How India's Education System Was Distorted | Indian History | India Unravelled

A boy born in Mecca in 1888 would one day play a significant role in not only the history of India, but also how history was taught in India.

The boy would grow up to be Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first education minister.

Azad is today considered a proponent of Hindu-Muslim unity and communal harmony by the Leftist academia. But how true is that claim? Let's take a look.

Azad's father had fled Delhi and settled in Mecca during the First War of Indian Independence of 1857. Mecca was then part of the Ottoman Empire, and Azad lived there for the first 7 years of his life, until his family later moved to Calcutta.

Educated at home in Islamic jurisprudence and theology, and fluent in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani and English, Azad became a noted scholar in his youth.

In the early 20th century, Europe began dismantling the Ottoman Empire, causing quite an upheaval in the Muslim world.

During the Khilafat Movement, Maulana Azad asked Indian Muslims to fight to preserve the Islamic Caliphate. A fiery speaker, he even justified violence and the sacrifice of human lives in order to restore the Ottoman Empire, during his many speeches in India.

Rejecting nationalism and batting for global Islamic brotherhood, he said that Europe was using a "Satanic strategy" to divide the Islamic world.

Maulana Azad's words make it clear that he was an ardent supporter of the Khilafat movement and its ideology. The same Khilafat movement that led to the ghastly Malabar massacre of Hindus committed by the Mapillas in Kerala.

It was during Azad's term as Education Minister that the seeds of Nehruvian secularism were sown in India's education system.

But there was more to come.

Enter Syed Nurul Hasan, India's education minister in 1969. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was the brainchild of PM Indira Gandhi and Hasan.

Modelled after colonial Britain’s Haileybury College, JNU was meant to produce and train the core of a committed bureaucracy that was loyal to the ideals of the Left. The institution took a sharp Left turn thanks to the curricula and faculty carefully chosen by Hasan from his pool of pro-communist teachers.

Over the years, many of the faculty posts were held by the Left or liberal academics. These academics would hold important posts in govt institutions like NCERT and ICHR, and go on to write textbooks that would one day be taught in India's schools and colleges.

These textbooks would distort Indian history and teach children to be alienated from their own culture and heritage.

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