News Report
DELHI, INDIA, August 25, 2003: The NCERT has dismissed eminent historians’ allegations that its new history text books are “saffronised.” The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is an apex resource organization set up by the Government of India, with headquarters at New Delhi, to assist and advise the Central and State Governments on academic matters related to school education. Adopting a combative stance, the HRD Ministry body described the Indian History Congress (IHC)’s recently published critique as biased. JS Rajput, the NCERT director, said on Wednesday that the IHC’s Index of Errors is “the work of scholars with insufficient and colored knowledge whose only purpose is to reduce young Indians’ respect for their glorious past. They want us to forget that there was a time when we Indians were world leaders in science, medicine and astronomy. The IHC had blasted the new NCERT texts, which replaced those authored by scholars like Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib. The Index of Errors highlighted factual mistakes, which allegedly proved that NCERT was implementing the Sangh Parivar’s agenda of “spreading jingoism and communal hatred through falsification of history,” in the words of this news report. Habib describes as “woolly headed fantasy” the NCERT text’s claim that ancient Indians knew the sphericity of the Earth or had advance knowledge of Pythagoras’s theorem. Rajput defended the lines by pointing out that Dick Teresi, the internationally reputed scholar, has written the same things in “Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science,” a book published in the United States last year. Following is a point-counterpoint of some of the disputed issues in the new texts: