Tender minds being fed distorted history: India History Congress on NCERT's Partition modules

New Delhi, Aug 25 (PTI) The Indian History Congress (IHC) has attacked NCERT’s new Partition Horrors Remembrance Day modules, alleging that they spread “falsehoods with a clear communal intent” by depicting the Congress as complicit in Partition while absolving the British.

The council warned that "tender minds" were being fed "distorted and polarising history".

The special modules released by the NCERT to mark "Partition Horrors Remembrance Day" have held Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Congress and then viceroy Lord Mountbatten responsible for India's Partition.

The modules also noted that post-Partition, Kashmir emerged as a "new problem", which never existed in India before, and created a challenge for the country's foreign policy.

It also flagged that some countries keep giving aid to Pakistan and exert pressure on India in the name of the Kashmir issue.

The NCERT modules -- prepared separately for Classes VI–VIII and IX–XII -- describe the “culprits of Partition” as Jinnah, who demanded it; the Congress, which accepted it; and Mountbatten, who formalised and implemented it.

They also state that the British “tried their best to preserve India as one until the end".

"Turning history completely upside down, the modules hold not only the Muslim League but also the Indian National Congress responsible for the Partition of the country. Quite in tune with the loyalist stance of the communal forces during the freedom struggle, the British colonial rulers are given a clean chit in these modules," the IHC said in a statement "What is not mentioned is the two-nation theory propounded by ‘Hindutva’ icon V D Savarkar three years earlier, in 1937, in his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha: ‘India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main, Hindus and Muslims, in India'," it added.

The Council said it is indeed ironical that Hindu communalists are never included in the list of those responsible for Partition.

"But among the chief ‘culprits’ are said to be the nationalist leaders when the entire spectrum of the national movement struggled relentlessly against religious and communal division, its greatest leader Mahatma Gandhi giving up his life for it," it said. PTI GJS ARI