Modi's educational reform may promote ideology of Hindu right: NYT

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised India's youth a bright future. As he is well aware, realizing that promise will depend on dramatically increasing educational quality and opportunity for the 600 million Indians under age 25, many of whom lack basic reading and math skills. In its 2014 Election Manifesto, Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, called education "the most powerful tool for the advancement of the nation and the most potent weapon to fight poverty." The question now is whether educational reform will be used not just to create an educated citizenry and trained work force but also to promote a particular ideology.

While campaigning ahead of the May election, Modi, then the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, promised to bring the "Gujarat model" to national governance. Many voters understood this to mean a commitment to a more dynamic economy. But the Gujarat model has a less attractive side to it: a requirement that the state's curriculum include several textbooks written by Dinanath Batra, a scholar dedicated to recasting India's history through the prism of the Hindu right wing.

In February, Batra led a successful effort to pressure Penguin India to withdraw copies of a book by Wendy Doniger, a religion professor at the University of Chicago, which he felt insulted Hinduism. Then, in June, the Gujarat government directed that several of Batra's own books be added to the state's curriculum. Batra's teachings range from the trivial to assertions that simply cannot be taken seriously. His books advise students not to celebrate birthdays with cakes and candles, a practice Batra considers non-Indian. More troublingly, they instruct students to draw maps of "Akhand Bharat," a greater India, presumably restored to its rightful boundaries, that include Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Batra also believes that aircraft, automobiles and nuclear weapons existed in ancient India, and he wants children to learn these so-called facts.

In 1999, the national government, then led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, put Batra in charge of rewriting history textbooks to reflect these and other views of the Hindu right. Now it appears that the party intends to pick up where it left off when it was voted out of power in 2004. Batra says Smriti Zubin Irani, the minister of human resource development, has assured him his books will soon be a part of the national curriculum. The education of youth is too important to the country's future to allow it to be hijacked by ideology that trumps historical facts, arbitrarily decides which cultural practices are Indian, and creates dangerous notions of India's place alongside its neighbors.

By the Editorial Board

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