The removal of the history of Mughal Empire by the NCERT takes the political interventions in history writing from one extreme end to another. In post-independent India, the Congress along with the historians steeped in leftist ideology pushed a distorted history based on the ideas of secularism. Whitewashing the Islamic Empire’s crimes and its severe iconoclastic activities in history books was a solution for them to achieve ‘communal harmony.’ This was a weird acknowledgement of the association of the present-day Muslims with the past Islamic rulers.
It was a disastrous move because the historical depictions in our textbooks went against a huge body of descriptions of contemporary historians of those times (mainly Muslims) which exist intact in the libraries. When true history comes out, faster and more effective in the globalized and connected world, the Hindu seethes in anger and the Muslim attempts to defend the indefensible. A far better way would have been a true depiction of the barbarities of the Islamic Empire (a blip of six or seven centuries in a 5000 year old Indian civilization) and stressing that the present day Muslims had nothing to do with the Islamic rulers.
India had an Islamic scholar as an education minister for ten long years after independence. This unique event in the history of any country would have certainly helped the implementation of these policies. Inappropriate ideas of secularism could not have the maturity of dealing with the problem between two communities whose frictions dated back to centuries. It grasped the definition of secularism as appeasement of ‘minority’ and liberalism as abuse of the ‘majority’ which managed to create a great disharmony unsurprisingly. The present decision to ban Mughal history is equally immature as the previous governments which is sure to aggravate the religious tensions in the country.
RANDOM MUSINGS 