Jurassic World

T-Rex Tastes the Rainbow is a painting by Olga Shvartsur

In the Jurassic world of the movies, man-made monsters go out of the control of their creators and become lethal to the creators themselves or their fellow human beings. Something similar is happening in today’s India. Certain skeletons of a bygone civilization are disinterred by some self-proclaimed nationalists. The skeletons slowly acquire life. Then they move out of the control of their excavators and behave like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic World movies.

One of the most lethal actions of these dinosaurs is on the school curriculum. A lot of history is being deleted. New history is created gradually. The Mughals who ruled most of India, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, for three whole centuries, were swallowed by the dinosaurs some time back. Now the freedom fighters are chomped on. Not even Mahatma Gandhi is spared. His killer is all set to be hoisted on a pedestal. Even chapters like ‘US hegemony in world politics’ and ‘The Cold War Era’ have disappeared. ‘Rise of popular movements’ and ‘Era of one-party dominance’ too vanished. ‘Central Islamic lands’ and ‘Confrontation of cultures’ made an exit from class 10. Even ‘The Industrial Revolution’ was put to rest. So were the chapters on ‘Democracy and Diversity,’ ‘Popular struggles and movements,’ and ‘Challenges to Democracy.’ Oh my god, the list of deletions seems endless!

There is no doubt that textbooks and curricula need to be revised and updated from time to time. How the changes are made and what the objectives of the changes are matter as much as the content-revision.

As the editorial of The Hindustan Times on 8 April 2023 said, academics should not be contaminated with political biases and intentions. School curriculum should help students to engage with diverse perspectives. Brainwashing the students with a tunnel vision is severely detrimental for the future of any nation. No nation can create an alert, aware and empathetic generation without allowing them to be in touch with different perspectives and possibilities. The editorial ends with the warning that “whenever ideology has been allowed to take the upper hand, it has proved detrimental to social progress and developing young minds.”

We are living in a world which provides information literally at fingertips. You can Google and get all possible information on almost anything under the sun. In such a world, how much can a government really shut out from people? But school students are a different matter. They don’t get the opportunity to learn from so many diverse sources. Hence what is given to them in classrooms is important. Let us not kill their imaginations by populating them with ancient dinosaurs.

Now the Indian government is also planning to play the censor on social media. The Press Information Bureau [PIB] has been asked to check the contents appearing on social media. Anything that is critical of the government will be removed in the name of ‘fact-checking.”

India is already sinking on the press freedom ranking. A lot of honest media people have lost their jobs and some of them are in jails. A friend joked the other day that the criminals are moving out of India’s jails by becoming members of the BJP and their places in the jails are being given to journalists, social activists and critics of the government. Has India already become a Jurassic World?

PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

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