Washington:
An influential US newspaper has suggested that Prime Minister Narendra
Modi's educational reform could be used to promote an ideology that sees
"India's history through the prism of the Hindu right wing."
New York Times said Narendra Modi's educational
reforms could be used to promote Hindu right wing ideology. AFP
Modi "has promised India's youth a bright future," the New York Times wrote
in an editorial published on Thursday, with his Bharatiya Janata Party's
2014 Election Manifesto calling education "the most powerful tool for the
advancement of the nation."
"The question now is whether educational reform will be used not just to
create an educated citizenry and trained work force but also to promote a
particular ideology," asked the editorial titled: "False Teachings for
India's Students."
During the May election campaign Modi had "promised to bring the 'Gujarat
model' to national governance," that many voters understood "to mean a
commitment to a more dynamic economy," it said.
"But the Gujarat model has a less attractive side to it: a requirement that
the state's curriculum include several textbooks written by Dinanath Batra,
a scholar dedicated to recasting India's history through the prism of the
Hindu right wing," the Times wrote.
The newspaper recalled that in February, "Batra led a successful effort to
pressure Penguin India to withdraw copies of a book by Wendy Doniger, a
religion professor at the University of Chicago, which he felt insulted
Hinduism."
"Batra's teachings range from the trivial to assertions that simply cannot
be taken seriously," the Times said.
"More troublingly, they instruct students to draw maps of 'Akhand Bharat,' a
greater India, presumably restored to its rightful boundaries, that include
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan," it
suggested.
In 1999, the then BJP national government put "Batra in charge of rewriting
history textbooks to reflect these and other views of the Hindu right," the
Times said.
"Now it appears that the party intends to pick up where it left off when it
was voted out of power in 2004," it suggested.
"The education of youth is too important to the country's future to allow it
to be hijacked by ideology that trumps historical facts, arbitrarily decides
which cultural practices are Indian, and creates dangerous notions of
India's place alongside its neighbours," the Times said.