When history becomes propaganda: NCERT’s partition modules

By Ram Puniyani* 

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which prepares the school texts for the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), is rapidly changing school texts and supplementary reading materials. Most of these changes modify content to suit the agenda of the ruling party. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pursuing its project of Hindu nationalism, constructing the past through these books to ensure that the new generation thinks in a way that supports the Bharatiya Janata Party–Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS) political program. They have already deleted references to the Mughals from textbooks and have presented ancient history to glorify the Aryans as the original inhabitants of this land. This strengthens their claim of Hindutva nationalism, as the Aryan race is one of its pillars. The latest distortion is the misrepresentation of India’s partition. NCERT has issued two modules on ‘Partition Horrors Day’ and partition. These modules are meant to be supplementary reading for projects, debates and similar exercises.

The partition module states, “Ultimately, on August 15, 1947, India was divided. But this was not the doing of any one person. There were three elements responsible for the Partition of India: Jinnah, who demanded it; second, the Congress, which accepted it; and third, Mountbatten, who implemented it.” It quotes Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as saying that the situation in India had become explosive. “India had become a battlefield, and it was better to partition the country than to have a civil war.” Jawaharlal Nehru described partition as “bad” but “unavoidable.” Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying that he could not be a party to Partition, but he would not stop Congress from accepting it with violence.

The module traces Partition to Muslim leaders’ belief in a separate identity rooted in “political Islam,” which, it claims, “rejects any permanent equality with non-Muslims.” It states that this ideology drove the Pakistan movement, with Jinnah as its “able lawyer.”

In doing so, it completely whitewashes the role of the British policy of “divide and rule” and ignores the parallel and opposite roles of Hindu communalism, singling out only Muslim communalism, while calling it “political Islam.” Incidentally, the phrase “political Islam” was not used at the time—it was called Muslim communalism. The module also erases the social bases of both Hindu and Muslim communalism. As social changes followed the coming of the British, new classes of industrialists, businessmen, workers and the modern educated emerged. Their associations culminated in the formation of the Indian National Congress (INC). Workers’ movements, as initiated by Narayan Meghaji Lokhande and Comrade Singaravelu, took shape. Bhagat Singh and his comrades represented the most powerful expression against colonial atrocities and longed for equality and liberation from oppression.

Jotirao Phule, Savitribai Phule, Bhimrao Ambedkar and Periyar Ramasamy Naicker stood for social equality, running parallel with the national movement and eventually finding expression in the Constitution. By contrast, the declining classes—landlords and kings of both religions—were unsettled by these social changes and formed organizations like the All-India Muslim League (AIML) and Hindu Mahasabha. The Muslim League stood for a Muslim nation and the Hindu Mahasabha asserted that India was a Hindu nation. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded in 1925 for the same goal. These communal organizations opposed Indian nationalism and its values of liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice. The British promoted communal historiography, which these organizations readily adopted. This sowed the seeds of communal hate leading to violence, which forced Gandhi and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad of the Congress to quietly accept the partition tragedy.

To claim that none of the British viceroys wanted partition is superficial. Rajinder Puri has shown how Lord Wavell and the British played a role. He cites Sir Martin Gilbert, biographer of Winston Churchill, who revealed that Churchill asked Jinnah to send secret letters to him through Elizabeth Giliat, Churchill’s secretary. This secret correspondence continued for years. Jinnah’s key decisions between 1940 and 1946, including the demand for Pakistan in 1940, were taken after receiving the nod from Churchill or from viceroys like Lord Linlithgow and Wavell.

It was primarily the British who wanted partition, keeping their future goals in mind. With the world dominated by two superpowers—the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—the British feared that a united India, led by leaders with left-leaning sympathies, might tilt towards the Soviet Union. To diminish India’s global impact, they encouraged division.

Lord Mountbatten came with the mandate to divide the country and succeeded. Nehru and Patel in the Interim Government realized unity was becoming difficult. Jinnah’s call for “Direct Action” unleashed violence that further compelled Congress leaders to concede the Muslim League’s demand, which was well supported by the British.

On nationalism, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS stood on the same page as the Muslim League. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in his book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, had already argued that there were two nations in the country, the Hindu nation and the Muslim nation. Dr B.R. Ambedkar himself concluded that both Savarkar and Jinnah were in complete agreement about two separate nations in India. At the 1938 Mahasabha convention, Savarkar declared that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist, and Jinnah’s 1940 Lahore resolution echoed this view. Their similarity was evident in the formation of coalition governments of the Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League in Bengal, Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) after 1942.

By such distortions, Hindu nationalist ideologues now put the blame for Partition solely on the Muslim League and Congress. The truth is different. These modules let the British off lightly, even though their manipulations encouraged both the Muslim League and Hindu communalists, leading to the ghastly tragedy. The horrors of Partition resulted from competitive communalism and the hurried division by the British, carried out without adequate preventive measures. The deeper cause was communalism itself, with Savarkar giving it ideological shape. Both strands of communalism, running parallel and opposite, created an atmosphere of hate that resulted in the immense hardships, mass migrations and sufferings of both Hindus and Muslims.

--

*Youtube Facebook Instagram Whatsapp
Twitter Pinterest My Website