On her visit to Washington DC to hold meetings with her counterparts of different countries and heads of top international organisations, Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman talked about negative Western perceptions.
“India has the second largest Muslim population in the world and that population is only growing in numbers. If there is a perception or in reality, their lives are difficult or made difficult with the support of the State which is what is implied in most of these write-ups, I would ask if will this happen in India, will the Muslim population be growing than what it was in 1947 as opposed to Pakistan which was formed at the same time”, Ms Sitharaman asked.
She further said, “Every minority has been dwindling in its number or decimated in Pakistan. Even some of the Muslim sects have also been decimated there. Whereas, in India, you would find every strand of Muslim doing their business, their children being educated, given fellowships.”
While any sensible Indian would completely agree with this statement of Nirmala Sitharaman, the people at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), who prepare course material, especially for social sciences, for English medium schools would staunchly disagree with this picture of Indian Muslims being presented.
Perhaps that is why books (for Class 6) on India’s social and political life, which should comprise lessons on our governments and civic bodies, carry two additional chapters named ‘Understanding Diversity’ and ‘Diversity and Discrimination’ that are aimed at subliminally colouring a child’s mind with distorted narratives on these concepts while peddling the agenda of ‘Muslims are subjugated in India’.
The chapters further emphasise that Hindus are the majority so the onus lies on them to take care of minorities no matter what. The texts also reinforce the imbalanced notions of class, caste, and social construct.
As a mother of a ten-year-old who will be subject to this forced conditioning, it does rankle and affect me to discover noxious rhetoric channeled by pseudo-seculars whose writings are incorporated in textbooks by the NCERT.
One of those pseudo-seculars is Indian author Poile Sengupta who exposed her severe bias against Hindus of India during the hijab controversy last year through her column in The Wire. Shockingly, the hardcore hypocrisy championed by the Left-leaning, duplicitous intellectual ecosystem is influencing decisions in NCERT as well.
Excerpt from her work features in the two chapters that are not just inappropriate and irrelevant, but also guilt trip the Hindu for even the communal bigotry propagated by Muslims. Unfortunately, a Muslim student who comes from a well-to-do home will also find the lessons confusing, as well as unsettling, because they clearly won’t feel subjugated in a thriving democracy like India.
As a parent, I would then question who in NCERT is passing such content in middle school that will disrupt the clarity of perception in students regarding the status of Hindus and Muslims. The content which will plant the seed of disharmony in their impressionable minds and is ultimately aimed at benefiting the Muslim percentage by handing them over a perpetual victim card.
Moreover, discussing riots and religion, sensitive issues that need far more maturity in understanding than what ten-year-olds would have, is the NCERT being fair here? Would teachers in class be honest enough to cite real reasons behind riots? Would that not ruffle the Muslims children then? Has the NCERT dwelled on this?
Here are some portions explaining the pure evil included. In the excerpt from The Lights Changed by Poile Sengupta, a Hindu boy meets a Muslim boy at the traffic signal every day. While both are called Samir, the Hindu boy immediately says, “I am Samir Ek, you are Samir Do!” Subconsciously, this is the reiteration of the construct of positioning Muslims as second-class citizens so that they can be used as foot soldiers to vitiate the atmosphere of harmony.
The Muslim boy is poor and uneducated. The pun on the word ‘subject’ (the Hindu boy explains what is taught in his school) is pretty obvious in the line that has the Hindu boy saying, “The English word sounded strange on his tongue… to be ruled by someone else.”
The next paragraph goes, “There is trouble in Meerut. Many people are being killed there in the communal riots. I’m a Muslim and all my people are in Meerut.” Isn’t the writer suggesting here, without explaining what triggered the riots, that Muslims are the only ones killed in them?
The extract ends with – “Samir Do was not at the crossing the day after. Neither the day after nor ever again. And no newspaper, in English or Hindi, can tell me where my Samir Do has gone.” This is devious. Communist Sengupta forced the notion of Muslims being rendered voiceless and faceless in a Hindu-majority country. In reality, though, it is the Hindus who beg to be heard (on media platforms) in India and the world.
The Muslims have plenty batting for their cause while many find representation in politics, jobs, education, and other spaces. If a Muslim is poor, the NCERT finds it easier to rest the onus on the Hindu for the inequality meted out to the Muslim without probing the real cause!
While diversity could have been deconstructed with more suited instances, the diatribe doesn’t end here. Furthering the discussion, the chapter explains how, when the British ruled India, women and men from different cultural, religious and regional backgrounds came together to oppose them in the freedom movement. This topic needs detailed analysis and cannot be brushed aside by this flaky statement.
Next up is a song that was apparently sung after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar where men and women, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, rich and poor, were killed and wounded when they were fired upon. The credit for the song has been given to the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a rabidly Communist-Islamist organisation that was established in 1943. Wonder then how they wrote a song sung in 1919?! The factual anomaly doesn’t end here.
Chapter Two is even more insidious where certain concepts are tackled without the nuance required to explain them to the children. For instance, read this, “Samir Ek and Samir Do belong to different religions, which is an aspect of diversity. However, diversity can also be a source of discrimination. Groups of people who may speak a certain language, follow a certain religion, may be discriminated against as their customs or practices may be seen as inferior.”
This is sheer vitriol for a young mind who is yet not equipped to sift through agendas to understand concepts of discrimination and inequality. Also, “The two Samirs were from different economic backgrounds. Samir Do was poor. This difference is not a form of diversity but of inequality.”
The paragraph goes on to put the blame of this inequality subtly on the Hindu majority simply because Samir Ek is from a well-to-do Hindu family going to study in an English medium school.
I would have brushed the mainstreaming of Muslim iconoclasm in the English medium school curriculum aside if I didn’t go through the details of what has been incorporated in my son’s social science text.
Words like ‘Ammi’ and ‘Abbu’ are being normalised for ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ in English schools. As a Hindu mother, and a proud Indian, this propaganda peddled by the NCERT rankles me because these are formative years for children. What will it take the babus and the education secretariat to clean the muck?
It’s a matter of imparting solid education to our future generation. Shouldn’t the curriculum be cleansed of distorted Hindu-Muslim topics as well as fake narratives on gender, stereotypes, and other socially relevant issues? It’s quite a mess already. Buck up ,please!
