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Year after year, whole sections, topics, and names are altered if not altogether taken out of the school textbooks that belong to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This has occurred so steadily over the last few years that news about history being erased from the school curriculum hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. As this story – which attempts to document the many changes effected in the curriculum through the consecutive terms of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government – was being written, Tipu Sultan was dropped from the Class 8 Social Science textbook, Akbar was reduced to a “mixture of tolerance and cruelty” while chapters on Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate went missing from the Class 7 textbook.
Those are but the more recent significant changes in a long list of omissions and revisions made by the NCERT, an autonomous organisation that falls under the Union government. The NCERT has maintained, especially in the last five years following the outbreak of COVID-19, that the changes were made to ease the stress on students. “Overlapping” and “irrelevant” content was dropped as part of syllabus rationalisation, it was claimed. However, this does not work as a satisfactory explanation as the alterations often appear to tally with the ideological line of the BJP.
Glaring revisions in recent history – such as the 2002 Gujarat riots or the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, in both of which the BJP had been involved – sparked outrage. But the changes go further deeper into history, omitting crucial parts about Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, chapters on industrialisation, and even Darwin’s theory of evolution. Stories of tribal movements, and Dalit and Muslim literature were also skipped without reason.
Beyond the sporadic outrage over individual instances, we often overlook the sheer scale of these alterations and the larger picture remains obscured. For this story, we have revisited news reports, checked textbooks, and spoken with teachers to understand the enormity of the changes.
The NCERT syllabus is followed by more than 24,000 schools in India that are affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
In classes 9 and 10, four subjects fall under Social Sciences: History, Geography, Political Science, and Economics. For lower classes, it is three (without Economics). Though the changes – dubbed rationalised revisions – began majorly in 2020, they can be traced to certain pronouncements from the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (parent party of the BJP) leaders.
Satya Pal Singh, a BJP Minister of State in the first term (2014-19), brushed off Darwin’s theory of evolution because, he said, nobody had seen an ape turn into a man. Three years later, the theory disappeared from textbooks. The word “evolution” itself was dropped from the Science textbooks of Classes 9 and 10, with the chapter on ‘Heredity and Evolution’ becoming simply ‘Heredity’.
Mughal history
Mughal history – spanning three centuries and three decades – is being phased out in stages. However, teachers say there are still portions that remain in textbooks, although these are not prescribed for exams. The BJP and other Hindutva forces have been vocal about their disdain for Mughal rule. Leaders or allies of the ruling party have consistently discredited the Mughal contribution to India’s culture and architecture.
In April this year, it was reported that chapters on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals were removed from the Social Science book of Class 7 for 2025-26. However, other dynasties, including the Mauryas and the Shungas, all of them non-Muslim, were included. The lessons stop with the chapter on the Gupta dynasty and skip the Mughal period that comes later.
In the Class 8 Social Science textbook for this year, Mughal emperors get new descriptions: Babur as a cruel conqueror, Akbar as a mixture of tolerance and cruelty, and Aurangzeb as a demolisher of temples and gurudwaras. In addition to the Mughal rulers, mention of Mysore rulers Tipu Sultan and Haider Ali has also been removed.
However, the purging of Mughal history began earlier. In 2022, a table listing the achievements of Mughal rulers was taken out of the Class 7 book, ‘Our Pasts-II’.
A year later, parts about Aurangzeb were removed from Class 8 history. And from Class 12, a chapter on Mughal history disappeared from a textbook titled ‘Themes in Indian History’.
Babri Masjid
Multiple references of the Babri Masjid were removed from textbooks in the last few years, with the reasoning that recent developments had to be taken into account. The NCERT is referring to the Ram temple that rose in the mosque’s place in Ayodhya, after the centuries-old Masjid was knocked down by RSS volunteers (known as karsevaks) in 1992. In 2019, the Supreme Court had, after years of hearing a battle for rights, allowed the building of the temple, a ‘resurrection’ of what was claimed to be buried under the historic mosque for centuries.
In 2024, the name of Babri Masjid was replaced by the words “three-dome structure” in the Class 12 Political Science textbook. The portion on Ayodhya was reduced from four to two pages, cutting down mentions of the mosque’s demolition.
The incidents leading to the demolition – including the Rath Yatra led by BJP leader LK Advani and the part played by RSS volunteers – were taken down. Also gone were descriptions of the aftermath – communal riots and President’s rule in BJP-governed states.
Gandhi’s assassination
Some of the phasing out began much earlier, teachers said, where facets of history were taken away and what was left became superficial, without much context. For Class 10, the section on nationalism in India started with the non-cooperation movement and civil disobedience, and the events before the arrival of Gandhi are missing, a retired teacher said.
However, more crucial changes in the syllabus came in recent years, in connection with Gandhi’s assasination. The assassin Nathuram Godse’s political background – linked to right-wing Hindutva and murky connections with the RSS – was blurred in Class 12 textbooks on Political Science and History in 2023. The part about the Hindutva dislike of Gandhi’s attempts at Hindu-Muslim unity also faded away. The chapter, ‘Politics in India Since Independence’, left out stories of Hindu-Muslim tensions and the ban on the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination.
One of the lines that disappeared is how Gandhi’s “steadfast pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists so much that they made several attempts to assassinate” him. Another line that was removed is on how Gandhi was “particularly disliked by those who wanted Hindus to take revenge or who wanted India to become a country for the Hindus, just as Pakistan was for Muslims”.
Godse’s part got rewritten as follows. The earlier text said the assassin was “a Brahmin from Pune named Nathuram Godse, the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper who had denounced Gandhiji as an appeaser of Muslims”. The revised one stopped at the assassin’s name.
Gujarat riots, NDA, and Emergency
Till 2022, the political science textbook for Class 12 had dealt with the Gujarat riots of 2002 under the title ‘Anti-Muslim Gujarat riots’. However, this was shortened to ‘Gujarat riots’ and two pages on the topic were deleted.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the riots in which hundreds of Muslims had been killed, an attack that was believed to be a retaliation for the Godhra train burning in which 57 Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhya died. The syllabus for Class 12 had included a report of the National Human Rights Commission on the violence, indicting Modi’s government in the crime. However, this too was eliminated in the revised version in 2023.
Some of the lines that were removed are: “Gujarat riots show that the government machinery also becomes susceptible to sectarian passions. Instances, like in Gujarat, alert us to dangers involved in using religious sentiments for political purposes. This poses a threat to democratic politics.” Also deleted was a page containing a collage of newspaper reports on the riots and BJP veteran Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “Raj Dharma” remark, referring to Narendra Modi – that a ruler should not discriminate between his subjects based on caste, creed or religion.
The Gujarat riots topic was also dropped from the Class 11 Sociology textbook in the following months. The deleted paragraph about the practice of segregation and ghettoisation said: “... in India, communal tensions between religious communities, most commonly Hindus and Muslims, results in the conversion of mixed neighbourhoods into single-community ones. This in turn gives a specific spatial pattern to communal violence whenever it erupts, which again furthers the ‘ghettoisation’ process. This has happened in many cities in India, most recently in Gujarat following the riots of 2002.”
By 2023, the Class 12 Sociology book also lost a paragraph under the section ‘Communalism, Secularism and the Nation-State’, which said that communalism drove people to “kill, rape, and loot members of other communities in order to redeem their pride, to protect their home turf.”
After the NCERT announced its decision to lessen the load on children during the pandemic in 2020, some of the first chapters to disappear from the Class 11 Political Science textbook were on federalism, secularism, citizenship, and nationalism. Class 10 lost chapters on ‘Democracy and Diversity’, ‘Caste, Religion, Gender’, ‘Popular Struggles and Movements’, and ‘Challenges to Democracy’. For Class 9 political science, chapters removed included democratic rights and structure of the Indian Constitution.
Instead, sections were added in the political science syllabus of Class 11 and 12 on the achievements of the different National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governments, led by the BJP, and on the drawbacks of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance before that.
A section reads: ‘Decline of Congress system and rise of NDA led by BJP’. Questions in exams would involve policy changes effected by the NDA, such as the 2019 abrogation of Article 370 that had granted autonomous rights to Kashmir.
Surprisingly, portions dealing with the protests against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975 – a dark period for which the Opposition Congress still faces the wrath of its critics – have also been cut down. This has been the right-wing supporters’ biggest point of criticism of the Congress through the decades. The Emergency was introduced in the syllabus only in 2007, with a chapter called ‘The Crisis of Democratic Order’ in the Class 12 political science textbook. It also included the anti-Sikh riots that took place after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. However, as part of the ‘syllabus rationalisation’ in 2023, five of the 25 pages of the chapter were removed. This contained incidents leading to the Emergency and some of the controversial decisions of the Indira Gandhi government.
Alteration of caste discrimination
Changes were also affected in lower classes with the Class 6 history book omitting parts about caste discrimination, including the practice of untouchability in the varna system. This too was part of the rationalisation process in 2022. However, it is taught in higher classes.
A paragraph concerning Muslim stereotypes was removed from the Class 6 book Social and Political Life: “A common stereotype about some Muslims is that they are not interested in educating girls and therefore do not send girls to school. However, studies have now shown that poverty amongst Muslims is an important reason why Muslim girls do not attend school or drop out from school after a few years.”
Several paragraphs were missing in another chapter in the book, called ‘Diversity and Discrimination’, including those about caste discrimination, how certain castes were labelled impure and limited to certain jobs, and how Dalits were not allowed to mix with the privileged castes.
A third chapter called ‘Key elements of a democratic government’ was also slashed. Class 6 also lost portions from its history book titled Our Pasts-I, about Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Prophet Mohammed. One of the lost lines was: “Like Christianity, Islam was a religion that laid stress on the equality and unity of all before Allah.”
From the Class 7 Social and Political Life book, stories of people who were discriminated against over poverty (Kanta, a domestic worker), caste (Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit writer), and religion (the Ansari family, Muslims) were removed.
In the book for Class 8, a line about caste discrimination was removed from the chapter ‘Confronting marginalisation’. The line read: “The term Dalit which means ‘broken’ is used deliberately and actively by groups to highlight the centuries of discrimination they have experienced within the caste system.” Class 8 also lost a paragraph about weavers in its book Our Pasts-III.
Political revisions
Other noticeable omissions include the deletion of the mention of Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, India’s First Education Minister, from the Class 11 political science book in 2023. Along with it, the fact that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India during independence, on the promise of autonomy, was also erased.
In 2024, the class 12 political science book introduced the abrogation of Article 370 by the Union government, which had given autonomous powers to Jammu and Kashmir. In another chapter, the words ‘Azad Pakistan’ were changed to ‘Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir’. The book also incorporated minor changes in topics such as India-China relations (where ‘military conflict over a border dispute’ was replaced by ‘Chinese aggression on Indian border’), and the Khalistan movement, where mention of the secession for a Sikh state was removed.
Recent developments have also been taken into account, including the formation of the INDIA bloc in 2023 by a number of Opposition parties to fight the BJP-led Union government in elections.
In 2024, after a panel recommended replacing ‘India’ with ‘Bharat’ in textbooks of all classes, the NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said that both will be used interchangeably as it is in the Constitution. The panel was headed by CI Issac, a historian with close ties to the Sangh Parivar.
Portions on the origin of civilisation in India – an area that the Hindutva regime has always contested – have been revised in the Class 12 political science book, to rule out Aryan migration and to claim that Harappans were the indigenous people. Earlier, the book had included the theory of Aryan migration, which would negate the Hindutva claims that the privileged castes had always been the original inhabitants of the country. The revised version of the NCERT skips the theory in the chapter ‘Bricks, Breads and Bones – The Harappan Civilisation’.
In the new edition, the civilisation is said to have enjoyed “unbroken continuity for 5000 years” and that the genetic roots of the Harappans go back to 10000 BCE. It adds: “The DNA of the Harappans has continued till today and a majority of the South Asian population appears to be their descendants. Due to trade and cultural contacts of the Harappans with distant regions there is a mixture of genes in small quantities.”
A line that was removed from the earlier text said: “It appears that there was a break between the Early Harappan and the Harappan civilisation, evident from large-scale burning at some sites, as well as the abandonment of certain settlements.”
Small omissions too cannot be discounted when their implications serve the interests of the ruling power. For instance, a chapter on Birsa Munda, a tribal independence activist from the 19th century, omits the word ‘Hindu’ in a line describing him as opposed to missionaries and Hindu landlords.
In the Sociology book of Class 12, similarly, the words ‘poverty, powerlessness and social stigma’ were removed from a line about Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The line had said: “Like the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes are social groups recognised by the Indian Constitution as specially marked by poverty, powerlessness and social stigma.”
Language changes
As early as 2017, there was a huge furore over the right-wing’s attempt at removing the poem ‘Sab Ton Khatarnak’ (The most dangerous thing) by Punjabi poet Pash. Pash was a revolutionary poet and his writings opposed religious fundamentalism, which had led to his killing by Sikh militants in 1988. The RSS and BJP had wanted his poem removed for similar reasons, but strong opposition from followers of Pash and others helped retain ‘Sab Ton Khatarnak’ in the syllabus.
Other literary works did not fare so well. A retired English teacher said that feminist, Dalit, and native writings were rationalised. Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘The Trees’ – that dealt with freedom and empowerment of women – was axed from Class 10, while an excerpt from Tamil Dalit writer Bama’s autobiographical work was removed for Class 12.
Miscellaneous changes
In Geography (for Class 10), NCERT removed the chapter ‘Lifeline of Indian economy – transportation and communication’.
Also from Class 10, the chapter of industrialisation – that dealt with manual labour, steam power, industrialisation that led to colonisation, factories and the growth of market – was removed. It had described the life of workers and indentured labour, a teacher said.
In Class 9, the chapter on pastoralism, about communities herding animals, and parts of food security was removed. And in science, along with reducing Darwin’s evolution theory to a chapter called heredity, sections on climate were also removed.
More environment-related revisions were made – scrapping a chapter on weather, climate and adaptation of animals in Class 7, a chapter on air and water pollution in Class 8, and details on forest and wildlife resources in Class 10. In Class 12, a whole chapter called ‘Environmental Issues’ disappeared.
Social Science and Language teachers and education experts TNM spoke to said that some of the edits made the content superficial and without depth, a mishmash of several histories without threads to connect them. While they appreciate the need to reduce the load on overburdened young students, only 12 to 17 years old, they say it should not leave them confused with half-baked knowledge.
Some teachers opined that certain changes were in line with ‘Indianising’ the history, which was previously told by the British. It came with the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) in 2023. They said that there was little said about the south Indian kingdoms of the Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas and others before – portions of which were added after 2023 in the Class 7 book.
“There was hardly any mention of the south Indian kingdoms before, while there was a lot of emphasis and glorification of the British Raj [in Class 7],” a retired teacher said.
Another teacher, who teaches social sciences for Classes 9 to 12, said that while the NCERT added achievements of the NDA 1, 2 and 3 governments (for Classes 11 and 12), they only added sections about the drawbacks of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government before them.
An education activist from Kerala said that the state would respond to changes in curriculum that go against the constitutional values of the country. For example, burying Mughal history dilutes secularism, an important facet of the Constitution. “For any such changes, we will issue additional textbooks from the state to cover those portions that were taken out,” said the official associated with the State Council of Educational Research and Training.