Rejoinder: Not true, RSS has no role whatsoever in preparing NCERT textbooks

By Michel Danino*
Prof. Shamsul Islam has been writing mendacious and slanderous articles about the new NCERT Social Science textbooks in Muslim Mirror (click August 8 and August 20). In Counterview these appear to be their shortened versions (August 9 and August 21).
In both articles, Prof. Islam alleges that the new textbooks were prepared under the control of the RSS. This is a baseless claim, and I felt compelled to respond with the following rejoinder:
In these writings, apart from his heavily distorted comments on the new NCERT Social Science textbooks—books he has clearly not read in full—he has indulged in slander, calumny, and language that at times borders on hate speech.
First, his allegation that the new textbooks were prepared “under the influence of RSS” is an outright falsehood. He offers no evidence, because there is none—except in his imagination. I have repeatedly clarified that our team prepared these textbooks without any political or ideological interference.
Our sole mandate was to follow the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 (NCF-SE 2023), two major documents designed to bring transformative changes in education. Prof. Islam has evidently not read them. Our team was given full freedom to develop the material, which went through multiple reviews by experts, colleagues, and teachers. The RSS has no role whatsoever in this process.
Secondly, he has sought to demonize me personally as “a Hindutva supporter,” once again without the slightest evidence. I have nothing to do with Hindutva. My academic contributions—many published internationally—are available for all to see on my Academia.edu page.
Impartial readers have often remarked that my work, unlike Prof. Islam’s, presents a diversity of viewpoints before arriving at an argument, and does so in a polite, respectful manner. Much of my work deals with aspects of Indian civilization, which perhaps he regards as a crime.
Lastly, Prof. Islam cannot even get his basic facts right. In his August 20 article, whose shorter version was published in Counterview on August 21, he claims that I “supervised” the recent NCERT modules on Partition. This is entirely false. Neither I nor my Social Science team had anything to do with those modules or others of that kind. In fact, I have not yet even had the opportunity to read them.
It is regrettable that such misrepresentation and abuse is being published, which hardly fits the definition of a “Counterview.”
Counterview's guidelines to contributors state that content “should not be derogatory, should not incite hate.” Publishers, including online platforms such as Counterview, are legally bound to ensure that the material they carry does not contain false, deliberately misleading, slanderous, or defamatory statements.
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*Guest Professor, Earth Sciences Dept., IIT Gandhinagar. https://es.iitgn.ac.in/faculty/michel-danino, https://iitgn.academia.edu/MichelDanino, https://www.youtube.com/@micheldanino1956

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