Mumbai (AsiaNews) - The "western" school model introduced by the British during the colonial era, "has dealt a severe blow to the values and culture of India" according to Rajnath Singh, Minister of the Interior. He was speaking yesterday at the celebrations for the centenary of Chopsani School in Jodhpur. He blames the former "rulers", for the Indian education system's failure in achieving its main goal: the "full development of the person". In contrast, "only the unmatched Indian culture and its rich and holistic model of values" is able to achieve this goal.
The statements by the Minister echo one of the election promises of the prime minister Narendra Modi. The leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently in government, has vowed to apply the "Gujarat model" nationwide. Many have interpreted this statement as refering exclusively to the economy, to make it more dynamic and open for business.
However, this model also covers other aspects including that of education. In the state that Modi led for over 10 years, government schools were forced to include a number of textbooks on the curricula written by Dinanath Batra, an intellectual who has devoted his life to revising Indian history through the prism of Hindutva, and radical Hindu nationalist ideology. In his works, for example, he instructs students to draw a map of "Akhand Bharat", the great India, the boundaries of which include Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Batra is also, among other things, the one who lobbied ofr and succeeded in getting a book by Wendy Doniger, off the market. The US scholar of Indian history is deemed "offensive" to Hinduism.
Contacted by AsiaNews, Mgr. Percival Fernandez, former secretary general of the Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), warns of the "dangers of distorting history in the impressionable minds of the young." First of all, he explains, "History is about facts, and facts must never be distorted, because they can no longer be changed. No 'partisan' text should ever enter educational institutions, which are intended to help the development of minds, not to distort them".
