Wednesday, December 08, 2004
EDITORIAL: Thinking of the toxic textbooks again
Prof Krishna Kumar of India’s National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) lectured Tuesday at the Government College University in Lahore on Education and Peace and left behind an alternative thought about the formulation of curricula that might obviate war in South Asia and the world. Consider. This is what has been happening here.
In Islamabad not much water has flowed under the bridges since the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) examined the mechanism of school textbook-writing and presented its findings in 2003. These caused an upheaval in parliament. The then education minister Ms Zubaida Jalal’s house in tribal Balochistan was ‘attacked’ despite the fact that she had announced herself a ‘fundamentalist’ and disavowed any association with the SDPI report. A reshuffle of the cabinet has now brought General (Retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi as the tough new education minister whose experience as the former chief of the ISI may have strengthened his nerves enough to withstand the threat to life and limb our education ministers are now expected to face. The SDPI boss, physicist Dr AH Nayyar, needless to say, is still receiving death threats for articulating the contents of that report.
What did the SDPI report say about the curriculum that dictates the writing of our textbooks in the provinces? A 2002 directive from the Curriculum Wing for Pakistan Studies went on to define the following learning objectives: “Develop understanding of Hindu-Muslim differences and need for Pakistan (Class IV); Hindu-Muslim differences in culture, India’s evil designs against Pakistan; identify the events in relation to Hindu-Muslim differences”. How did the textbooks respond to these directions? The SDPI report tells us that in the Class V textbook prepared by Punjab there is a sentence that says “Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam”; a Class IV textbook said “The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things, Hindus did not respect women”; a Class VI textbook said “the Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society, in case a man died his wife was burnt alive with him, the killing of shudras was not punished, but the killing of a brahmin was severely punished, caste system made people’s lives miserable”.
The “hate material” goes on: “Hindus thought that there was no country other than India nor any other people other than Indians, nor did anyone possess any knowledge”; [a cooked-up story titled The Enemy Pilot] stated that “he had been taught to have no pity on Muslims, to always bother the neighbouring Muslims, to weaken them to the extent that they forget about freedom, and that it is better to finish off the enemy. He remembered that the Hindus tried to please the goddess Kali by slaughtering people of other religions, they regarded everybody else as untouchables. He knew that his country India had attacked Pakistan in the dead of the night to bleed Pakistani Muslims and to dominate the entire Subcontinent” (Class VI, Punjab). “The Hindus who had always been opportunists cooperated with the British” (Class VI, Punjab). The Class VI books generally speak inaccurately about the nature of All-India Congress, seeking to convince the children that the party was Hindu, was clos e to the British and prevented them for doing anything in favour of the Muslims.
All hell broke lose in parliament after the SDPI report was published. The highlighting of this dark side of Pakistan’s education did not lead to remedial action but to the further tightening of the ideological regime. The clergy opened the textbooks and found that Quranic verses had been shifted around in the science textbooks and one textbook had recorded the dangerously subversive misinformation that Hazrat Umar had “liked music”. The caretaker prime minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, proudly took out the photo of a dog from a textbook to steal some of the thunder of the opposition. The PMLN sided with the clergy and the PPPP did not support the government. As a result, the government retreated and we still have poison in the textbooks. With this kind of national brainwash we will never treat our non-Muslim minorities well and our coming generations will only think of going to war with India, which is not such a good idea since we tend to lose the wars we fight with Indi a. So should we go on giving our children these toxic books to read? Since we are in the business of hating, maybe we should inject a bit of anti-American venom too to please the clergy, if that is all we live to do!
Prof Krishna Kumar, who is busy detoxifying some of the Indian textbooks ruined by the BJP, thinks we should tell our children more about our South Asian identity and the challenges we all face as South Asians. Facing the extra-regional challenges (for instance, ecology, globalisation) can deflect our future citizens from hating each other. National identity will always carry the burden of defining “the other” which is the dark version of ourselves. Take the coming water shortage in South Asia. If we can, under SAARC, agree to look at the problem as a South Asian problem we can move towards a resolution of it. Experts tell us that the scarcity of water can be rationally explained as an environmental crisis requiring a collective South Asian solution. But looked at nationalistically, as we do now, the issue will inevitably lead to the option of war.
Is it difficult to expect Islamabad to develop the kind of intellectual sensitivity needed to leach the textbooks of hatred? The government has thankfully not buckled under the demand of the mullahs that the old mazhabi khana (entry about religion) be restored to the new Pakistani passport. Will it now reconsider the curriculum which causes textbooks to be written with a view to making poisonous propaganda and not teaching quality education? We can hope, can’t we?
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