Op-ed: Subverting education

M V Ramana

School texts in Pakistan and India have been systematically subverted and end up promoting hatred and intolerance. This process must be resisted and reversed

One of the slogans of the all-controlling party in George Orwell’s classic book 1984 was “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Religious fundamentalists of all stripes in South Asia would agree wholly. And the way they attempt to achieve this control is by subverting the educational system. After all children going to school today will be the citizens of the future.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India, the effort to sift the recounting of the past with the sieve of Hindutva has been under way. The process is much older in Pakistan. A recent report compiled by Prof. A. H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim, and aided by a galaxy of experts, demonstrates how through and following the period of Islamisation in the 1980s, school curricula and textbooks have become systematically distorted in various ways, promoting hatred and intolerance. (See http://www.sdpi.org/archive/nayyar_report.htm)

Controlling the subject matter taught in schools is something all nations indulge in to varying degrees. If nations are, as Benedict Anderson contended, imagined communities, then the process of imagining a new community where formerly there was none inevitably involves sins of omission and commission. Inconvenient facts — for example those that derive from conflicts between the ruling and working classes — are often omitted. Instead some kind of united identity as citizens of the nation state is devised, sometimes by postulating conflict with some other nation.

While all states manipulate textbooks, not all manipulations are equally egregious. The distortions that derive from some form of secular nationalism are usually less virulent and dangerous when compared to those originating in religious nationalism. As political scientist Srirupa Roy has argued, the Indian state initially chose to define ‘India’ in terms of its cultural diversity (though selectively applied) and presented itself as the sole unifying agent capable of achieving order and stability. This is a much more tolerant and secular idea compared to the Hindutva conceptualisation of India’s history, which postulates a unitary Hindu population under attack from various foreign forces — first the Muslims, then the British, and, to the extent that they want to acknowledge it, the Communists. The 3 M’s (Madrasas, Macaulay and Marx) as they are sometimes called. This conception then furthers antipathy to Islam and selected ‘Western’ ideals like secularism and democracy.

Armed with this belief system, the BJP has infiltrated educational institutions, especially the agencies that set curricula and produce textbooks, appointing people whose views are sympathetic to its philosophy. For example, the new textbook for Class XII entitled Modern India is written by Satish Chandra Mittal, a retired professor of history. Among his qualifications is a stated unhappiness with what he called too much emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity and composite culture in history books. He has also stated in the Allahabad High Court that the Hindu deity Lord Rama was not a mythological personality, but a historical personality, and that he was Lord Almighty who trod the earth in human form.

These efforts by the BJP have been strenuously opposed. The Indian History Congress has set up a committee to examine the new history textbooks brought out by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Several state governments have decided not to use the new NCERT textbooks. There have been petitions in the Supreme Court challenging the new curricula. Regardless of the results of these challenges, it is clear that as long as the BJP rules India, its ability to further this process of communalising history and poisoning young minds is likely to increase.

Some idea of what this process may lead to can be obtained from the report by Nayyar and Salim mentioned earlier. The report is titled ‘The Subtle Subversion’, which is both ironical and ominous. Ironical because to any objective reader the subversion should be all too obvious with nothing subtle about it. But the fact that it may seem subtle to some, i.e. the process has gone on unnoticed, is itself evidence of how far this subversion has permeated national consciousness; that is truly ominous.

Nayyar and Salim argue that the kind of history taught in Pakistan’s schools ‘leave a false understanding of...national experience’. The definition of Pakistani nationalism in effect excludes non-Muslim Pakistanis from ‘either being Pakistani nationals or from even being good human beings.’ Official school curricula also glorify war and the use of force, urging students to take the path of Jihad and Shahadat. (Though not mentioned in the report, one would expect that the target of the wars and Jihad is India.)

One common feature in these distorted textbooks in India and Pakistan is the introduction of facts that prejudice students against the ‘other’ community. In the new NCERT textbook on Ancient India, for example, there is the intentional introduction of Osama Bin Laden in a box on ‘cultural contacts with the outside world’. There is, of course, no relevance to this introduction and it seems but a clumsy effort to tar the entire Islamic community with the brush of terrorism. Similarly, A H Nayyar points out that statements like ‘The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women...’ and ‘Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols...’ are introduced in Pakistani curricula to create ‘hate and denigration’ for Hindus.

The great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun argued that the “inner meaning of history...involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.” It is such a conceptualisation of history that should guide school textbooks. Indeed the larger purpose of education itself should be to promote a critical understanding of the world, empowering students to make sense of society and eventually effect progressive social change. At stake is our common future.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

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