Textbooks in India have never just been about education. For decades, school curricula have sat at the centre of some of the country’s most explosive political battles, with governments of every stripe treating what children learn as an ideological opportunity.
Are School Textbooks Actually Political?
Yes. And they always have been. From the early days of the National Council of Educational Research and Training to the latest Supreme Court showdowns of 2026, the fight over what goes into Indian classrooms has shaped how generations of citizens understand their own history, identity, and nation.
This is the story of how India’s textbooks became a battlefield.
The Playground of Ideology: Why School Curricula Matter to Governments
Control the classroom and you shape the future. That has been the quiet logic behind every major overhaul of Indian school textbooks since Independence. Curricula are not just academic documents. They are political instruments.
In India, where history is deeply contested and identity politics runs deep, textbooks have become proxies for larger culture wars. Who gets celebrated, who gets blamed, which empire gets a full chapter and which gets a footnote. These choices are never just academic. They reflect what the government of the day wants the next generation to think about India’s past.
Every time a new government comes to power at the Centre or in a state, one of the first places it looks is the school syllabus. The pattern has repeated itself so many times that scholars now treat textbook revision as a reliable indicator of the political climate of its era.
Phase 1: The Early Foundations (1960s to 1980s)
1. The Secular Draft: Post-Independence Identity and the Birth of the NCERT
Textbooks as a national project began in earnest after India established the NCERT in 1961. The Nehru government wanted a unified national curriculum that reflected a secular, modern, and democratic republic. History writing was entrusted to eminent scholars who largely followed a Marxist-influenced, evidence-based approach to Indian history. The idea was to build citizens who thought critically and identified with the idea of India rather than any single religion or region.
These early textbooks were far from perfect. Critics argued they underplayed ancient Indian civilisation and were slow to represent regional diversity. But they established a baseline that would be challenged aggressively in the decades that followed.
2. The First Purge (1977): The Janata Party and the Vedic Beef-Eating Debate
The first major political disruption to NCERT textbooks came in 1977 when the Janata Party swept to power after the Emergency. The new government, backed by constituencies deeply uncomfortable with secular-left historiography, ordered a review of NCERT content. The most symbolic flashpoint was a passage in a Class 11 history textbook written by eminent historian Romila Thapar, which noted that ancient Vedic society consumed beef. The passage was historically defensible but politically explosive. The government pushed for its removal.
Sound familiar? This exact argument is still happening in 2026. Just with different chapters and different governments.
3. The Marxist Counter-Weight: West Bengal’s 1989 Guidelines on Medieval History
While the Centre grappled with one kind of ideological pressure, West Bengal under the Left Front took its own approach. In 1989, the state government issued guidelines that shaped how medieval Indian history, particularly the role of Muslim rulers, was taught in state board textbooks.
The Left sought to emphasise composite culture and syncretic traditions, presenting the medieval period as one of cultural exchange rather than conflict.
Critics, including some historians, argued this too was selective. By emphasising only certain narratives, the state was also engaging in its own form of curriculum curation. It was a reminder that textbook politics is not the exclusive territory of any one ideology.
Phase 2: The Turn of the Century (1998 to 2014)
1. The Saffron Wave (1998 to 2004): The Vajpayee Era, NCF 2000, and Secret Deletions
When the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA came to power in 1998, textbook revision moved to the top of the cultural agenda. The government introduced the National Curriculum Framework 2000, which critics dubbed “saffronisation.”
New textbooks introduced by the Human Resource Development Ministry gave greater prominence to ancient Indian science and civilisation, reframed certain medieval history chapters, and in some cases quietly removed passages that had appeared in earlier editions. Historians and academics raised an alarm. A group of over 50 eminent scholars, including Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, wrote an open letter protesting what they called the distortion of history. The controversy drew international attention and put Indian textbooks on the global map as a political flashpoint.
2. The Pendulum Swings Back (2004 to 2005): De-Saffronisation and the Landmark NCF 2005
The UPA government under Dr. Manmohan Singh came to power in 2004 with a promise to reverse what it called ideological interference in education. By 2005, NCERT released a new National Curriculum Framework, developed under the stewardship of Professor Yash Pal. NCF 2005 became a landmark document. It emphasised child-centred learning, critical thinking, and a reduced syllabus load. It brought back a more pluralistic approach to history and removed much of the content critics had flagged as politically motivated.
Educationists widely praised NCF 2005 as one of the most thoughtful curricular documents India had produced. It set the standard that would, paradoxically, make later departures from it all the more controversial.
3. The Snail and the Whip (2012): The Laxman Cartoon That Shut Down Parliament
Not all textbook controversies are about history. In 2012, a cartoon by legendary cartoonist R.K. Laxman appeared in a new NCERT political science textbook for Class 11. The cartoon depicted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru whipping a snail representing the Constitution, with B.R. Ambedkar sitting on top of it. The image was decades old and was originally published in 1949, but its inclusion in the textbook caused a political earthquake. Members of Parliament, including from the ruling Congress, protested vigorously. Dalit groups argued it was disrespectful to Ambedkar. Opposition members disrupted proceedings. The cartoon was eventually removed.
A 63-year-old cartoon managed to stop the functioning of the Indian Parliament. That is how loaded textbook content can get.
4. The 100-Mistake Crisis (2013): High-Stakes Biology Errors and the Medical Entrance Panic
In 2013, NCERT faced a crisis of a different kind. Parents and teachers discovered that biology textbooks used for Class 11 and Class 12 contained close to 100 factual and conceptual errors. For students preparing for medical and engineering entrance examinations, this was not an abstract concern. Wrong information in textbooks could mean wrong answers in high-stakes tests that determined career trajectories.
NCERT issued corrections, but the damage to credibility was significant. If the books cannot get basic biology right, how much can millions of students trust them for their future?
Phase 3: The Present Overhaul (2020s to 2026)
1. The Modern Scalpel: The NEP, Mughal Restructuring, and Missing Preambles
The National Education Policy 2020 set the stage for the most sweeping overhaul of Indian education in a generation. As new NCERT textbooks began rolling out from 2022 onwards, controversy followed almost immediately. Chapters on the Mughal Empire, which had formed a substantial part of Class 12 history, were restructured or reduced. References to the Preamble of the Constitution were reported missing from some editions. Passages on the 2002 Gujarat riots and the Emergency were trimmed or altered.
NCERT defended the changes as part of necessary curriculum rationalisation and said the goal was to reduce the burden on students. Critics, including historians and former NCERT officials, argued the deletions followed a clear pattern of erasing content uncomfortable to the ruling ideology. The debate over textbooks had entered a new and sharper phase.
2. The Judicial Showdown (2026): The Supreme Court vs. the Class 8 Corruption Chapter
The conflict moved into the courtroom in 2026 when the Supreme Court of India took up a petition challenging the removal of a chapter on corruption and political accountability from a Class 8 civics textbook. The petitioners argued that removing the chapter deprived students of critical civic knowledge essential for a functioning democracy. The government argued the chapter had been removed as part of a broader content streamlining exercise and was not politically motivated.
The case questionioned that India has circled for decades: who decides what children learn, and by what authority can a sitting government erase a chapter it finds inconvenient, with no public debate and no academic review?
3. The 1,600-Error Crisis: How Rapid NEP Implementation Sparked Chaos in Odisha
Speed and political ambition are a dangerous combination when it comes to textbooks. In 2025 and 2026, Odisha’s newly revised state textbooks, introduced as part of NEP-aligned reforms, were found to contain over 1,600 errors. The mistakes were not minor typographical slips. They included photographs of the Karnataka Legislative Assembly misidentified as the Odisha Assembly, the Niyamgiri hills placed in entirely the wrong region, and multiple factual inaccuracies across subjects.
The scale of the errors triggered public outrage and demands for accountability. Educators pointed out that the textbooks had been rushed through production without adequate review. The crisis became a cautionary tale about what happens when political timelines override educational standards.
4. Cartographic Casualties: The Jaisalmer Map Blunder and Regional Pride
Maps, too, became a source of controversy. A textbook map that incorrectly depicted geographical features near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan drew sharp criticism from local politicians and residents who saw it as an affront to regional identity and factual accuracy. The error seemed small in isolation but landed against a backdrop where every mistake in a textbook was now read through a political lens. Trust in the NCERT system, painstakingly built over decades, had become fragile.
5. After Criticism, NCERT to Restore Original Dancing Girl Image in School Textbook
One of the more symbolic episodes of recent textbook politics involved the Dancing Girl, the famous bronze figurine from Mohenjo-daro that has appeared in Indian history textbooks for generations. A revised edition of an NCERT textbook replaced the original image with an altered version that critics said softened or changed the artefact’s depiction. After widespread criticism from archaeologists, historians, and the general public, NCERT announced it would restore the original image in subsequent printings.
But when even an artefact from 2500 BCE becomes a controversy, it tells you how charged the textbook environment in India has become. And how even small choices in textbooks carry enormous cultural weight in a country where ancient civilization is both a source of pride and a site of political contestation.
Beyond the Ink: The Impact on India’s Next Generation
Here is the thing about textbooks. They feel permanent. When a teacher hands you a book and says, “this is history,” it carries authority. Most students do not question it. Most parents assume someone responsible has checked it. And most of the time, that trust is not rewarded.
Textbooks are the first place where a nation tells its children who they are. Every deletion, every rewrite, every controversy over a cartoon or a map or a chapter on the Mughals carries a message beyond its immediate content. It tells students which stories their country considers worth remembering and which it would rather forget.
The cumulative cost of decades of political interference in Indian textbooks is difficult to measure but impossible to ignore. Students caught between rival versions of history, teachers unsure which edition to trust, parents discovering that their children’s textbooks contain hundreds of errors; these are not abstract policy failures. These are failures that shape minds and, in turn, shape the country.
Maybe Textbooks will keep changing. Governments will keep rewriting them. But we need to ask the same question for every generation of students and parents and teachers: Are you reading what someone decided you should believe, or what you actually need to know? Should textbooks serve the government of the day, or should they serve the next generation of citizens?
Those are the questions worth asking. Every single time someone hands you a textbook. Because the ink in India’s school textbooks has always carried more than words. It carries the weight of who gets to tell the story of a nation.