Delhi bureaucrats murdered BJP’s Indianising agenda

The panel also submitted its report to the former education minister, Harsh Vardhan, in the middle of 1997, but its repeated reminders for budget allocations to begin the process of revamping the textbooks of Classes I to VIII were met with a weekly status report on the movement of the file.

Even then, Harsh Vardhan says it will be “idiotic” and “narrow-minded” on the part of “Macaulay’s slaves” to undo the BJP government’s work. The former minister says Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi’s similar attempt to introduce an Indianised education system into the agenda of the recent State education ministers’ meeting met with stiff resistance on purely political grounds.

“He only wanted a debate on this matter,” Harsh Vardhan says, rising to the minister’s defence. “In the Delhi Government, we introduced so many schemes to further this agenda and everyone was receptive. The press, in fact, was our biggest supporter.”

Rastogi, who has been a pracharak of the RSS for over four decades (Vidya Bharati is the organisation’s education wing), says all that the committee wanted was to ensure the curriculum of the over 2,000 Delhi government schools reflected a non-Western, nationalist and spiritual character. “Spiritual not in the ritualistic sense, but in the broad Indian philosophical sense,” says Rastogi, adding “give the BJP Government 10 years and watch how half the leftists will swing to the right”.

A point raised by Rastogi’s 11 sub-committees was that the textbooks did not reflect either Indian culture or the “proud traditions of the Indian nation, society and family”. The panel also felt there was a huge gap between the syllabus and the textbooks as well as inadequate information about Delhi.

The panel had planned to re-do completely the curriculum and textbooks of Classes I to VIII by 1998. As Rastogi says: “Even when the syllabus lays down that the Class I textbooks should tell the stories of saints and sages, these are not taught because the Delhi Bureau of Textbooks only wants to pass off NCERT textbooks as its own. It refuses to invest in education”.

Harsh Vardhan, meanwhile, takes special pride in having made yoga a compulsory subject (“it makes the mind pure”), starting a positive health scheme, making moral education (including prayers) mandatory, and introducing the Sukriti calendar. The last encourages self-assessment on the part of students, apart from imparting information on India’s Hindu pilgrimage spots and the maths established by Sankaracharya, and including quick quizzes on historical figures like Shivaji and Swami Vivekananda.

Here, the calendar’s indoctrination is at its most subtle. In the multiple-choice questions, almost all the answers have one RSS functionary as an option, from its founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee to Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar and K. S. Hedgewar. The calendar was introduced for Classes I-IX last year.