A lesson to learn

A seventh standard textbook invites controversy and politically motivated street battles.

in Thiruvananthapuram

These developments are controversial, for these involve deep conflicts and we are still too close to the events. Yet we can ask some questions central to the political change in this period.

What are the implications of the rise of coalition politics for our democracy? What is Mandalisation all about? In which ways will it change the nature of political representation? What is the legacy of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and the Ayodhya demolition for the nature of political mobilisation? What does the rise of a new policy consensus do to the nature of political choices?

The chapter does not answer these questions. It simply gives you the necessary information and some tools so that you can ask and answer these questions when you are through with this book. We cannot avoid asking these questions just because they are politically sensitive, for the whole point of studying the history of politics in India since Independence is to make sense of our present.

The above excerpt from a Political Science textbook for Class 12 students prepared by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in 2007 would perhaps serve as an introduction to the unusually intense controversy and motivated street battles over a few school textbooks brought out this year by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in Kerala.

The inclusion of comparatively recent developments in Indian history, society and politics into the social and political science curricula in schools a silent revolution of sorts ushered in by the NCERT in institutions following the national syllabus, and, without any opposition from political parties has seemingly hit a roadblock in Kerala, a State that enthusiastically responded to the NCERTs National Curriculum Framework (2005) guidelines and has attempted wide-ranging alterations in the State school syllabus based on them.

However, in what seems to be a determined warm-up exercise before the elections to the Lok Sabha in a State crucial for the Left parties, a predictable coalition of politically powerful forces led by the opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) and minority, Christian and Muslim and caste-based Hindu organisations, some with major business interests in the education sector, have found common cause mainly in the content of a Social Science textbook (Part One) for Standard VII students of the State secondary school system.

Petrol bombs, Stun Lac grenades, tear-gas shells and water cannons have become part of the everyday street scenes in the State since the first week of June. Opposition leaders and other agitators want nothing short of the withdrawal of the textbook (along with a few others that have been revised this year), which they accuse of spreading anti-religious outlook and communist ideals and ideology and of denying the Congress and important national leaders their role in the national movement and instead presenting them or their views but only in contexts far removed from their main contribution to Indian society.

Despite the governments explanations to the contrary, and its insistence that the controversial textbook is only the first part of the Social Science series for State students now in Class VII, the opposition has been disrupting Assembly proceedings, its student unions and affiliated organisations have been destroying public property, setting alight textbooks and senselessly fighting the police in most districts. Pro-UDF teachers unions and managements of certain minority educational institutions have announced they would not teach the controversial portions in the textbook at all.

A meeting organised by the Thrissur diocese of the Catholic Church has even declared it would formulate an alternative curriculum that would present a more objective view of history and a fairer approach to religion and belief in God. A joint declaration of the leaders of a section of Christian school managements and churches and the Nair Service Society (NSS), the socio-political organisation of the Nair community, has demanded immediate withdrawal of the textbook. After a meeting with Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan and Education Minister M.A. Baby, leaders of 12 Muslim organisations, including the Muslim League, have announced a Statewide agitation from the first week of July if the government does not withdraw the textbook.

The allegations raised by them are many: The textbook encourages divisiveness, social disharmony and hatred in young minds; under the pretext of promoting secular ideals it encourages students to deny religion and discourages belief in God; it denies the role of parents in the moral and religious upbringing of their children; it analyses important national and local historical events from a class perspective and uses such interpretations for narrow political ends of the ruling party; it ignores the role of the mainstream freedom movement and important national and social reform leaders of the State in the building of modern India; it fails to provide children a complete education, focussing on the unimportant and teaching them wrong precepts that would only lead them astray; its content is weak, it lacks quality, and compared with the textbooks prepared by the NCERT, it puts students following the State syllabus at a definite disadvantage.

No doubt, the revised textbook is a far cry, both in form and content, from the ones students, parents, politicians, religious and caste group leaders and school managements in Kerala are used to. Among other things, it draws attention to a lot of characters, events and concepts in recent Kerala society, history and politics that have so far remained absent in school curricula: landlords, tenants, savarnas, avarnas, farmer, farm worker, tenancy, price rise, ownership of land, food safety, reclamation of paddy fields, eviction, peasant movements, literacy, life expectancy, the Land Reform Bill of 1957, Dalits and their lot, untouchability and denial of educational opportunities that existed in the State, and traditional dress codes and other forms of exploitation that forced people of the lower castes into servility.

It talks about the concept of freedom and what it entails, how British traders became British rulers of India, about the Quit India movement, the Wagon Tragedy, the Shannar agitation, the Vaikom and Guruvayoor satyagrahas, the massacre at Jallianwalabagh, the Khilafat movement in Malabar, the Dandi March and Salt Satyagraha and the Karivallur (north Malabar) peasant struggle. It also speaks about Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (which fought against discriminatory practices within the Christian community) and Muslim Aikya Sangam (which fought against social evils in Muslim society) and about Mangal Pandey and Pir Muhammed, and Shanti Ghosh and Sunitha Chaudhari, Bengal schoolgirls and freedom fighters who shot down a British magistrate in 1931.

It quotes from a letter written by Bhagat Singh from the gallows, from A.K. Gopalans autobiography (about the life of a peasant family when landlordism prevailed in Kerala) and Congress leader K. Madhavan Nair (about a Namboothiri landlord family of his village and their profligate lifestyle). It quotes the Mahabharata and the Bible, and the Prophet Mohammad and Guru Nanak. It also calls attention to superstitions, religious evils, inflation, epidemics, scarcity of drinking water, earthquakes, the activities of liquor lobbies, illicit distillers, sexual harassment, and accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. Several questions are also posed: Is there discrimination among members of the same religion? Are there any checks and controls on the dress code of women in our locality? How far would a common dress code help in curbing social segregation?

But the most controversial lesson, perhaps, is titled No Religion for Jeevan and reads as follows (warts and all, exactly as in the Social Science Reader for English-medium students of Class VII):

Jeevans parents came to school seeking admission to him. The parents were seated on the chairs and the Headmaster started to fill up the application form.

What is the name of your son?JeevanGood, nice name; Fathers name?Anwar RashidMothers name?Lakshmi Devi

The headmaster looked at the parents and asked.

What about the religion of the child?Need not record anything.Write no religionCaste?No need of that too

The headmaster reclined in the chair and asked seriously.

When he grows up if he wish to have a religion?

In that case let him choose the religion of his choice.

The lesson is accompanied immediately by an excerpt from the will and testament of Jawaharlal Nehru in which he declares that no religious ceremony be performed for him after his death and says, I do not believe in any such ceremonies. To be forced to do them even as a formality is hipocracy [sic] and an attempt to scare us and others, and quotations from religious texts that promote friendship and harmony among members of various faiths.

All over Kerala, today, this lesson is being read aloud (mostly in chaste Malayalam, without the language errors that mar the English version) in homes, schools, churches, mosques, public places, political party and government offices and repeatedly on TV channels, or followed with keen interest for what it conveys in a society where political loyalties are sharply divided and religious and caste factors and business interests (notably, in the education sector) have invariably played a role in making or marring the fortunes of the two coalitions led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), and the Congress.

Importantly, therefore, the allegations being raised by the opposition and others have also to be viewed in proper perspective. On the one hand, clearly, a political mobilisation of social, religious and economic vested interests is sought to be engineered by the Congress-led UDF with the issue of textbook revision as a pretext and with the Lok Sabha elections in mind. Recently, the forces that run a number of educational institutions and claim support among sizable religious (especially Church-based) and caste groups in Keralas deeply polarised society have been aggrieved a lot because of the various pro-people measures adopted by the LDF government that go against their vested interests. They have been worried especially by the repeated legal, political and government measures to curb blatant profiteering by an array of self-financing professional colleges established by managements under the umbrella of various community and religious labels. The Class VII textbook is now like manna from heaven for a variety of such forces, making it possible for them to rally openly under the UDF.

On the other hand, however, the controversy needs to be seen also in the context of the major revision of school curriculum and method of teaching that is under way all over India, based on NCERTs National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 guidelines.

The focus of the NCF guidelines is the introduction of critical pedagogy, which, as defined by one of its leading exponents, Ira Shor, is habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichs, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organisation, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.

As sought to be implemented by the NCERT and the State Education Department, it implies activity-oriented teaching and learning (also with examples from the local environment) and development of a critical outlook in students to help them question lifes events and circumstances critically and come to wise conclusions. It is also meant to help them identify social evils and counter them effectively, to question preconceived notions and trends in society and reflect on them critically in terms of their political, social, economic and moral aspects and to engage learners in actively constructing their own knowledge by connecting the new with the old, accepting various ideas and viewpoints with equanimity and a discriminatory outlook, and engage in all this, with a commitment to democratic forms of interaction.

Thus, for example, in an important chapter on Secularism, an NCERT Political Science textbook introduced for Class XI students in 2007 presents examples of various forms of secularism as had been practised in different parts of the world from Kemal Ataturks Turkey, which banned the fez, the traditional cap worn by Muslims, and introduced Western clothing as part of attempts to modernise and secularise Turkey in an aggressive manner, to modern-day France, which decided to ban the use of religious markers such as turbans and veils in educational institutions, to the distinctive form of secularism as propounded by Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted a secular state to be one that protects all religions, but does not favour one at the expense of the others and does not itself adopt any religion as the state religion.

The chapter throws up several issues for the students to debate over. For example, it raises arguments like, Should learning more about other religions and learning to respect and accept other people and their beliefs mean that we should not be able to stand up for what we feel are basic human values?

It encourages students to read short stories or watch movies like Bombay and Garam Hawa and asks: What are the different ideals of secularism that they depict? And it poses several critiques of Indian secularism for learners to dwell upon: secularism is anti-religious; secularism threatens religious identity; (the concept of) secularism is linked to Christianity, which is Western and therefore unsuited to Indian conditions; is Indian secularisms advocacy of minority rights justified? Secularism is coercive and it interferes excessively with the religious freedom of communities; secularism encourages the politics of vote banks, and so on.

But eventually what the chapter offers through these activities and posers is a firm, professionally managed and academically balanced grounding for the student to come to her own true wisdom on secularism.

It concludes by telling the students: It should be clear by now why the complexity of Indian secularism cannot be captured by the phrase equal respect for all religions. Indian secularism allows for principled state intervention in all religions. Such intervention betrays disrespect to some aspects of every religion. For example, religiously sanctioned caste hierarchies are not acceptable within Indian secularism. The secular state does not have to treat every aspect of every religion with equal respect. It allows equal disrespect for some aspects of organised religions.

As in the controversial Class VII textbook produced by the Kerala government, there are many lessons in the NCERTs new series of textbooks, on equality, freedom, dress code, unequal treatment of women by religions, the inequalities in education, and so on, which attempt to tackle sensitive aspects of recent Indian society and which could have come in handy for motivated political parties, religious leaders, caste-based organisations or other vested interests in any part of India, if they indeed chose to find them as convenient red rags.

But while copies of the State textbook are burnt on the streets and this is causing a breakdown of law and order in many districts of Kerala, the NCERTs one-year-old textbooks are hailed as a welcome change in classrooms for encouraging critical thinking and for their long-lasting implications on how children grasp the workings of their own democracy.

From a cursory reading of the textbooks belonging to the two streams, the difference obviously is not in the general nature or academic intention of their content, but perhaps in the extra care that has gone into the choice of content in the NCERT textbooks and in the professionalism and academic balance evident in the way the lessons, questions and activities related to them have been presented.

Perhaps the agitators in Kerala and the textbook makers in the State Education Department should treat The Case of Keralas Class VII schoolbook as a lesson worthy of some critical thinking, with a few questions or activities that are posed at the end: Activity One: List some of the ways in which a school textbook that deals with recent history or events can become a convenient tool in the hands of political parties, religious leaders and caste-based organisations to pursue their vested interests. Activity Two: List some of the ways in which the Class VII textbook could have achieved the very same academic purpose without giving cause for such widespread grievance, real or artificial. Question: What will be the long-term implications of the opposition coalitions smart choice of a schoolbook as a tool for such political mobilisation?

With the opposition insisting on the withdrawal of the textbook, refusing to acknowledge the expert committee appointed by the government to examine the disputed portions and threatening to prolong the agitation along with Church leaders, Muslim organisations and other community-based organisations like the NSS, it would surely be a shame if, with rising political costs, the Kerala government is forced to throw the baby out with the bath water, as it were.