'Hindutva's icons would have frowned on NCERT revisions'

New Delhi: It was reported on July 17 that the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s newly published textbooks for class 8 portray various Mughal emperors as brutal and intolerant. It describes that the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals followed the policies of religious intolerance. It also adds question able notes at the end.

According to NCERT such new descriptions of Mughal are based on the New Education Policy 2000 and NCF-SE 2023, reports The Wire. While Babur is depicted as “brutal and ruthless conqueror, slaughtering entire populations of cities”, Akbar’s rule is characterised as “blend of brutality and tolerance”, and Aurangzeb as one who destroyed tem ples and gurdwaras.

Very preposterously the NCERT justifies the description of Mughal brutality and other versions by explaining it in a “Note on Some Darker Periods in History,” writes SN Sahu, former OSD to the President of India. Gandhi’s apprehensions Such rewriting of history and the rationale given for it is a gross distortion that reflects the accentua tion of communal tensions during the Narendra Modi regime. Earlier, the NCERT had removed Mughal era from history books and now it presents the Mughal era and other periods of In dian history ruled by some Muslim rulers as brutal and heinous.

Earlier, in April 2023, I had written on how Gandhi’s prediction that communal polarisation would erase Mughal rule from history had come true. In fact in his article ‘Of New Univer sities,’ on October 25, 1947, and published in Harijan on November 2, Gandhi with rare farsightedness wrote that accentuation of Hindu-Muslim discord would poison our education and history and would lead to erasure of the Mughal period from the history texts..

Those apprehensions of Gandhi are being fructified by NCERT because of the kind of narratives spun by the Modi regime, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindutva leaders. Their purpose is to deepen discord among people on the basis of faith. Of Syama Prasad Mookerjee Apart from making Gandhi’s fears a reality, the NCERT, by making a sweeping projection of Mughal rulers as barbaric and intolerant are negating the vision of Sya ma Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Jan Sangh (the current BJP) and a revered figure for BJP and Hindutva forces was certainly a Hindutva ideologue.

But on December 17, 1946 in the Constituent Assembly, while talking about the brutal suppression of the 1942 Quit India movement, Mookerjee described Mughals as great and not barbaric.

On that day, while participating in the discussion on the Objectives Resolution moved by Jawaharlal Nehru on December 13, 1946, Mookerjee mentioned that several British leaders made utterly false statements about India and its Constituent Assembly and specially referred to the charge of Lord Simon that the Constituent Assembly of India consisted of only caste Hindus.

Expressing his outrage Mookerjee urged that the Assembly should, in no uncertain terms, tell the Britishers: “You started your career in this country as traders. You came here as supplicants before the Great Mughal. You wanted to exploit the wealth of this country. Luck was in your favour. By forgery, fraud and force, you succeeded in establishing-these are all matters of history-your Government in this country, but not with the will ing cooperation of the people of this land.

You introduced separate electorates, you introduced religion into Indian politics”. Mookerjee in the Constituent Assembly thus said that Britishers came “as supplicants before the Great Mughal” and it was not Indians who introduced religion to politics but Britishers. This contrasts to the depiction of Mughals in the NCERT text books as barbaric and in tolerant. Of Swami Vivekananda.

The distorted contents in those books of the NCERT are also completely contrary to the understanding and vision of Swami Vivekananda, a celebrated and cerebral Hindu monk. In his book Lectures from Colombo to America, he referred to the varieties and complexities of India and how it has been shaped by contributions of several nationalities.

He said: “Here have been the Aryan, the Dravidian, the Tartar, the Turk, the Mogul, the European all the nations of the world, as it were, pouring their blood into this land”. If Mughals were pouring their blood to this nation, as stated by Swami Vivekananda, how is it that the NCERT book now projects them as brutal? While he f lagged some shortcom ings of several rulers in cluding that of Aurangzeb, nowhere did he say that Mughals were barbaric.

In volume five of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda is his article ‘East and West’. In page 459 he referred to the firmly based and tre mendously strong Mughal empire and explained that they left the religion of Hin dus largely untouched.(Courtesy: The Wire)