A reference to this champion of Indian nationalism, a freedom fighter whom former Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru called Mir-e-Karavan (leader of our caravan) when he announced his death, is the latest excision in school textbooks. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has called these deletions a step towards syllabi rationalisation, but every day brings new details of what is being edited out.

So far, we knew that NCERT removed some portions about the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Emergency, the Cold War, the Naxalite movement, and Mughal courts from its Class 12 textbooks. Earlier this week, reports said that a line referencing Maulana Azad’s presence at the Constituent Assembly meetings was removed from the new political science textbook for Class XI students. Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and BR Ambedkar’s names were retained, but Azad’s name was edited.

This is both unacceptable and inexplicable.

NCERT, which refuted media reports that Mughal history would no longer be taught in schools (arguing that only “overlapping” and “irrelevant” chapters were compressed or removed), offered no explanation or a counter to multiple media reports on the Azad issue. The opacity around these changes, which were finalised last year, is most disconcerting. Surely, what our children study — or do not — in school — is an issue in which every parent is a stakeholder. Read together with the fact that the Centre stopped the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) for minority communities in 2022, arguing that there were several other overlapping schemes, the removal of the Azad reference can hardly be seen as random or innocuous.

We should not be surprised that history is a modern battlefield or a gladiatorial arena where political narratives of the present are seeded in the soil of the contested past. In the United States, confederate statues are a flashpoint for heated arguments over racism and slavery. In the United Kingdom, the crimes of the British empire have been entirely taken out of the classroom; there is no colonial history taught. In India, textbook politics have long been the staple of political disputes between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress.

Yes, interpretations of history are often more normative than empirical. Whose lens you see history through — that of the conqueror, of the victor, of the vanquished, of women, of Dalits, of the subalterns — changes the picture you see. And how we look back at the past is also informed by how we understand our present. Hence, the contemporary edits in books by much-loved authors, such as Enid Blyton, whom an entire generation did not find racist till Golliwog references started being considered unpardonable.

But changes made in the textbooks without a public discussion are worrying. A parliamentary debate, for instance, where citizens have a right to see who stands where on how history should be taught, could have preceded these edits.

Again, political competitiveness at the core of textbook changes bothers me less than the growing impression of religious prejudice. Lieutenant-General (retired) Zameer Uddin Shah, a respected military veteran and former vice-chancellor (V-C) of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), told me that “this is not rationalisation, it is entirely irrational. The present attempt to alter history is being assumed by Muslims to be an attack on them.” Shah can hardly be called doctrinaire or conservative. He met Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat last year. As V-C of AMU, he engaged with PM Narendra Modi. His sense of pluralism comes from the Indian Army. “We are five fingers, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and Parsis; Injuring one means we can no longer clench our fists,” he said.

Let’s go back to the words of Azad, who incidentally told late journalist Kuldip Nayyar that he made a mistake in supporting Nehru over Sardar Patel for PM: “Come, today let us pledge that this country is ours, we belong to it and any fundamental decisions about its destiny will remain incomplete without our consent.” He was addressing a Muslim gathering, but we should all care about what’s being taught in India’s classrooms.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author

The views expressed are personal