As part of its Hindu supremacist agenda, India's right-wing government removes significant historical and scientific facts from textbooks. In 2018, a year before the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stormed back to power for a second term, a federal education minister said he believed Indians were the descendants of Hindu “rishis” (sages) and not monkeys. Satya Pal Singh, who was the minister of state for human resource development, said Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong”. “It needs to change in the school and college curriculum. Since man has been seen on Earth, he has always been a man. Nobody saw an ape turning into a man,” he said. By the 2021-2022 academic year, Darwin’s theory was quietly removed from the examination syllabus for the students of Class 9 and Class 10. By 2022-2023, the topic of evolution was completely purged from school textbooks, teachers and education experts told Al Jazeera. Now, millions of school students will not know who Darwin was or what his theory says – unless they opt for biology in Class 11 and Class 12. The current government is assaulting the ethos of India by poisoning the school curriculum. The changes to textbooks were prescribed by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a state-run body under the federal education ministry. NCERT textbooks are prescribed by more than 24,000 schools affiliated with India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), with tens of millions of students. CBSE also has about 240 affiliated schools in 26 countries across the world. Apart from that, at least 19 school boards in 14 Indian states also use NCERT books in classrooms.
