The Nation A PRESENT TENSE ... As BJP HRD minister since 1998, Murli Manohar Joshi has sought to challenge the left hegemony; but with mediocrities. While changing people and the odd textbook passage, Joshi has done precious little about the calibre of writers NCERT uses. Rajput, now the NCERT director, was once an Arjun Singh favourite. Is he just brilliant or merely a time server? Joshi should know. While criticising Macaulay's children and Marx's followers, Joshi's historians haven't produced rigorous scholarship. AND A PAST IMPERFECT As Indira Gandhi's education minister between 1971 and 1977, S. Nurul Hasan married state patronage to leftist history writing. The Marxist school of history controlled institutions, scholarships, key jobs. It arrogated unto itself the power to write textbooks. Hasan's historians were hardly democratic. Worse, they were terribly poor writers. The books they wrote bored a generation. In an attempt to protect shoddy textbooks, the Hasan-inspired brigade simply dismisses every criticism as "saffronisation".

Ask any schoolchild which subject he or she finds formidably boring and, invariably, the answer is "History". For a country with a past as rich as India's, that is a shame. It is also the result, as the immediate week's Parliament-level slanging match made clear, the result of bad writing and worse politics. As Murli Manohar Joshi and S. Nurul Hasan-education ministers present and past, living and dead, right and left-fight a proxy war, a noble subject suffers.

History's latest conflict began innocuously enough with the Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)-the premier, state-funded consultancy for school learning-issuing a circular. It asked the Central Board of Secondary Education to delete certain portions from NCERT certified textbooks.

To those who'd been following the controversy, much of what emerged was tiresomely old. The passages that had been objected to and finally bowdlerised had been the subject of an internal note written by Jagmohan Singh Rajput, NCERT's director, early this year. The note pointed to allegedly derogatory references to key figures (see extracts), ranging from Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur to Mahavira, the preceptor of Jainism. The buzz in "informed circles" at NCERT's sprawling south Delhi campus was that these segments "hurt minority communities". There had, as Rajput argued, been complaints and even court cases against NCERT, particularly by Sikh groups, pertaining to the very sections. The books themselves were seen as slanted history, painting a partial picture and subscribing to the leftist proclivities of the writers.

The "leftist historians"-an admittedly broad categorisation that includes almost everybody who is somebody in the Indian History Congress-are in a sense proteges of the late Nurul Hasan, Indira Gandhi's education minister (1971-77). Venerable and genial as he was, Hasan happily arranged the marriage between Marxist social science and state patronage. It produced the sort of hagiography Indira Gandhi interred in her famous "time capsules".

Not till Joshi became the BJP's human resource development minister in 1998 did the hegemony-a delightful Gramscian expression the Marxists will know only too well-of the left face its first challenge. Since then, every difference of opinion on the teaching of history has been viewed in terms of "saffronisation".

It was so this past week as well, at least initially. CPI(M) MPs took up the NCERT's "censorship" in the Lok Sabha. Congress veterans Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee breathed fire in the Rajya Sabha, even accusing the government of "Talibanisation" and causing a silly sideshow on whether that term was unparliamentary.

The Nation

R.S. Sharma, Historian "They do not want the historicity of Rama and Krishna to be questioned. Therefore, they removed the passage." J.S. Rajput, NCERT director "Beef is discouraged ... What purpose does it serve to inform children that in ancient times beef was eaten?" Bipin Chandra, Historian "Our society has become so fractured and intolerant, you can't say anything unflattering about anybody." Dinanath Batra, RSS thinker " History is never 100 per cent true. So protect our children from such misinformation."

The removal of the references to Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ruling NDA said, was courtesy a unanimous resolution by the Congress-dominated Delhi Assembly. In September, at the initiative of Congress MLA Arvinder Singh Lovely, the Delhi legislature had demanded the purge that in effect gave NCERT its chance.

Never sublime in the first place, matters now rapidly declined to ridiculous levels. BJP MP Sahib Singh Verma told the Lok Sabha that the deletion of certain references to Jats had redeemed his community's pride. Shivraj Patil, the Congress' deputy leader in the Lok Sabha, faced quite a predicament. He was urged by colleagues from Punjab-which faces an assembly election in three months-not to oppose the removal of negative references to Guru Tegh Bahadur.

So Patil ended up saying his party was not opposed to changes in textbooks, only to the method adopted. He went on to talk about how the Congress Government in Rajasthan had similarly "corrected" history books. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pramod Mahajan spoke up for "people's sentiments". Avtar Singh Bhadana (Congress) complained about offensive references to his Gujjar community. Slightly confused, the Left Front-notwithstanding its record of inflicting Marx and imagined class struggles on West Bengal's schoolchildren-walked out of the Lok Sabha. Even more confused, the Congress followed in the left's footsteps. In the next few days, it began an elaborate process of retraction, which included Punjab MP Jagmeet Singh Brar explaining issues on Sonia Gandhi's behalf.

What emerged was that there was near unanimity among political parties as to the right to doctor textbooks. The only quibbling was on the type of medicine to use.