Early in April 2024, India’s top educational body quietly made changes to millions of school textbooks. Key amongst these changes was the removal of references to the Babri mosque, a medieval mosque publicly demolished in 1992 by far-right Hindu nationalists, who believed the mosque’s location was home to a former temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Lord Ram. The extra-judicial demolition of the Babri mosque, and construction of a new Hindu temple in its spot, has been central to the growth and success of the country’s Hindu nationalist tilt, and rise of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power today.

Barely three months after Modi inaugurated the Ram temple in a widely publicized event, the country’s premier advisory body tasked with drafting textbooks removed multiple references to the mosque and its demolition from political science curricula. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has long been at the forefront of guiding school syllabi and drafting content used by more than 40 million students annually.

But as India shifts further to the right, bodies like the NCERT, and the country’s schooling at large, have been collateral damage in an increasingly Hindu majoritarian polity. Schools are now, more than ever, being used to influence the minds of millions of children, with history and science as the most frequently targeted subjects for revisionism.

Educators across the country are taking note and voicing concerns. Apoorvanand, a scholar and professor of Hindi at Delhi University, alleged that there is a concerted effort by the current government to impose their version of history on young minds.

“In their distorted version of history, our ancient past was a golden era; then Muslims came and ruined everything, then the (non-BJP) governments after the independence did nothing and all the work is being done by this government only. This reflects in their understanding of science as well where they want to establish that we had already invented all the scientific equipment in our ancient past,” he said.

Mornings in a Delhi-based branch of the Saraswati Bal Mandir school are a case in point. Before classes begin each day, the school makes students participate in thirty minutes of Sanskrit prayers worshiping Hindu gods. It’s a routine exercise, now followed by thousands of schools across the country.

Several schools that provide affordable and accessible education to millions of children are run by a vast chain of institutions called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right ideological organization and precursor to the country’s BJP Party.

Across India, there is a growing sense of segregation in the classroom, where once-secular institutions now find themselves teaching texts replete with omissions and revisions. Meanwhile, schools run by Christians and Muslims now find themselves under overt attack. Authorities have cracked down upon missionary and convent-run schools that are otherwise popularly sought-after for an English-style education. Elsewhere, school teachers and staff have faced suspension and threats based on allegations of “forced conversions.” Across India, religious minorities (Muslims and Christians in particular) have been targeted frequently with allegations of forcefully attempting to lure others to convert by fraud or deceit. More than twelve Indian states, almost all governed by the BJP, have legislation that criminalizes such forced conversions, and rightwing vigilante groups often press false charges of “forced conversion” to threaten, intimidate, or even arrest Muslims and Christians.

As the country heads towards a critical election year, and as the far-right BJP pushes its idea of a “Hindu First” India, changes in school syllabi and the educational climate are critical to influencing millions of impressionable young people. Through these curricular initiatives, the BJP is working to ensure India will have a Hindu nationalist future.

“Vedic” Science and Rewriting History

Students in RSS-backed schools are not merely told to chant Hindu prayers in morning assemblies, they are even reportedly instructed do leave their shoes outside their classrooms – a practice no different from entry into a Hindu temple. Yet, an additional concern lies in what these supposedly secular schools teach.

Last year, news emerged that Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as concepts like electromagnetism and discussions on the sustainable use of natural resources, were removed from science textbooks across the country. At the same time, state-run schools are increasingly attempting to bring in subjects like “Vedic mathematics” and “Vedic science,” using what is being pushed as a more indigenous or “decolonial” pedagogy, but is in reality the propounding of Hindu mythological and creationist ideas.

While the education system is erasing accepted scientific theories, they are also purging history textbooks of information about the country’s Mughal rulers (seen as Muslim), and references to a syncretic historical landscape where people with differing religious practices peacefully comingled. Multiple sections in high school history textbooks no longer describe the achievements of the country’s Mughal rulers and Delhi Sultanate, almost as if to minimize their contributions to the country’s culture, trade, archaeology, and their legacy today.

Several of the country’s most famous monuments, including the celebrated Taj Mahal, were built by the Mughals, who also fostered significant trade ties, created a legal lexicon, patronized artisans and literature, and more. The Mughal empire ruled over a substantial portion of the Indian subcontinent for centuries. But right-wing Hindus see them as foreign invaders who looted and plundered Indian and Hindu civilization.

“Our students will lag behind students of other countries as a curriculum based on Hindu nationalism will limit their knowledge and understanding. No country’s aim is to produce nationalists from schools and it should not be. The goal of the schools should be to educate kids. But the goal of India’s education system is now to produce nationalists,” Apoorvanand cautioned.

This erasure has been accompanied by history and political science books removing references to the connections between Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, and the RSS, the ideological parent to the BJP. Government-appointed authorities have studiously omitted Godse’s links to Hindu supremacist thought while only retaining the fact that he was Gandhi’s killer. They have also purged the curriculum of sections that spoke of the anti-Muslim 2002 pogrom, where Muslims were disproportionately targeted in the Indian state of Gujarat—then helmed by Narendra Modi as its Chief Minister.

Pawan (name changed to protect identity), a leading educator from New Delhi, recalled that the NCERT textbooks in India have been revised before, but not at this pace and scale. “First, this government revised the textbooks in the name of reducing the load on students due to Covid. Now this is a new strategy. At least earlier, they only cut some portions of the textbooks…But now they are changing the content of the textbooks without even rationalizing it,” he told us. 

Monopolizing Young Minds and India’s Schools

The country’s rightward march isn’t only reflected in changes to syllabi and textbooks, but also in the overhaul of formerly secular institutions. For example, military training schools are being privatized, and their transformation is a religious one.

In April 2024, an investigation revealed that an autonomous body of cadet schools run under the country’s Ministry of Defense had allowed private actors to partner with these schools and even open their own to train young military services aspirants. Several of these schools are now run by far-right Hindu organizations, leaders of the BJP, or its allies.

But the problem is not only at military schools. Today, schools for and run by minority religious and ethnic communities that were once protected thanks to provisions in the Indian constitution, find themselves facing unconstitutional oversight. Chief among these are the country’s premier Christian institutions.

The Catholic church is said to run nearly 14,000 schools, 650 colleges, seven universities, five medical colleges, and 450 technical and vocational institutions in India. Meanwhile, Protestant churches and other Christian groups are believed to operate another 30,000 schools, making it nearly 50,000 such educational institutions in India. Many of these schools and colleges are widely regarded as some of the best in the country, with leading academics, politicians, economists, policymakers, writers, journalists, and public intellectuals across religious backgrounds having hailed from a Christian-run alma mater.

The Indian Constitution’s provision of Article 30 allows all religious and linguistic minorities to run their own educational institutions. John Dayal, a senior journalist turned activist who works on religious and caste oppression, believes that Christian schools and Islamic madrasas (centers for Muslim learning), “have in fact been the neutral schools we’ve had, because the gurukuls [ancient Indian learning system modeled on the idea of a guru and disciple] that existed in pre-modern times were only for the upper-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas.” This ancient learning system often excluded the oppressed castes and other non-Hindu groups.

Yet, a palpable fear is slowly becoming evident. The Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) recently issued a comprehensive set of guidelines for what they dubbed as the “emerging challenges due to the current socio-cultural, religious, and political situation” in the country.

At the core of the guidelines, Dayal notes that there are now directions such as not “forcing Christian traditions on students of other religions.” Pointing to how Hindu nationalists are villainizing Christian schools for allegedly promoting religious conversions, Dayal highlighted how many of the country’s supposedly secular schools have long taught students only about Hindu independence fighters, included Hindu iconography in classrooms, and even encouraged Hindu songs and prayers in morning assemblies. Despite this, the CBCI now encourages schools to have students engage in a collective reading of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, amidst growing fearmongering that these schools encourage “forced conversions” into Christianity.

In indigenous and tribal-dominated and forest areas of India, vigilante attacks against Christian-run schools have been on the rise. Priests have been instructed to put up statues of Hindu deities at the gates of their schools. Meanwhile, in the country’s border state of Assam, a Hindu nationalist group told Christian schools they had two weeks to remove all Christian symbols.

With violence and revisionism on the rise, anti-Muslim underpinnings are also becoming worryingly evident.

In April 2023, the NCERT removed all references of India’s first education minister and Muslim leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad from 11th grade political science textbooks in a section about the meetings between 1946-1949 to draft India’s constitution. “They only removed the reference to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. How will omitting only four words reduce the load on the students? Their only aim is to invisibilize the names of Muslims from all public spaces such as roads, stations and now textbooks,” said Aditya Mukherjee, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a leading central university in Delhi.

Mukherjee says this is not the first time the RSS has tried to change India’s textbooks.

“The first time RSS had an influence over the government was in 1977 when a non-Congress government was formed for the first time in the country. It was at that time when the organization first demanded to change the textbooks. But people were not scared to speak up at that time and they protested. Then, in 1999 when the BJP government was formed at the center, RSS again demanded changes in India’s textbooks. A large number of India’s intellectuals and academicians including me as well protested against this and their demands could not be implemented. The reason they wanted to do this for so long is because history plays a very important role in fanning communal tensions. They want to dehumanize any mention of Muslims in our textbooks,” a worried Mukherjee said.

The educator Pawan also expressed his concerns about the implications of these changes, especially for millions of low-income students whose only source of information is government-published NCERT books. “As an educationist I know the sanctity of NCERT textbooks is very high especially in small cities where students cannot afford to purchase any other books than the NCERT. So changing something in these books with an agenda means generations after generations will learn that and this will create a chain reaction,” he said.

Hiding the Truth from an Upcoming Generation

Echoing these concerns, Apoorvanand said that a large portion of the population will grow up studying NCERT books and will be misinformed throughout their lives.

Nitin (name changed to protect identity), a teacher at one of the schools run by RSS in Delhi, said the changes this government is bringing to the textbooks are in line with RSS propaganda. “RSS already feeds this propaganda in the young minds through their booklets in their schools. What they were not able to achieve before 2014 was changing India’s textbooks according to their propaganda. With a thumping majority for the BJP, they are able to do that now,” he said.

Nowhere is this change more evident than in the students themselves. Seventeen-year-old Sumit Jaiswal just graduated from his high school. When he was studying, he read about the Babri mosque’s demolition by far-right Hindu nationalists in his school textbooks. Now, he worries that his sibling won’t be able to know about this major act of violence and political upheaval from her school textbooks.

Jaiswal sighed and said, “The Babri mosque demolition was one of the major political events in the 90s. It influenced our understanding of religion and secularism to a large extent. Students my age still take everything written in NCERT books as gospel truth. I am worried that those studying now, such as my sister, won’t be able to learn about this event from their textbooks. It looks like they are trying to prevent young minds from learning about this major illegal act.”

As students such as Jaiswal are worried about this rightwing shift in India’s education system, India’s students find themselves at a crossroads with a massive ideological shift staring at them. Unless more people push back, the country’s educational system could shape India’s future by rewriting its past.

 

Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist and researcher based in New Delhi, India.

Kaushik Raj is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India.