The rush to congratulate Prime Minister Narendra Modi began even before his landslide victory on May 16. The Rajasthan board of secondary education, sensing the trend as early as May 1, announced that it would include a chapter on Modi's life. Madhya Pradesh echoed this decision on Monday, stating that its class 3 or class 6 students would have the privilege of studying the man's life.
This is not remotely unusual in Indian politics: a change in power often hails a change in textbooks. The battle is most often fought in history books, which many argue are subjective and anyway written by the victors. The Vajpayee government took this maxim to heart soon after they assumed power in 1999. Officials at the National Council Of Educational Research And Trainingwere swift to begin the process of saffronising the history textbooks under them. Students from one batch to the next were suddenly told to admire Hitler's administrative process, and that Muslims, Christians and Parsis were foreigners.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is not the only party to stake claim to its version of the truth. The Gandhi family features quite regularly in textbooks, if only because so many of them have been prime ministers of the country. Sometimes, this can seem a little excessive. For instance, a textbook written by Annie Koshi, principal of St Mary’s School in Delhi, asked students to draw the Gandhi family tree, including Rahul, Priyanka and even Robert Vadra. Children are also encouraged to stick pictures against their names.
While the Gandhi family might not necessarily have personally asked for their names to be included in textbooks, other politicians are particularly prickly about what might be the easiest way to exert soft power.
In April, members of the youth wing of the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra threw something of a hissy fit when they realised that their founder and leader Sharad Pawar was not included in a class 10 social studies textbook list of prominent political leaders that had Bal and Raj Thackeray of the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, and even Kanshi Ram, founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has a relatively small presence in the state. Officials at the board of education promised to take take action in a month – something they have yet failed to do.
In Bengal, Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress has set her sights on excising chapters on the political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from textbooks prepared under the supervision of the Communist Party of India, which ruled the state for more than 30 years. Shortly after coming to power in 2011, Mamata began to probe whether these references could be removed. She has not yet succeeded.
The CPI, however, lost a battle in Tripura, when the Tripura Board of Secondary Education in April agreed to remove references to the BJP as a communal party from its class 11 textbook after the BJP complained to the Election Commission.
Further west, Bihar’s textbooks also underwent a revamp after Nitish Kumar became chief minister in 2005. The next year, Kumar ordered a purge of all references to his predecessor, Lalu Prasad Yadav, from Hindi textbooks, which describe him as the pride of Bihari soil. There was an entire chapter on Lalu's life and achievements.
As far as fawning admiration go, nothing can compare with the eternal seesaw of information that occurs every time Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi exchange chief ministerial seats in Tamil Nadu. In a move that must give textbook printers a regular boost in profits, both politicians ensure that they remove mentions of their opponents in textbooks soon after they assume power – and replace these with paeans to themselves.
This was carried to an absurd extreme in 2011, when the state’s equitable education department reported that school children had been made to blank out all references to former chief minister Karunanidhi in their text books because they had not been updated in time. This involved pasting stickers over the Thiruvalluvar logo used by Karunanidhi, a chapter outlining a medical insurance scheme by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government, and even a poem by him.
Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are following a fine tradition.
This is not remotely unusual in Indian politics: a change in power often hails a change in textbooks. The battle is most often fought in history books, which many argue are subjective and anyway written by the victors. The Vajpayee government took this maxim to heart soon after they assumed power in 1999. Officials at the National Council Of Educational Research And Trainingwere swift to begin the process of saffronising the history textbooks under them. Students from one batch to the next were suddenly told to admire Hitler's administrative process, and that Muslims, Christians and Parsis were foreigners.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is not the only party to stake claim to its version of the truth. The Gandhi family features quite regularly in textbooks, if only because so many of them have been prime ministers of the country. Sometimes, this can seem a little excessive. For instance, a textbook written by Annie Koshi, principal of St Mary’s School in Delhi, asked students to draw the Gandhi family tree, including Rahul, Priyanka and even Robert Vadra. Children are also encouraged to stick pictures against their names.
While the Gandhi family might not necessarily have personally asked for their names to be included in textbooks, other politicians are particularly prickly about what might be the easiest way to exert soft power.
In April, members of the youth wing of the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra threw something of a hissy fit when they realised that their founder and leader Sharad Pawar was not included in a class 10 social studies textbook list of prominent political leaders that had Bal and Raj Thackeray of the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, and even Kanshi Ram, founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has a relatively small presence in the state. Officials at the board of education promised to take take action in a month – something they have yet failed to do.
In Bengal, Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress has set her sights on excising chapters on the political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from textbooks prepared under the supervision of the Communist Party of India, which ruled the state for more than 30 years. Shortly after coming to power in 2011, Mamata began to probe whether these references could be removed. She has not yet succeeded.
The CPI, however, lost a battle in Tripura, when the Tripura Board of Secondary Education in April agreed to remove references to the BJP as a communal party from its class 11 textbook after the BJP complained to the Election Commission.
Further west, Bihar’s textbooks also underwent a revamp after Nitish Kumar became chief minister in 2005. The next year, Kumar ordered a purge of all references to his predecessor, Lalu Prasad Yadav, from Hindi textbooks, which describe him as the pride of Bihari soil. There was an entire chapter on Lalu's life and achievements.
As far as fawning admiration go, nothing can compare with the eternal seesaw of information that occurs every time Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi exchange chief ministerial seats in Tamil Nadu. In a move that must give textbook printers a regular boost in profits, both politicians ensure that they remove mentions of their opponents in textbooks soon after they assume power – and replace these with paeans to themselves.
This was carried to an absurd extreme in 2011, when the state’s equitable education department reported that school children had been made to blank out all references to former chief minister Karunanidhi in their text books because they had not been updated in time. This involved pasting stickers over the Thiruvalluvar logo used by Karunanidhi, a chapter outlining a medical insurance scheme by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government, and even a poem by him.
Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are following a fine tradition.
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