11 to 16-year-old
should be exposed to complex situations from the past. In the process,
he angered the Empire. So, ultimately we are ruing the non-existence of
a species called the independent historian. Negativists of the antiquity
of India's historiographic tradition may find this unpalatable, but it
was here that one of the earliest flowerings of man's quest for knowledge
about the past took form. If the Arthashastra and the Itihas Puranas served
as beacons, NCERT under the Congress-communist combine would certainly
constitute the low water mark.
