The debate over politicisation of education is an old one, but it needs to be understood in the full sense of the term.

Government intervention in the sphere of education is not necessarily a bad thing. Policies like reservation for Scheduled Castes\Tribes, the Right to Education Act, are all instances of the government’s involvement in education. While these measures have undoubtedly been used as a plank for vote gathering, they have definitely benefited some sections of society, to whatever limited extent.

In a country like India, where universal literacy is a distant dream, the state’s intervention is both desired and desirable to ensure that the benefits of education reach the maximum number of people. However, government’s interest in education becomes problematic when it starts using school syllabi as a medium to promote its own ideology, as has happened in the case of the CBSE syllabus since Independence.

Every Indian school kid grows up with the idea that the Indian National Congress, under the able guidance of Jawaharlal Nehru and of course Mahatma Gandhi, was the architect of India’s freedom struggle, with people like B.G. Tilak, Subhas Chandra Bose, abd B.R. Ambedkar making, as it were, cameo appearances in two or three chapters. This is a direct consequence of the syllabus being framed when the Congress government was in power, post-Independence.

The Janata Party under Morarji Desai in 1977 sought to correct the inaccuracies of the Congress-designed syllabus. However, instead of putting the historical record straight, it was more interested in reducing the “communist influence” on the syllabus, which supposedly depicted Muslim rulers and the influence of Islam on India’s culture too sympathetically and showed too little enthusiasm for Hindu heritage.

The same process was carried forward by the NDA government in 2002, with Murali Manohar Joshi as the HRD minister seeking to introduce subjects like Vedic mathematics and astrology, along with tweaking the syllabi of the existing subjects.

Both the attempts were met with outrage by the opposition protesting the “saffronisation” of education, and succeeding Congress-led governments promptly tried to undo the damage.

Press reports indicated that the rush to “de-saffronise” school texts resulted in Urdu versions not being ready for the academic year which began in April 2005. The reports asserted that this failure hurt Urdu-speaking students by depriving them of needed textbooks.

Among more recent examples are the “cartoon controversy” where the government allowed the removal of a cartoon depicting Ambedkar sitting on a snail and Nehru holding a whip because certain groups felt it insulted Ambedkar. NCERT chief advisors Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar resigned after the government issued an apology to these groups and promised to remove the cartoon.

Similarly, in 2011, Delhi University's Academic Council decided to drop A.K. Ramanujan's essay ‘300 Ramayanas’ from the Delhi University B.A. syllabus, largely due to pressure from right-wing organisations. Dr Avnijesh Awasthy, NDTF President and a professor of Hindi at PGDAV College, went on record saying, “It is a well-known tactic of the Leftists to attack deep-rooted religious beliefs of Hindus. Will the same historians recommend a narrative by Salman Rushdie as a compulsory text for the study of the Quran or Islam?”

The debate over religious paranoia aside, such decisions are denying students access to free information and usurping their right to evaluate information and form their own opinions. Propaganda disguised as education is one of the most disastrously efficient Fascist tools, while kowtowing to extremist forces in the name of pluralism diminishes the scope of free discourse.

(Yashee is a student of ACJ, Chennai.)

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