On February 10 last year, when the Congress-backed hijab controversy broke out in Karnataka, Indian author Poile Sengupta wrote a column in The Wire known for its extreme bias against Hindus in India. Titled The Hijab Question: A Writer Recalls a Time in 1980s Karnataka When Education Came. First, the piece ironically mentions how 12 Muslim girls studying in a Raichur college where she taught for three months in the early 1908s took off their burkhas in a small room inside the college gates. After their classes, they would put on their burkhas and head home. Isn’t that what the college authorities last year were insisting on? That the burkha be removed while sitting in class. Sengupta just missed logic by stating the obvious about the unnecessary hullabaloo.
While the entire column exposes her one-sided empathy towards Muslims, who she segregates as ‘marginalised’ as Raichur was underdeveloped back then. With the district headquarters having a large Muslim population, one portion makes it a wee too apparent. She expresses her anger at the ‘insensitive inclusion’ of Charles Lamb’s whimsical essay, Dissertation on Roast Pig, directly bringing religion into a class of ‘many Muslim students’ where lessons must be taught as lessons only. But the teacher substituted ‘crackling’ with ‘roasted’ and potatoes and baingan for the meat because she felt the Muslim youngsters would be hurt. She goes on to opine that, fortunately, the English syllabus is more sensible now; that is, it panders to Muslims’ religious beliefs.
The writer ended with a slanting remark against Hindus. “Wearing a headscarf does not disrupt anything. But wearing a saffron scarf might” proved not only how severely bent she is towards appeasing Muslims but also how she doesn’t think about the hypocrisy of the demands being made during the hijab furore. That is the hardcore hypocrisy championed by the Left cabal, rather, the duplicitous intellectual ecosystem backing the break India forces.
So, why talk about Poile Sengupta now? Because as a mother of a ten-year-old boy, who will be studying the different aspects of Indian society, Government and political life in school this year, I have discovered this same noxious rhetoric channelled by such pseudo seculars included in my son’s Class 6 Social Science textbook recommended by National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Two chapters named ‘Understanding Diversity’ and ‘Diversity and Discrimination’ are shoved just before the pertinent topics on civics, aimed at subliminally colouring a child’s mind with distorted narratives on these concepts while peddling the agenda of ‘Muslims are subjugated in India’, ‘Hindus are the majority so the onus lies on them to take care of minorities no matter what’ as well as wrong notions of class, caste and social construct.
The chapters, completely inappropriate and irrelevant, for that matter, are guilt-tripping the Hindu for even the communal bigotry propagated by Muslims. Unfortunately, a Muslim student from a well-to-do home will also find the lessons confusing and unsettling because he doesn’t feel subjugated in a thriving democracy like India. The point then is, who are the people in NCERT deciding the inclusion of these chapters that will disrupt the clarity of perception in middle school students regarding the status of Hindus and Muslims, will plant the seed of disharmony in their impressionable minds and are ultimately aimed at benefiting the Muslim percentage by handing them over a perpetual victim card. Moreover, by bringing in mentions of riots and religion, sensitive issues that need far more maturity in understanding than what ten-year-olds would have, is the NCERT being fair here? What if a student asks the teacher what started the riots? Will the teacher be honest enough to cite the real reasons? Would that not ruffle the Muslim children, then? Has the NCERT, clearly represented by biased writers like Poile Sengupta, thought about this?
Here are some portions explaining the pure evil included in the chapters. In the excerpt from Sengupta’s story The Lights Changed, a Hindu boy meets a Muslim boy at the traffic signal every day. While both are called Samir (the writer tactfully puts how the Muslim boy informs the Hindu that his father said it is Hanuman ji’s father’s name, pointing out how accepting the Muslim is of Sanatan Dharma!), the Hindu boy immediately says, “I am Samir Ek, you are Samir Do!” Do you get the drift here? The Muslim is being placed second (as per the Congress’ construct of using them as second-class citizens to be used as foot soldiers to vitiate the atmosphere of harmony) by the Hindu here, especially because the Muslim boy is poor and uneducated. The pun on the word ‘subject’ is pretty obvious in the line that has the Hindu boy saying, “The English word sounded strange on his tongue… to be ruled by someone else.”
The next paragraph goes, “There is trouble in Meerut. Many people are being killed there in the communal riots. I’m a Muslim, and all my people are in Meerut.” Isn’t the writer suggesting here, without explaining what triggered the riots, that Muslims are the only ones killed in them? The extract ends with “Samir Do was not at the crossing the day after. Neither the day after nor ever again. And no English or Hindi newspaper can tell me where my Samir Do has gone.” This is devious. Cunning Sengupta peddles the false idea that Muslims are voiceless and faceless in a Hindu-majority country where the media is unwilling to hear their stifled, pained voices.
In reality, most English media platforms in India and the world are strongly batting for their cause, while Muslims find representation in politics, jobs, education and other spaces. Is the NCERT willing to probe into the actual causes if a Muslim is poor? But then, it probably is easier to rest the onus on the Hindus for the inequality meted out to the Muslims. What a classic socialist/communist trope!
Diversity can be explained with several other and better examples. Why did the NCERT have to spread the Hindu-Muslim divide in the topic while rubbing in the fact that the Hindu is responsible for the downtrodden lives of Muslims? The diatribe doesn’t end here. Furthering the discussion on Unity in Diversity, the chapter explains how when the British ruled India, women and men from different cultural, religious and regional backgrounds came together to oppose them in the freedom movement. Though true, it needs detailed analysis and cannot be brushed aside by this flaky statement.
Next is a song sung after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar where ‘Men and women, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, rich and poor, were killed and wounded when they were open fired on. This credit for the song has been given to the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a rabidly Communist-Islamist organisation established in 1943. Wonder then how they wrote a song sung in 1919?! The factual anomaly doesn’t end here. According to unsanitised documentation, the crowd at Jalianwala Bagh mostly had villagers from Punjab visiting Amritsar for Baisakhi. They were clueless about the sloganeering that would be held against the British there. So, a substantial number of Muslims being present there sounds erroneous.
Chapter Two is even more insidious, where certain concepts are tackled without the nuance to explain them to children. For instance, read this, “Samir Ek and Samir Do belong to different religions, an aspect of diversity. However, diversity can also be a source of discrimination. Groups of people who speak a certain language, follow a certain religion, may be discriminated against because their customs or practices may be seen as inferior.” Please gauge how vitriolic this is for a young mind in school who is yet not equipped to sift through agendas to understand concepts of discrimination and inequality. Read this, “The two Samirs were from different economic backgrounds. Samir Do was poor.
This difference is not a form of diversity but of inequality.” The paragraph blames this inequality subtly on the Hindu majority simply because Samir Ek is from a well-to-do Hindu family going to study in an English medium school. At the same time, Samir Do is a gareeb newspaper vendor.
Recently, Manish Mittal, a father of a class two boy, approached the Dehradun district magistrate, complaining against the use of ‘abbu’ and ‘ammi’ for father and mother in the English textbook of his school. Note, the operative word here is English, and hence we ask, how is the inclusion of these Muslim words even legitimate? Honestly, I would have ignored this mainstreaming of Muslim iconoclasm in an English medium school curriculum aside if I didn’t go through the details of what has been incorporated in my son’s social science text. As a Hindu mother, and a proud Indian, this propaganda peddled by the NCERT rankles and affects me. Setting correct narratives in Class 12 will be ineffective unless the system is rectified from the foundation years. But is the Indian Education Ministry bothered enough to clean up the mess?
Regarding not just the distorted Hindu Muslim topics in school textbooks but also the fake narratives on gender, stereotypes, and other socially relevant issues. Yes, the chapters have these as well. It’s a cesspool out there but on that, some other day!
