BJP has been effective in transmitting its version of Indian history to next generation of learners | The Indian Express

BJP has been effective in transmitting its version of Indian history to next generation of learners | The Indian Express

Written by Christophe Jaffrelot, Pradyumna Jairam |Updated: November 16, 2019 11:58:32 am

Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  He offers valuable insights on South Asian politics, particularly the methods and motivations of the Hindu right in India.

The author is a research scholar at King's College, London

BJP has been effective in transmitting its version of Indian history to next generation of learners

Will the Congress government re-rewrite the history textbooks of Rajasthan, or is the Hindu nationalist version bound to prevail? And if one more version of India’s history is produced, in the context of the political narrative in India today, will it have any impact on the next generation of learners?

Shortly after Narendra Modi’s rise to power, in August 2014, the RSS formed a committee, the Bharatiya Shiksha Niti Aayog, to “Indianise” the education system. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while speaking at a recent seminar in Banaras Hindu University on the 5th century emperor, Skandagupta, declared: “Putting together our history, embellishing it and rewriting it is the responsibility of the country, its people and historians”, suggesting that there are different ways to write the history of India and that professional historians had not done their job properly so far.