BJP ally JDU slams move: History is history, cannot be reversed

This was a reference to Nitish Kumar’s response last week to a media query on Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s remark that “we can write our own history”.

Objecting to the dropping of chapters from NCERT’s history books, Tyagi said, “Present and future generations should know history the way it was. What was the point in dropping the chapter on the Emergency? We, as NDA, can gather on June 25 to condemn the Emergency on its anniversary. History students should know its history as a test case for violation of human rights and democratic norms.”

🚨 Limited Time Offer | Express Premium with ad-lite for just Rs 2/ day 👉🏽 Click here to subscribe 🚨

Dropping chapters on individual personality or any important event, he said, would serve no purpose. He said it should be left to historians and researchers to decide if there are new facts on events of the past and if they need to be written. “But blaming only Communists or feudals for influencing history writing would not serve any purpose,” he said.

Congress Rajya Sabha MP and its general secretary (communication) Jairam Ramesh said, “Selective amnesia of the recent past is as bad as rewriting of the ancient one.”

RJD Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha said the BJP government is trying to “present a past which never existed”.

“History cannot be wishful thinking. What we have witnessed has been a tendency in all authoritarian regimes which comes through democratic means, and they are the ones which can jettison democracy at the very first go. Because they cannot deal with the issues and concerns of the present, they love altering the past, deleting the past. But national memory acquires the level of folk memory. You can erase it from the textbook but it remains entrenched in folk memory. And history shows regimes and rulers who have done it have been relegated to the dustbin of history,” Jha said.

CPI leader D Raja said, “The NCERT’s move is in tune with the RSS ideology, which is highly divisive… A similar episode is playing out in Karnataka as well. This is highly condemnable. They are targeting school children to condition their minds at the beginning.”