india

Updated: Jun 27, 2015 01:21 IST

The stage is all set for an acrimonious contest between “secular” and Hindutva-leaning historians over school textbooks, with an ICHR member openly attacking the NCERT Class-12 text as “biased”.

Saradindu Mukherji, a member of the key body that funds historical research, has in a blog post accused historian Ramachandra Guha and other scholars of introducing biases in the text. He says that Guha’s chapter in the book has sanitized the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement, projected Jinnah as a constitutionalist and over-emphasised the role of Mahatma Gandhi while sweeping Subhas Chandra Bose and key revolutionaries under the carpet.

Accusing Guha of Jinnah-worship, Mukherji accuses him of projecting the Pakistan founder while ignoring nationalists like Subhash Bose. “To the likes of Guha, Jinnah, one of the vilest mass murderers of history, was one of the ‘makers’ of modern India, and not the venerable Lokmanya Tilak and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose,” the article says.

Dubbing UPA as “the most anti-Hindu government to rule India since the decline of the Mughals”, Mukherji says that the fact that “anti-Hindu violence for 1,400 years has a holy, theological sanction” has been ignored. Accusing textbooks of teaching “distorted history” to kids, Mukherji ends by demanding an “unqualified apology” from the chairperson and chief advisor of the textbook development committee.