The Supreme Court had a limited issue before it — to examine whether the National Curricular Framework (NCF) violated the secular character of our constitution or not — in the PIL filed by Aruna Roy and others. It has ruled that the NCF proposal on value education does not violate it. The judges, however, have issued a word of caution that the programme be implemented in a spirit of equal respect for all religions. This implies that value education has the danger of being misused for reinforcing sectarianism. Gujarat has posed the most serious challenge to secularism. We require an equally powerful prescription to clear our minds of prejudice and prepare us to protect the lives and dignity of people, without distinction of religion. Merely telling students that all religions are equal or giving them a superficial exposure to various religions is not going to help. The existing school books already have lessons on Buddha, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsi, Mira, Gandhi and others, who represent the best of the Indian spiritual tradition. Then we have religious practices in the family and discourses at religious shrines and on TV. All these have a cumulative effect on our thinking. Any more emphasis on them will be futile. Communalism attacks the right of people to live in the country, branding some as aliens. It distorts the perception to the extent that even educated people seek to avenge the past by targetting whole communities. During the temple movement, the slogan that caught the imagination was ‘Babur ki auladon se badla lenge’. The people who raised this forget that the ancestors of the poor Muslims sought to be targeted were exploited labourers even at the time of Babur. More recently, at the height of the Gujarat violence, VHP’s Praveen Togadia stated on TV that Hindus were a non-violent people — as if killing Muslims in large numbers was not violence. We, therefore, need a genuine sense of self inquiry so that students can turn into thinking individuals, with the ability to perceive the agony of their fellow beings without prejudices of caste or religion. Teachers can help students in this. The proponents of value education have no concern for liberating the mind from prejudice. They are driven by the conviction that ancient Indian culture is superior to all others and that we must take pride in it. Changes envisaged by NCERT in the social sciences curriculum, especially, is driven by this. It is fallacious on two counts. First, pride is a function of authority — 70 per cent of Indians live lives of hardship. They cannot feel pride just because their religion had a great culture. Second, pride doesn’t foster understanding. That comes through a process of self inquiry. Take the controversy over history. The study of history has two purposes — to develop an objective understanding of the processes that determine social and political dynamics, and to help us understand the fundamental contradictions between the rulers and the ruled. History then becomes a way of confronting past myths, prejudices and oppression. The new syllabi — comprising two history books for Class XI, one on Ancient India and the other on Medieval India — emphasise the glories of ancient India and suppress its in-built contradictions. Caste, for instance, has been a dominant factor in Indian society over millennia yet it finds only a marginal mention in the syllabus. There are special units on Vedic culture and philosophy of Upanishads but very little mention of the Sufi-Saint movement that influenced Indian social life immensely for centuries. The preamble to the new syllabus says that its focus shall not be on rulers but the syllabus for ‘Medieval India’ has nothing but the rulers — invasions by Turks, Arabs, Mughals and other Muslim rulers and the rise of rebellion against them is seen as the dominant history of that period. When coupled with silence on Muslim artisans, faqirs and Sufis, the picture that emerges is that of Muslims as aliens who are oppressive and violent. The most serious drawback of the NCF and other initiatives of the ministry of human resource development has been their neglect of the genuine educational needs of students. The ratio of the number of students in primary and upper primary schools to the total population of the relevant age group has declined in the last seven years; 70 per cent children drop out from schools at or before eighth grade and high school results in many government schools is below 20 percent. It is in these areas that reform is called for, most of all. The ministry would have done a great service to the nation if it had focussed of these issues. (The writer is a professor of physics at IIT, New Delhi)
