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| Monday, 17 May 2004 |
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New Indian govt likely to roll back 'distorted' history NEW DELHI, Sunday (AFP) India's history books, rewritten by the outgoing Hindu nationalist government, are likely to be revamped again once a new Congress-led government takes power, party leaders have indicated. The Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi in 2001 began a programme of "rewriting" Indian history through the eyes of Hindu hardliners. Joshi, a former physics professor, had claimed that the new curriculum was cleared by his ministry and was not about imposing the viewpoints of Hindu nationalists or their interpretation of events. Rather, he said the move, which created a fierce storm in academic circles, was about instilling values in children based on the concept of the equality of all religions. But academics and opposition politicians, among them senior Congress leader Eduardo Faleiro - himself a former human resources development minister - vehemently opposed the historical reinterpretation. According to Faleiro, there were many problems with the textbooks that Hindu nationalists circulated to schoolchildren. "The quality of the new books was much below the expected standards. There were several instances of history being distorted. The subject of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was deleted," he said, referring to the killing of India's apostle of peace by Hindu fanatic Nathuram Godse in January 1948. "When that was corrected, the new version too had mistakes as the identity of Gandhi's killer was deleted," Faleiro told AFP this weekend. Another example was when the new history textbooks cast aspersions on the Mughal rulers of India and Muslims in general, he said. "Minorities were clearly defined as aliens and through innuendo stated as enemies," Faleiro said. "This obviously provoked members of (Muslim) communities, besides making them feeling insecure." Media reports over the past three years have regularly pointed out distortions. Common examples were passages in textbooks glorifying the years of Hindu political dominance and denigrating the medieval period when the Mughal empire flourished. A chapter in a high school social sciences textbook titled "Problems of the Country and Their Solutions" listed "minority communities" as the foremost component of India's problems. |
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